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The Life Sciences and Health Care AI Dossier

Top uses for AI in life sciences and health care — now and in the future

Applications of AI in Life Sciences and Health Care

 

To date, most organizations in life sciences and health care (LSHC) have only scratched the surface of AI’s potential — primarily using it to automate repetitive tasks and standard business processes. However, AI is now widely recognized as a strategic business issue in this area and is actively being discussed at the board and C-suite levels.

By combining AI technology with the fields of medicine and science, organizations are looking for opportunities to transform some of their most critical processes and achieve sustainable competitive advantage through AI.

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The application of AI has the potential to expedite drug development — helping researchers to identify and validate genetic targets, and to design novel compounds. It also has the potential to help companies launch and market products more effectively, and to make supply chains smarter and more responsive.

According to a recent Deloitte survey about the use of AI in life sciences globally, the top outcomes that life sciences companies are trying to achieve with AI are:

80%

of respondents in a recent survey revealed that they expect AI and machine learning to improve treatment recommendations for individuals.

50%

of global health care companies will implement artificial intelligence strategies by 2025.

Facing the top obstacles

 

Though the AI health market is growing rapidly, implementing technology for medical purposes still entails a range of challenges. At a high level, the key to successful AI adoption requires people, processes, and technology to work in harmony. Ensuring patients’ trust, upskilling talent, having a clearly defined digital strategy, along with ways to measure ROI, are among top concerns that hinder successful AI adoption in the health care sector.

For life sciences and health care organizations, AI offers tantalizing prospects for swifter, more accurate clinical decision making and amplified R&D capabilities. However, open issues around regulation and clinical relevance remain, causing both technology developers and potential investors to grapple with how to overcome today’s barriers to adoption, compliance, and implementation.

Four main challenges barriers to AI adoption:

  • Integrating data from various sources into a proper data infrastructure
  • Identifying use cases with the highest potential value
  • Lack of adequately qualified workers with the right technical skill sets to support AI innovation
  • Anxiety over the change AI can/will bring to the industry

Discover new applications and benefits for AI

AI is already proving its value in making processes more efficient, and over the next three to five years, AI is expected to have a transformational impact on biopharma research and development (R&D), particularly for drug discovery.

Meanwhile, life sciences companies will likely continue to conduct AI pilots and proofs-of-concept in many other parts of the value chain.

In health care, AI adoption is still largely in its infancy. However, it is quickly gaining traction — and ultimately Al is expected to have a huge transformational impact on the business of health care — and on how health care is delivered. Today, most early use cases for AI in health care focus on administrative tasks and basic automation, rather than more sophisticated clinical applications such as disease diagnosis and care delivery, which seem riskier and require higher levels of intelligence. However, more advanced AI applications are already emerging that demonstrate the practical viability of sophisticated clinical use cases (e.g., the use of AI for imaging diagnoses).

For most organizations, the single most important AI building block is data: getting access to the rich data that AI systems require, and then managing that data in a coordinated way across the enterprise. With robust data, the potential use cases for AI in life sciences and health care are nearly limitless.

Understanding what can be achieved by AI today

As AI becomes a standard business tool — and competitive necessity — organizations in life sciences and health care will need a clear vision and strategy for harnessing the power of AI. They will also need the building blocks in place to develop and deploy AI solutions at scale. These building blocks include: the right IT infrastructure; the right talent and skill sets; and alliances/ecosystems that enable them to develop or access the AI capabilities they need.

Explore ten use cases depicting how life sciences and health care organizations are harnessing the power of AI to improve process efficiency.

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