The Generative AI Tracker said this week the healthcare generative artificial intelligence market is valued at more than $1 billion as of 2022, but technology companies and investors will play a significant role in development. They'll team up with healthcare companies including providers, payers and others in the healthcare ecosystem to train large language models on healthcare-specific data and establish robust benchmarks.

WHY IT MATTERS

The Generative AI Tracker is a collaboration between Pymnts and Reno-based AI-ID, a platform that captures artificial intelligence outputs and manages authentication, source validation and data. 

Their dive into the current state and future potential of generative AI in healthcare finds that, while most healthcare-focused companies and startups turning to generative AI for complex drug discovery, diagnostic testing and patient care challenges need to develop their solutions further, some are already reshaping care delivery and expanding research capabilities.

Wednesday's update, Generative Al can elevate health and revolutionize healthcare, examines the role that generative AI can play in transforming healthcare and looks at how companies leverage machine learning, natural language processing and more to do that now.

It found generative AI already has begun to reshape diagnostics, treatment plans and delivery of care as providers "ponder its implications," while healthcare generative AI innovations expand researchers’ capabilities and accelerate drug discovery and diagnostics.

However, the Tracker said generative AI in healthcare requires further development, citing the training of LLMs on healthcare-specific data and establishing robust benchmarks, and discusses the following key market factors:

• Startups stand poised to transform the care continuum.
• Generative AI boosts medical research and drug development.
• Emerging technology is not yet perfected for healthcare.
• Regulations are still in the works. 

It covers use cases, offers examples of emerging regulations and highlights select startups making inroads to address complex challenges in healthcare settings – Epic, Huma, Tempus, Google’s MedPaLM 2 LLM trained on medical data, Medwise.ai, Innovacer, Babylon Health and others.

"Generative AI has the potential to revolutionize how we deliver care, making it more efficient, personalized and effective," Robert C. Garrett, CEO of Hackensack Meridien Health, said in the report.

Not yet fully optimized, and with many growing pains, healthcare generative AI has yet to seek its footing, according to the Tracker.

"In a recent survey, management consulting firm Bain & Company reveals that the main barriers to generative AI in healthcare are a lack of resources, expertise and regulation, with data access and quality and organizational resistance close behind," the authors noted.

THE LARGER TREND

Generative AI, a class of machine learning models that are trained on large volumes of text, audio or image data to generate new content, could have many applications in data-rich healthcare settings.

"In the next few years, I believe the industry will begin to embrace generative AI-based systems that assist, augment and automate processes that have historically undermined the healthcare experience and fueled unsustainable costs," said Dr. Shiv Rao, a practicing cardiologist and CEO of Abridge, a vendor of generative AI-powered clinical documentation technology.

Long term, Rao told Healthcare IT News in August he believes generative AI will make "a massive contribution to clinical decision-making, how we train and utilize clinicians and how we drive better healthcare policy."

"We will have a much more complete and real-time understanding of patients, the efficacy of treatments and the best ways to help optimize the health of populations that share important characteristics," he said.

ON THE RECORD

"No real benchmarks exist, but we estimate [ChatGPT’s] performance to be at the level of someone who has just graduated from medical school, such as an intern or resident,” Dr. Marc Succi, associate chair of innovation and commercialization and strategic innovation leader at Mass General Brigham, said. "This tells us that LLMs … have the potential to be an augmenting tool for the practice of medicine and support clinical decision-making with impressive accuracy,"

Andrea Fox is senior editor of Healthcare IT News.
Email: afox@himss.org
Healthcare IT News is a HIMSS Media publication.