Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare - New AI Applications
The World Health Organization (WHO) has advised all global leaders to increase their attention to mental health and well-being, given the rising rates of depression and anxiety. Reasons cited are: loneliness, from earlier isolation, deaths of family members and friends, financial worries due to economic dynamics, and off and on again recession dynamics. Within the health community, nurses and doctors, are exhausted from the pandemic, but also so many citizens and our medical community are experiencing the Long-Covid which often includes: respiratory symptoms, fever, and gastrointestinal problems.
Further complicating these realities is the Omnicron variant, often referred to as “Kraken,” which is an enormous mythical sea monster, like a giant squid or octopus from Scandinavian folklore. This new super Covid-19 virus called XBB.1.5 (nicknamed “Kraken,” by some), is a descendent of the Omicron variant. Like previous versions of the virus, it has been described as the most transmissible strain to date and is far more efficient and contagious than its earlier predecessors.
Already infections in the U.S. and Canada are spreading like wildfire, as reported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) earlier this month. This new virus strain, XBB.1.5 is currently the predominant strain in North America, having risen to 75% of infections vs. in mid-February 2023 from less than 2% in December, 2022.
What is important to understand is that we may well be in a health crisis with rolling hyper super viruses and as noted, we are already faced with tremendous mental exhaustion of our precious health care workers, nurses, doctors, care givers and not to diminish the reality of our continual backlog of healthcare procedures.
Our healthcare systems are in crisis.
In addition, former containment measures from Covid-19, economic recession risk realities are continuing to impact employee mental health (e.g., anxiety, depression) and physical health (e.g., weight gain, unbalanced nutrition).All of these realities are continually putting stress on our employees across all businesses globally – but how is this changing how corporate board directors and C levels view health programs as health care benefits are predominately viewed as a cost vs. as an investment.
Will we start to see a shift on how the analysts start to view employee well-being and cognitive care or will we see bolder moves by leadership to increase or double their investments in cognitive care solutions and modernize their health and wellness/employee engagement practices.
Call To Action
To make the shift needed, corporate leaders need to place Health and Wellness as their #1 corporate priority and examine their employee health benefits and support systems, and strive to modernize employee well-being check-ins and provide 7x24 cognitive care to appreciate and understand how their employees are really feeling.
Management conversations need to shift and place more emphasis on employee well-being and be trained on what cognitive care means. Putting in place, Chief Happiness (Wellbeing) Officers are already starting to be seen in leading companies like: Ernst & Young, Google, Uniliver, SAP, Rakuten to name a few. What a cool title – Chief Happiness Officer.
It’s no longer good enough to train your employees on health and wellness, offer portals with so much rich content that they are overwhelmed in trying to find information, or even emergency hotlines are not enough anymore.
Why is this the case?
First, we must learn to stop being reactive and be far more proactive in developing employee happiness and well-being strategies. HealthCare programs for our senior coveted talent must be opened up to equalize health and well-being.
Expensive yes, but do the math.
If you reduce employee churn, sickness, incidents by 20%, there are opportunities to reinvest in more proactive and predictive strategies, versus looking in the rear view mirror which is sadly where the majority of our corporate programs are positioned across the globe.
We must find ways to prevent anxiety and depression and reduce the stress of employees and be able to predict health risks, well ahead of the risks of incidents, suicides, increasing sickness days, leave of absence, and serious illnesses developing from long standing health challenges.
In our research on health and wellbeing that the risks of starting your day either sad or angry increase your risk of an incident in the transportation industry according to the Virginia Tech.
Well buckle up leaders as we have 25-30% of our global population starting their day like this. The cost to productivity and growth is trillions.
Why happiness matters so much. It’s as important as building skills as leaders to read a profit and loss statement, or balance sheet.
Yet do we monitor our employee happiness daily as much we watch our stock market dynamics? I think you know the answer on this question.
One area that must change is companies have to start looking at healthcare as an investment, vs being managed as a cost.
Government and corporate leaders must strive to make this required shift to view health and wellness as an investment and a recruiting attractor to stand out in offering more employee assisted benefits focused on wellbeing, using modernized approaches that are proactive vs reactive - and many of these newer methods will be fueled by artificial intelligence.
We are going to experience many changes in how we interact with employees, and AI methods will be the core enabler in new solutions ranging from:
- daily 7x24 AI health and wellness/moodinsights secure and private check-ins, asking how you are feeling before you start your day, and analyzing with advanced methods all text inputs to predict risks that are controllable. Note: G2 has a good listing of other corporate wellness solutions, like HeadSpace Wellable, to also name a few etc.
- mobile software that will listen to our breathing, our coughing frequency and heart rates and can predict if we have health risks;
- software that analyzes your email written communication and can detect subtle changes in your communication style over time that shows if you are feeling more despondent or even depressed, using natural language processing (AI).
- software that monitors your walking and even your gait (posture) can predict health risks,
- cognitive health care chat bots that are acting as your personal health and wellness assistants guiding you to the right content sources automatically versus having to request content, and these new chat bots will even cheer you on not only personally but within your social team and corporate structures.
These are new AI designed employee health and wellness innovations in the market now, and more use cases will unfold as corporate directors and leaders shift more of their focus to employee happiness and well-being.
Today, we celebrate Presidents Club for our Sales Results and making our plan numbers – tomorrow’s President’s Club will also start to recognize its employees for health and wellness successes.
This is no longer a personal reality where often depressed or high anxiety employees suffer quietly in their own worlds, this is increasing a corporate responsibility where there is more transparency and sensitivity and open communication.
Will employees in the future be asked to also weight themselves daily for additional corporate predictive risk analytics? Why not, if you are a courier driver, you have to check your vehicle before you drive it. Why not, ensure all front line employees check their health first thing every morning before they start work to ensure they are ready to face the day ahead, and in many respects are “fit to serve.”
Positive and happy employees are more passionate and are more engaged with your customers too. It’s simply smart business.
We also have an explosion and rapid adoption of biomedical advances, artificial intelligence, connected devices, digital pathology, population health, genomics, connected health and other technologies is contributing to an unprecedented explosion in healthcare data.
In addition, healthcare organizations are dealing with massive amounts of data from medical records, and also from a wide variety of medical instruments and devices, including wearable sensors,” said Jane Yu, MD, PhD, Biomedical Engineering, International Client Technical Health Leader for IBM.
With data volumes “doubling every six months,” it’s difficult for healthcare organizations to manage the constantly growing influx of information, according to Yu. “Healthcare organizations have to know how to access, store, share and analyze this data.
The speed that healthcare changes are happening is incredible. For example, 15 years ago, it took 10 years and 2.7 billion dollars to sequence the first genome. Now we can do this with less than 10 thousand dollars in a week.
As we look forward, board directors and C-levels need to seriously think about modernizing their employee engagement practices with their employees, to ensure happiness and wellness is seeded in all operating practices.
One thing is for sure, Artificial Intelligence will be one of the most strategic change enablers to bring these new use cases highlighted to life.
To read more about Dr. Cindy Gordon’s research on Employee Happiness and Well Being, see these articles:
Happiness is a leading indicator of Profitability
AI in Healthcare makes our World Healthier
New Challenges in Mental Health That Board Directors Must Pay Attention To
AI HealthCare Apps that Put Mental Health First
Mindfulness Has Many Benefits To Create Healthier and More Productive Organizations
The Great Resignation: Why Unhappiness Must Shift To The Happiness Age
