At around one-third of overall healthcare spending, hospitals are much more than what’s spent on drugs and pharmaceuticals. Making hospitals more efficient could help bring down healthcare costs significantly, and AI is just the tool to do it.

Hospitals, in the US and internationally, are already making a big splash in a number of different areas:

• AI helps with diagnosing illnesses and medical issues. This includes AI algorithms that help radiologists by scanning MRI or CT images for possible tumor signs, and AI algorithms can also help detect cancer cells when analyzing biopsy slides/blocks. Eye or skin conditions can also be detected via AI image processing. Help from these technologies means human personnel can be more efficient, analyzing more data in the same time periods, and AI can also help hard-to-identify items that may be overlooked by overworked human doctors.
• In many hospitals, monitoring patients is one of the most important tasks, especially in intensive care units (ICUs). Here, the combination of sensors that detect all kinds of data —  a patient’s heart rate, blood pressure, oxygen saturation, and so on — and algorithms can help identify emerging problems and provide early warnings. Doctors, nurses, and so on thus can be informed when a patient’s condition is starting to worsen, but before it gets bad. This way, help can be administered as soon as possible, improving patient outcomes.
• Healthcare is a heavily regulated industry, but heavy regulation means that there’s a high administrative workload, that means high costs and often duplicative workflows. This holds true for hospitals as well, of course. Making these tasks more efficient with the help of AI can improve hospitals’ performance — better patient outcomes at lower costs can be achieved over time, all else equal. AI tools can help automate documentation so doctors, nurses, etc. have more time to actually treat patients. AI tools can also handle billing, insurance claims, and many more back office tasks.

These are some of the most important tasks AI can help with in hospitals, but additional developments exist, such as surgery robots where AI tools can help surgeons, AI-enabled chatbots that help patients and their relatives with questions they may have, and much more.  

How to Benefit from AI In Hospitals

Hospitals and their operators usually aren’t publicly traded, but investors can benefit from the growing usage of AI tools in hospitals in another way: Major tech companies provide many of the AI algorithms, tools, and services outlined above to all kinds of hospitals.

Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT), for example, provides AI and data services to hospitals via its Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare units, which includes Dragon Copilot, specifically developed for helping with workflow in hospitals, clinics, etc. International Business Machines (NASDAQ: IBM), via its Merative unit, provides healthcare-focused AI tools, such as data analysis, decision-making, and so on — doctors can, for example, use Merative to help find diagnoses for rare or hard-to-identify medical issues. Of course, NVIDIA’s (NASDAQ: NVDA) GPUs are powering many of the advanced algorithms that are used in hospitals for all kinds of tasks.

Investors that are interested in broader exposure to the world of tech and Artificial Intelligence should take a look at our top picks.