Charting the Future of Healthcare: AI's Promise and Potential

Artificial intelligence has become a game-changing force in a number of industries, but its potential to improve the healthcare sector is especially encouraging for our society. By utilising the massive volumes of data generated within the healthcare ecosystem, AI-powered solutions can enable precision medicine, personalise treatment plans, and promote more precise diagnoses. However, compared to other industries, the adoption of AI in healthcare has been rather gradual.
Previous attempts to use AI to healthcare have mostly focused on large-scale research initiatives like accelerating the discovery of new drugs or utilising Machine Learning algorithms for early diagnosis and medical imaging, such as radiology, CT scans, or detecting skin cancers.

Although these applications are very important and have a lot of potential, they require a lot of funds and resources to be developed. These applications additionally make use of specialised domain-specific machine learning models that were developed using challenging to get high-quality labelled datasets. Lack of access to these resources has prevented many would-be innovators in healthcare AI from joining the market and has slowed down the general adoption of AI solutions in routine healthcare settings.

Healthcare could soon see a new wave of AI solutions thanks to the quick development of generative AI, especially in Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT. They will have a significant effect on all aspects of routine healthcare operations, including medical education, doctor-patient interactions, preventive, and personalised treatment.

Unstructured texts, including those found in electronic health records, medical journals, clinical trial documents, public health reports, and accounts of patient-provider contacts, make up the majority of interactions and data in the everyday healthcare ecosystem. Large Language Models like GPT have the potential to significantly improve healthcare because of how common unstructured text is. They can quickly read, process, and analyse a lot of text (whether it be written or verbally synthesised), turning it into medical insights, diagnoses, summaries, and recommendations.

Training LLMs on medical text will open up advanced AI capabilities to a wider range of healthcare industry stakeholders, paving the path for a new age of AI-driven breakthroughs in the sector.