Intelligent Autonomous Healthcare – A Technology Enabled Reality

The COVID-19 pandemic has placed an enormous strain on the global healthcare sector’s workforce, infrastructure, and supply chain. It has exposed social inequities in both health and care. Disruptions are being observed across social, economic, environmental, behavioural, and industrial ecosystems. The 1920 pandemic was followed by agricultural revolution and the subsequent industrial revolution led to today’s consumption centric economy. Electrification, mechanization, automation finally led to Industry 4.0, a ‘Smart hands free’ operating model. During 2020 pandemic, a system of ‘Human free’ operating model, permeating into an ‘Intelligent Enterprise’ has started to evolve. A fundamental shift from erstwhile ‘Mass production’ to ‘Mass customization’ became a need pan industry sectors.

Interestingly, the ‘Intelligent’ approach was prevalent in the ancient Indian medical system, also known as Ayurveda (from the Sanskrit words ayur, or life, and veda, science). Ayurveda relies on a ‘natural’ and ‘holistic’ approach to physical and mental health. This is ‘Mass customization’ where treatment is prescribed based an individual assessment (Nadi Pariksha - an ancient Ayurvedic technique of diagnosis through the pulse to accurately diagnose physical, mental and emotional conditions). I have come across projects which converge conventional techniques with Ayurveda and Astrology. AI models trained to understand energies surrounding a person’s solar and lunar ecosystem and diagnose health conditions and recommend preventive and curative treatments are now becoming feasible. This new approach can help humanity tremendously in years to come.

We will discuss the Digital Emerging tech innovations leading to Intelligent Healthcare in detail in this paper.

Factors Driving Healthcare from being Smart to Intelligent

An Intelligent Enterprise is driven by a system level convergence within and across three layers^1,3

1. Technology – making the ‘Art of possible’ – Possible

2. Industry processes enabling Digital autonomous business models

3. Consumer behaviour – demanding new modes of engagement

In the healthcare ecosystem, fundamental shifts are accelerating change, forcing health systems to quickly adapt and innovate. Examples include consumers’ increasing involvement in health care decisionmaking; the rapid adoption of virtual health and other digital innovations; the push for interoperable data and data analytics use; and unprecedented public-private collaborations in vaccine and therapeutics development. Amid these dynamics, governments, health care providers, payers, and other stakeholders around the globe are being challenged to quickly pivot, adapt, and innovate.⁴

Let us briefly look at a few challenges the healthcare industry needs to address.

Challenges fuelling innovation

• The shift to a patient-centric healthcare business model

• Caring for a growing patient volume and ageing population

• Leveraging healthcare data and ensuring data privacy

• Insufficient qualified medical professionals across the world

This is giving rise to a much bigger technological challenge with IDC estimating 2,314 exabytes of data to be generated by the healthcare industry in 2020, an 11,000% increase from the 153 exabytes generated in 2013.

How healthcare stakeholders analyse, understand, and respond to these challenges will shape their ability to navigate from recovering to thriving in the post pandemic “new norm” and advance their journey along the path to the ‘Future of Health’.

Technologies Shaping Intelligent Healthcare

The industry is able to transform from a hype to happening. Multiple technologies responsible for the shifts towards Intelligent Healthcare are:

• Cloud

• AI-ML, Virtual Assistant

• AR-VR, CAVE

• Blockchain

• Robotics, IoT

• Nanotechnology

• 3D Printing

• Telemedicine

• On Demand Care

• Quantum Technologies

Together, these technologies augment feature and functionality to the healthcare ecosystem by enabling Data democracy, Skill democracy, Knowledge and Experience augmentation. There are a number of used cases across the ecosystem driving innovations in healthcare leveraging these technology innovations -

1. Patients: mHealth, VR based patient Rehabilitation, Health tracking

2. Providers: Caregiving Robots, 3D Simulated training, Automated Image Diagnosis

3. Payers: Anomaly / fraud detection, Revenue Cycle Management

4. Pharma: Clinical trial Participant, Gene Sequencing, Quantum for Drug Development

5. Policy Makers: Population dashboard for infectious disease management

Use Case Examples and Solutions

Intelligent Healthcare builds on top of the horizontal use cases like Electronic Health records, Unified Healthcare platforms, Blockchain, Cyber security, Connected Machines, Administrative workflow assistance etc. Let us looks at a few use cases enabled by combining these with the emerging technologies to map the future of healthcare.

