America’s healthcare customers, particularly hospital patients and their families, are growing furious with escalating bureaucracy, which threatens to undo the high level of quality care we have come to expect and generally receive. It is time to unleash the power of artificial intelligence to disrupt the healthcare establishment and fix this.
Just as America’s most successful tech companies have radically improved how we shop, use our phones, do basic research, and keep in touch with family and friends, they can also give the healthcare sector the gut check and resulting change it needs.
Arguably, the problems in America’s healthcare sector are the most significant and serious that Big Tech, with its penchant for identifying and deploying creative solutions, can now take on. Policymakers should encourage this.
Instead, regulators like the Federal Trade Commission are bashing tech companies simply because they are big. As the healthcare industry consolidates, with hospitals and medical practices merging, customers have fewer competitive options.
Enter Big Tech, which offers the opportunity to provide innovative services, research new cost-effective pharmaceuticals, and help healthcare customers better find optimal services outside their area.
Healthcare’s customer service problems are systemic. These include delays and complications from insurance pre-approvals, physicians’ time on insurance matters, and unclear and confusing care instructions.
It is not only the quality of patient care, and by extension, patients’ lives, that is threatened, but patients’ dignity as well. Calls are not answered. Emails are sent to patients who cannot respond.
Doctors also commonly make their rounds to patients’ hospital rooms early in the morning, telling the tired and quite sick patients a few things and then rushing off quickly.
I recently experienced this during a three-day hospital stay. Morning one, I was brushed off by the doctors. Morning two, thanks to the power of Google and access to prominent outlets such as the National Institutes of Health, the Mayo Clinic and New York University’s Langone Hospital, I could research my condition, pin my doctors down, and get answers the following day.
Bold healthcare change is needed, and it can best arise not from top-down government dictates but from companies willing to make the big-money investments and big risks for transformative improvements to address market needs.
Tech companies understand the magnitude of these problems. During its call with analysts on February 1, an Amazon executive slammed the healthcare industry for “notoriously poor customer service.”
Amazon is already in the healthcare field, using AI and machine learning to improve patient care and enable physicians to work more efficiently, reducing stress, fatigue and burnout. It also helps the healthcare field by providing generative AI to better match patients with the right clinical trials.
Google is also in the healthcare field, pushing research and technology advancements. “We are building and testing AI models with the goal of helping alleviate the global shortage of physicians, as well as the low access to modern imaging and diagnostic tools in certain parts of the world. With improved tech, we hope to increase accessibility and help more patients receive timely and accurate diagnoses and care,” the company said.
Big Tech may not be the silver bullet for dramatically overhauling and fixing U.S. healthcare. But it does have an essential role to play.
It is time for the FTC and policymakers to either support those efforts or get out of the way as the push for healthcare solutions, improved care and greater patient dignity moves forward.