With digitization causing havoc in every business, including medicine, the capacity to gather, exchange, and distribute data is becoming increasingly important. Machine learning (ML), big data, and artificial intelligence (AI) can all assist in addressing the difficulties that massive volumes of data provided.
Machine learning may also assist healthcare companies in meeting rising medical needs, improving operations, and lowering costs.
Machine learning development at the bedside can assist healthcare practitioners in detecting and treating disease more effectively, with more accuracy, and with more individualized care.
What is the Impact of Machine Learning in Medical Informatics on Healthcare?
- Record Keeping
In medical informatics, machine learning can help to simplify recordkeeping, especially EHRs (electronic health records). Using artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance EHR administration can improve patient care, save healthcare as well as administrative costs, and optimize operations.
One instance is natural language processing. This allows clinicians to collect and document clinical notes without the use of manual processes.
ML algorithms also can make EHR administration systems more user-friendly for physicians through automation of image analysis and incorporating telehealth technology.
- Data Integrity
Discrepancies in healthcare info can lead to machine learning techniques generating incorrect predictions, which can have a detrimental influence on medical decision-making.
Because healthcare data was initially designed for EHRs, it must be prepped before machine learning systems can use it efficiently.
Data integrity is the responsibility of health informatics experts. Data collection, analysis, classification, and cleaning are all tasks performed by health informatics experts.
- Predictive Analysis
The integration of machine learning, medical informatics, as well as predictive analytics provides the potential to enhance healthcare processes, change medical decision support systems, and aid in the improvement of patient results. The potential of machine learning in healthcare rests in its capacity to use health informatics to anticipate health outcomes via predictive analytics, resulting in more precise diagnosis and therapy as well as improved physician perspectives for customized and cohort therapies.
Machine learning can supplement predictive analytics through data interpretation for decision-makers in order to discover process bottlenecks and enhance overall medical business operations.
What Will the Future of Healthcare Technology Look Like?
Health informatics experts are at the forefront of potential, playing a critical role in integrating ML into medical and health care procedures. Their in-depth understanding of technology as well as how that can be used to improve the quality of care and results is extremely valuable in a developing healthcare sector that is heavily dependent on data.
What does the future of technology in healthcare look like? Here are some instances of technology that will have an influence on healthcare in the next years.
- Virtual Reality
Virtual reality (VR) is revolutionizing healthcare by improving patient care and making medical training easier.
Surgeons wearing customized VR headsets, for instance, can broadcast procedures and give medical trainees a new perspective on a surgical process. In another case, virtual reality (VR) is being utilized to assist speed up rehabilitation in physiotherapy.
Patients undergoing physical therapy are frequently subjected to intense physical activity that can be taxing. Recovery programs may be tailored using VR training drills with ML to make physical treatment sessions more fun and engaging.
- Augmented Reality
According to The Medical Futurist, augmented reality (AR) is one of the top three innovations changing healthcare. AR technologies in healthcare, like VR, can assist in better educate medical students. AR technology can allow students to learn live from surgeons doing real-life operations.
For example, augmented reality allows medical students to receive comprehensive, realistic representations of anatomy without having to examine actual human beings.
- Wearable Tech
Consumer wearable devices give information that can help individuals become more athletic, from counting steps to tracking heart rhythms.
Other wearable devices, such as heart rate monitors, can give doctors crucial information about their patients’ health, such as heart rhythm, temperature, heart rate, and blood pressure.
As more individuals use wearable technology, health informatics experts can assist in improving the communication, as well as the accuracy of the information, exchanged between these gadgets and also the health information systems used by clinicians.
- Genome Sequencing
Doctors can use genomic data to build individualized treatment regimens for their patients. In medical informatics, machine learning allows genetic variations to be examined quicker and aids in the diagnosis of problems that might result in illness. Genome sequencing, made feasible by machine learning techniques, has the potential to improve cancer detection and therapy while also reducing the burden of infectious illness.
Health informatics experts can help develop genomic medicine to address the world’s worst illnesses as genome sequencing gets more affordable and ML grows smarter.
- Nanotechnology
The National Nanotechnology Initiative defines nanotechnology as “the study and control of matter at the nanoscale, at dimensions ranging from 1 to 100 nanometers.”
Nanomedicine refers to the use of nanotechnology in healthcare. Nanotechnology can aid in the execution of activities involving chemicals, biological structures, and DNA, such as medication delivery.
As per Engineering.com, upcoming nanotechnology medicine will feature drug delivery techniques that “enable site-specific targeting to avoid the accumulation of drug compounds in healthy cells or tissues.”
In other words, medicines can be given to specific parts of the human body while avoiding portions of the human body that are not impacted by illnesses.
- 3D Printing
As per research issued in the Journal of Polymers and the Environment, in biomedicine, 3D printing provides potential in the medical field. Drug formulations, prostheses, implants, biosensor devices, and even human organs and tissues may be efficiently manufactured using 3D printing methods. It enables the personalization of medical treatments, increases healthcare quality, lowers costs, and decreases manufacturing risks.
Healthcare Industry Transformation
As per Imaging Technology News, the industry for AI in medicine will reach more than $31.3 billion by 2025, representing a more than 40% increase from 2018. Individuals interested in expanding their medical informatics professions to include ML should start by looking into educational options. Enlisting graduate degree programs in medical informatics is one option. They can help alter the healthcare sector with the enhanced skills and expertise they learn in graduate schools.
