Artificial intelligence is seeing rapid growth in the healthcare industry, with a projected $6.7 billion in revenue by 2021. Many medical software companies are eying up this space as a way to use AI for lifesaving improvements. Here are a few of the players in this market and the way that they’re innovating key processes and software for healthcare organizations.

1. Emotional Intelligence

The emotional state of a patient can provide useful information on their mental and physical health. Providers can leverage AI to pick up clues in the way people talk and interact and provide helpful advice.

Ginger.IO

Objectively measuring mental well-being and proactively offering the right type of emotional support is difficult for mental health professionals. Ginger.IO uses AI to process the data from its app users to determine whether they’re feeling better, worse and when they need assistance. Self-care guides help users learn how to cope with their emotional states at the exact time they need this assistance.

Beyond Verbal

This startup is working on a tool that can pick up biomarkers from someone’s speech to diagnose potential health conditions.

2. Proactive Healthcare

Preventative care can make a big difference in a patient’s life and their medical outcomes. AI can analyze large data sets to help healthcare providers understand what their patients are dealing with and how best to assist them at the moment.

Sensely

Sensley uses AI to power Molly, a virtual health assistant. She can help connect the patient with their health care team, guide them to resources that are helpful for their current needs, use speech recognition to answer the patient with natural language, and connect with their health records for a truly personalized experience.

Permanente Medical Group

Permanente Medical Group uses AI technology to analyze patient data from over half a million people in their community. They use this information to create a predictive data model that can point out the patients who may need to get upgraded to the ICU, along with other useful insights.

Careskore

Careskore is a cloud-based system that takes a big picture view of a patient’s health to determine whether they’re going to end up back in the hospital. Healthcare providers may choose to wait to discharge a patient who is likely to get readmitted shortly after leaving as a way to ensure a smooth continuation of care. Having to go through the intake process and all of the delays involved in that process could end up leading to poor outcomes.

The system analyzes data from more than 39 million records and 4.3 billion data points as the basis for its predictions. You get the analysis in real-time, so if anything suddenly changes with the patient’s condition, that’s already taken into account.

3. Computer-assisted Physician Documentation

Paperwork might be a necessary part of providing care, but it takes up a lot of physician and nurse time that could be spent working with patients.

Nuance

The computer-assisted physician documentation solution by Nuance leverages AI technology to streamline the workflow and improve the notes being taken by the medical professionals.

This system strives to reduce the need for any record reworking during the patient’s care, which eliminates a time-consuming part of the process. It also improves accuracy, which can be lifesaving in the healthcare field. Nuance integrates with EHR systems already in place at healthcare organizations, so they can bring their AI platform into the solutions that many practices already use.

Samantha

This documentation tool makes it easier for doctors to make their medical charts by using automation to streamline the workflow. This application uses Natural Language Processing to understand what the doctor dictates and to pull the appropriate terminology into the records.

4. Medication Compliance

You can do a lot for your patients, but you can’t go to their homes and make sure that they’re taking their medication. Proper medication management is the key to successfully treating many conditions, but that can be difficult for patients who may be forgetful or have executive functioning problems. This problem is particularly challenging for clinical trials that need the data from compliant patients.

AICure

AICure uses AI technology to identify the medication that the person is taking, confirm that the right person is taking it and even look for body movements that suggest that the pill has been swallowed successfully. You might not be able to sit next to them when they take their medication, but AICure offers something that’s even better than that at promoting compliance.

It can also encourage patients to take their medication, remind them of the appropriate time to take it and help them throughout the process. The healthcare provider or clinical trial gets the information needed to move forward with the rest of the plan.

MedMinder

This patient compliance solution connects a Bluetooth enabled smart pill dispenser to an AI-powered app. It sends reminders to patients and predicts whether someone is at risk of missing a dose.

AI in the healthcare industry comes in countless forms, and there are many opportunities for getting into this market. Whether you want to solve a big problem for healthcare companies as a whole or narrow your focus, it’s a good time to look at the applications of AI.