Responsible implementation of technology holds the key in augmenting healthcare

Implants, stents, genome sequencing, non-invasive surgeries, transplants and prosthetics — the evolution in medical sciences over time has been stupendous to say the least. The proliferation of technology has provided an impetus to several elements of the end-to-end healthcare value chain — consultation, maintenance of health records, surgical and diagnostic procedures, large scale production of drugs, personal health monitoring, and many others. Some of the key ones are: AI, which has become omnipresent and transcends the complexities of several domains, has already made its mark in healthcare applications; for instance, in terms of analyzing large sets of data from health records, sensors, and images. Cloud technologies and Big Data systems enable storing and processing of large scale healthcare data from several sources with speeds that we did not anticipate about 10 years back. Technology will likely revolutionize traditional formats of almost all aspects of healthcare; for instance, in the near future, we could even hope to see an automated insurance processing system that kicks into action, when we check in for a medical procedure, saving us two dozen frantic phone calls to have the procedure “covered and approved” under insurance.