How AI Can assist sustainability in the healthcare industry

In a survey of business executives across the healthcare industry, over 50 per cent of respondents believed that AI will be ubiquitous in healthcare by 2025. Following the recent drive in AI technologies, Jermyn Street Design takes a closer look at the ways in which AI can ensure sustainability in the healthcare industry.

How AI Can Assist Sustainability in the Healthcare Industry

The advantages of AI are clear: speeding up processes, recognising more intricate patterns, and dealing with large amounts of data and information. While humans can do this work manually, AI is quickly eating into the monopoly, becoming useful across many sectors, including the healthcare industry.

In a survey of business executives across the healthcare industry, over 50 per cent of respondents believed that AI would be ubiquitous in healthcare by 2025.

The need for AI in healthcare is clear. Healthcare relies on accuracy and intelligence, with complex medicines and quality care needed to treat patients. In this sense, AI is helping to improve the healthcare industry across the board. However, can these automated services also assist pharmaceutical businesses and healthcare providers to be more sustainable? Here we explore how AI is working within the healthcare industry and how it is helping the environment through reduced waste and energy use.

Precision pharmaceuticals

In pharmaceutical manufacturing, efficiency and precision will factor into drug development and creation time. From prioritising medicines to organising stock, AI is helping to make processes more precise, saving time, money, and energy.

AI is able to automate processes, understanding large amounts of patient and health data. This means that drugs can be automatically ordered and prioritised based on urgency while sharing complex details on precise treatment needs. Robotics and other automated technology may even be able to procure elements of treatment for pharmacists.

In terms of sustainability, the saving can be seen in energy and time. As opposed to human labour, the lower energy consumption of AI services is also good news for the environment. Lower energy use links directly to a lower environmental impact from electricity generation.

This automation can also help pharmaceutical businesses to be more hygienic. Alongside quality workwear clothing for healthcare workers, sanitary PPE, and limiting human contact, AI can automate processes that may have required human labour. These automated processes reduce human action and the waste involved with ensuring environments are clean for healthcare standards.

Drug development

For drug development, large data sets and clinical trials are used. Patterns must be recognised among this data and research to show symptoms, cures, side effects, and various other impactful features of drug development.

AI is useful because its intelligence can quickly point out these patterns and may indicate further assertions that human analysis may have missed. As a result, AI is slashing the time it would traditionally take to develop a new drug. In 2018, one pharmaceutical company used AI to help identify new treatments for type-2 diabetes. Understanding data and patterns are key to these processes, with technology only aiding the endeavour.

AI helps the environment not only by saving time and energy but through minimisation of work. More intelligent AI systems will be able to understand the compatibility of drugs, the biology of disease, and the effects of medicinal components to automatically create new medicine. In turn, this reduces the amount of waste during experimental processes of drug development. If the AI system can identify failures early on, pharmaceutical waste can be avoided. This prevents material, plastic, and other by-product waste from going to landfill.

Treatment efficiency

With digitised personal health records becoming more prominent in our lives, AI is helping to make our healthcare more efficient. By automating our GP records, appointments, treatments, and recording historic immunisations, AI can identify our needs better than ever before.

Suppose a patient is due for further immunisation or medicine. In that case, AI systems will be able to identify when these are needed, should a patient or medical professional fail to do so. Further to this, by comparing your historic health record, AI systems may be able to identify which illnesses you may be prone to. Our biology, genealogy, and past illnesses may make us more likely to have diabetes, cancer, or heart disease, for example. AI systems may recognise factors in your health history that could lead to these, predict illnesses before they occur, and recommend measures to treat or avoid them.

In terms of sustainability, of course, our health is closely linked to the environment. If AI can encourage us to live healthier lifestyles and can prevent illness, our energy and waste use will be reduced. As a result, medicine is not wasted, health workers labour is reduced, and we live better lives. This, in turn, encourages sustainability within the health care system.

AI will continue to develop and improve, and it will continue to grow its utility within the healthcare industry. As businesses and services providers turn their attention to their environmental obligations, there is no doubt that AI will play an integral role in ensuring that the healthcare industry is more sustainable.

For more news from Top Business Tech, don’t forget to subscribe to our daily bulletin!

Follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter

Amber Donovan-Stevens

Amber is a Content Editor at Top Business Tech

How E-commerce Marketers Can Win Black Friday

Sue Azari • 11th November 2024

As new global eCommerce players expand their influence across both European and US markets, traditional brands are navigating a rapidly shifting landscape. These fast-growing Asian platforms have gained traction by offering ultra-low prices, rapid product turnarounds, heavy investment in paid user acquisition, and leveraging viral social media trends to create demand almost in real-time. This...

Why microgrids are big news

Craig Tropea • 31st October 2024

As the world continues its march towards a greener future, businesses, communities, and individuals alike are all increasingly turning towards renewable energy sources to power their operations. What is most interesting, though, is how many of them are taking the pro-active position of researching, selecting, and implementing their preferred solutions without the assistance of traditional...

Is automation the silver bullet for customer retention?

Carter Busse • 22nd October 2024

CX innovation has accelerated rapidly since 2020, as business and consumer expectations evolved dramatically during the Covid-19 pandemic. Now, finding the best way to engage and respond to customers has become a top business priority and a key business challenge. Not only do customers expect the highest standard, but companies are prioritising superb CX to...

Automated Testing Tools and Their Impact on Software Quality

Natalia Yanchii • 09th October 2024

Test automation refers to using specialized software tools and frameworks to automate the execution of test cases, thereby reducing the time and effort required for manual testing. This approach ensures that automation tests run quickly and consistently, allowing development teams to identify and resolve defects more effectively. Test automation provides greater accuracy by eliminating human...

Custom Software Development

Natalia Yanchii • 04th October 2024

There is a wide performance gap between industry-leading companies and other market players. What helps these top businesses outperform their competitors? McKinsey & Company researchers are confident that these are digital technologies and custom software solutions. Nearly 70% of the top performers develop their proprietary products to differentiate themselves from competitors and drive growth. As...

The Impact of Test Automation on Software Quality

Natalia Yanchii • 04th October 2024

Software systems have become highly complex now, with multiple interconnected components, diverse user interfaces, and business logic. To ensure quality, QA engineers thoroughly test these systems through either automated or manual testing. At Testlum, we met many software development teams who were pressured to deliver new features and updates at a faster pace. The manual...