Connected Healthcare⁷

Connected Healthcare platform is prime for Data transparency, privacy, data integration, patient experience across the health ecosystems. In this pandemic driven world, providing quality Tele-medicine at home helped save many lives. The world realises that prevention would have been far more cost efficient and lifesaving than battling the pandemic. A robust platform with Multi Cloud, AI, empowered Edge and omnipotent IOT could address these challenges. Leveraging IoT, Blockchain and Cloud platforms, Coldchain solutions brings data transparency, immutability, real-time tracking of medical supply chain aimed at solving the issues around counterfeit drugs. Geo-fencing, anticounterfeiting capabilities, real-time update of ambient transportation conditions can deliver optimum results. Multilingual chatbot enhances the patient experience by giving them the ability to interact in Fusion languages (Hindi-English, English-Spanish, etc.) and get the desired information and connect with doctors. mHealth and Virtual Assistants via HMD or a mobile telehealth focused application can serve both patients and doctors through a single application. The App can remove all barriers for diagnosing and treatment.

CAVE enabled RoboOps²

A stereoscopic, fully immersive CAVE (Cave Automatic Virtual Environments) enabling high quality 3D visualization, augmented virtuality and collaboration capabilities with real-time dynamic data enabling remote operations - aka the Metaverse. Doctors can move freely and explore the 3D space from ‘Cognitive Command Centres’: a virtual replica of the facility created using laser scans, 3D modelling software and running on game engines. IoMT and OT data filtered through condition based monitoring and analytics systems send out relevant information at the right time for surgical assists. Remote surgeries by operating precision robotics surgical equipment with 5G connectivity promises low latency and fast internet speeds. With Game tech maturing, the tech can be a major disruptor for healthcare in coming decades.

Avestragenome¹¹

This is a collection of genetic information from Parsis over the last many years. Imagine Mr. Parsee Shaw in 2040 walking into a doctor’s office for a check-up . He presents a small chip enabled token and swipes his finger prints and the doctor does the same.

This will allow the doctor to view Mr. Shaw’s current reading with this gene information. It will also allow the doctor to generate a specific formulation tailored for Mr. Shaw.

Will Mr. Shaw be bombarded with Insurance offers /therapies for his illness. Will he get pesky SMS reminders asking him to convert his credit card payment to the doctor into EMI’s --- No

This is possible with the following technologies:

• Consent based sharing on a blockchain -- The patient data is stored on a blockchain and the access to it is controlled by consent from the patient and the doctor is verified by his finger print. The same is shared with the pharma / drug unit again based on consent.

• Quantum technologies -- The human Genome project has made it possible to synthesise the genes for a human. It takes about a day. Given that about 98% of the genes are common across all humans (Yes, we are more similar than what we think), Quantum computers can synthesise information within the time Mr. Shaw is in the doctor’s office.

• The AI and Federated Learning enables the entire ecosystem cannot be rigged by individuals in the system (e.g.) Mr. Shaw or his physician.

Conclusion

A sub-optimal healthcare infrastructure is a showstopper and will bring the world to a grinding halt. The ripple effects are far reaching and recovery paths more complex and distressing. Be it livelihood for below poverty line citizens, saving lives and keeping the economy on track, all becomes critical. Leveraging technology to bring in the stability, predictability and sustainable models of operations becomes a prime need. Innovations in Technologies in Healthcare are maturing at fast pace, and many of the topics discussed are being deployed across the globe today.