Prescription for Advancing Healthcare: Artificial Intelligence

Even prior to the pandemic, the healthcare industry suffered from a variety of ailments: shortage of skilled medical staff; nurse and physician burnout; rising costs; privacy issues; and lack of infrastructure to quickly synthesize all patient information to get a holistic view. 

While many of these issues have been brewing for years, COVID-19 made them worse. In the United States, for example, 55% of frontline healthcare workers report pandemic-related burnout, with the highest rate (69%) among the youngest staff, according to a Deloitte study. 

AI Can Help Streamline Workflows in Hospitals

Healthcare organizations around the world have been turning to AI out of necessity to cope with these challenges. Many are using AI to help clinical teams triage patients, detect anomalies, track disease progression, set up alerts for screenings and assist with patient care. 

An overwhelming majority of healthcare organizations have now implemented, or plan to implement, AI, according to an Optum Research Survey. That could include using computer vision and AI-enabled chatbots for telehealth and virtual care, federated learning approaches for building more robust AI models across hospitals, AI-powered medical devices, and optimization of reading of pathology and radiology studies.

Advancements in sensor technology put a huge strain on the processing and human interpretation needed for all that data. To meet these increased demands, GPUs are becoming the computational workhorse for medical device innovation. NVIDIA Clara Holoscan is an accelerated computing platform designed to develop and deploy software-defined AI medical devices in robotics, surgery, diagnostic imaging, and others. 

Bringing Therapies to Market Faster

Drug discovery is undergoing rapid change, thanks to GPU-accelerated supercomputers. Computational biology and chemistry methods are replacing some of the processes that are currently time-consuming and costly. These new capabilities are being applied to everything from simulating biomolecule interactions and predicting protein structures, to designing novel proteins and applying natural language processing to create virtual screening models. 

AI and simulation are proving themselves as essential tools for modern healthcare and pharmaceutical research. The companies utilizing this approach will deliver much needed care faster and help lighten the burden on overworked professionals by coming up with innovative solutions.

See Where Healthcare AI is Going

For the last several years, thousands of healthcare researchers, IT professionals and innovative developers have come together at NVIDIA’s GTC to discover how AI can be applied to some of our most important challenges. 

GTC 2022, a virtual event taking place from March 21-24, will offer 75 sessions that dive deeper into many of the AI-driven solutions the healthcare industry is pursuing. Speakers from many of the top organizations in healthcare will present, including AstraZeneca, Bristol Meyers Squibb, GSK, Harvard Medical School, Massachusetts General Hospital, The Mayo Clinic, St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital and more.

Among the healthcare topics are:

• Capitalizing on the Metaverse of Medical Imaging Data to Improve AI Performance, Caroline Chung, Chief Data Officer, MD Anderson Cancer Center
• Accelerating Drug Design with AI, Ola Engkvist, Senior Director, Discovery Sciences, R&D, AstraZeneca 
• When Every Second Counts: Accelerated Genome Sequencing for Critical Care, Euan Ashley, Associate Dean, Stanford University 
• OpenFold: Democratizing Access to Predicting and Modeling Protein Structures, Mohammed AlQuraishi, Professor, Columbia University
• Accelerating Healthcare with AI, Kimberly Powell, Vice President of Healthcare, NVIDIA

Registration to the conference is free and open now.