How AI and entrepreneurs share a healthy future 

Picture this. In maybe ten years from now, you’re sitting in the doctor’s surgery and he has one eye on you and the other on an Ipad on his knee.

Your medical records are loaded onto the Ipad (If they still exist by then!) and fed through an AI system to be analysed. As you speak, messages to the doctor flash up on the screen.  

“Ask if the patient is sleeping at nights.”

Followed by: “Examine the lower intestine.”    

How AI will transform visit to the doctor.

This is a taste of how AI is going to transform a visit to the doctor and there will be ample and lucrative opportunities for entrepreneurs.

There is likely to be a vast market, up and down the country, for AI entrepreneurs to build models that can gather and  analyse medical data to help speed treatment and save lives.

Britain’s medical database is growing.   

This is the word from Professor Payam Barnaghi, one of the UK’s leading experts in machine intelligence applied to medicine. He believes this country’s huge electronic database, plus AI, will revolutionise the way doctors work.

This database is growing in size and sophistication by the day. Great Ormond Street Hospital, in London, has just digitized its last 20 years of medical records – 300 million pieces of data that will help diagnose patients.  

It is all about analysing data.

“A lot of this is about analysing electronic health care records and finding people at higher risk  and finding patterns and looking for early diagnosis. If you can do it for dementia, you can do it for cardiovascular. Like me, you could look at my blood pressure history and decide that I am at higher risk of blood pressure and you can make some interventions to reduce it with some interventions rather than wait ‘til I am older and it is too late,” he says.

AI is creating more robust models.  

“My feeling is that in the next five to ten years these type of things should become more streamlined through the power of AI. I have been working in academia for the past 20 years. I think this is the first time I see these two coming together. It is the progress made in computing and the infrastructure. In the past the data was there but you couldn’t access it. A lot of this will become more accessible, more usable, and also AI models have proved that you can create data on a larger scale and create more robust models.”

“If you get this right, it gives really good insights.”  

This is where the possibility of a doctor with an Ipad on his knee, sending him messages to help diagnosis could spring from.

“With progress you can create a predictive model to help you. You can imagine, ChatGPT, you write text and it starts completing your text. Now you create that just by looking at the experience of electronic health care reports … your model can start recreating what happens next…If you get this right, it gives really good insights like keeping an eye on this symptom because a lot of people with your demographic and your age group complained about this symptom,“ he says.

With AI – do we still need doctors?

How far away are we, I ask, from the days when you no longer need a doctor – when you walk into a wired-up chamber and AI diagnoses you ?  

“I think we are not that close to that because what is wrong with you could have different biases and human beings make contributions that machines cannot find easily. An experienced doctor, or a medical system, works on a collaborative basis so a lot of people will provide a lot of opinions, from nurses, junior doctors and consultants to make that decision,” says Barnaghi.

More business for entrepreneurs.

“I don’t think machines will replace that. People over the last 10 years say radiologists will be replaced because machines can do it. You see a lot in research that algorithms can work with 99% accuracy, but still they do not get rid of radiologists.”

Whatever happens, there is likely to be a lot of work in the future in the health service for skilled entrepreneurs, who can build AI systems that can help prevent disease and save lives.