Technology is the medicine
Every kid in high school learns at some point that we live in a world where natural resources are scarce. It also appears that human capabilities (at their core definition) are scarce as well; it is innovation and technology that allow us to multiply our impact and footprint on this planet. However, I am afraid that in the western world, we have already converged to the ceiling of our current frontier when it comes to healthcare. While population is aging rapidly, the current healthcare systems are heading towards a structural crisis, which leads to costs persistently continuing to explode.
If nothing changes, the system will become unaffordable, and healthcare will transform from a human right to a premium commodity. The only realistic solution is artificial intelligence (AI).
Our society is aging
It is a commonly accepted truth that populations in Europe and the United States are facing a demographic crisis. According to the United Nations, by the mid-2030s we will have more people over the age of 80 than newborns. What is fairly disappointing is that current governments fail not only to tackle this issue (by providing incentives to families to reproduce more), but also to pinpoint countermeasures to mitigate the effects that rapid aging is going to have on society. More older people means we will have bigger demand for surgeries, physiotherapy, mental health, prescriptive drugs and healthcare services in general. At the same time, economies will have less workers trying to balance out societal productivity ratios. OECD predicts that by 2050, the world will have 52.5 older age people (above the age of 65) for every 100 working people (a ratio close to 1:2).
Which brings me to my main question: How do we expect to scale healthcare services to cover the higher demand and also bring down the costs?
Well, the answer is definitely not by hiring and training more doctors. According to KFF, the costs of hospitals, clinics and physicians represent more than 50% of all healthcare spending, which makes it evident that we cannot expect to scale healthcare with human labor alone.
A radical shift in philosophy
AI has the potential to superscale humanity to achieve enormous things. In contrast to many politicians, entrepreneurs and journalists that believe AI will take our jobs, I think AI is the tool that will allow us to become much more productive and efficient (you won’t be replaced by AI, but from the people that know how to use it). In the context of medicine, I believe it is paramount to optimize workflows, boost scientific discovery and shift the norm towards a more preventive healthcare system.
As mentioned earlier, a big bottleneck in the healthcare system delivery cost is the one for physicians and hospitals, which mainly originates from the shortage of highly trained personnel, expensive and slow R&D in equipment and the unfortunate but vital profit margin. AI can handle and automate repetitive and administrative tasks, such as medical documentation, billing, appointment scheduling, insurance processing, and medical record management, which would radically increase the capacity of the existing workforce without increasing labor costs. In addition, it can analyze hospital workflows, patient flow patterns, and resource utilization to forecast and optimize operations, such as patient admissions, operating room scheduling and bed allocation. This could reduce waiting times and significantly lower costs within healthcare institutions.
AI is not just a better executive assistant or a low level worker with unlimited capacity; it has the potential to contribute meaningfully to healthcare delivery. Machine Learning models can evaluate medical images, pathology slides, ECG signals, and other clinical data almost better than humans (in some cases even better), which can then be developed and deployed globally at near zero marginal cost. Moreover, AI’s computational capabilities allow it to synthesize massive volumes of medical literature, clinical guidelines, and patient data to support physician’s decision making and contributing to drug discovery and medical research.
AI really has enormous opportunities for healthcare, even outside of the hospitals. Imagine combining these complex algorithms and trained models with wearable devices. We could monitor vital systems and human health on a 24-hour basis and who knows the amount of useful information and pattern recognition we could generate. Plus, we can always use it to make care more personalized and augment the patient’s experience.
I could write a book about the use cases of AI in healthcare, but all would be worthless without mentioning perhaps the most important aspect of them all: the shift towards predictive health. For decades, our healthcare systems have been focused on improving their abilities to treat diseases, make complex operations to “fix” what was wrong and give us medicine to help us mitigate our symptoms. I hope you notice that there is a pattern hidden in the phrases above; healthcare is focused on restoration rather than prevention, and people have adapted the same mindset as well. It is why cavity is the most prevalent disease in the worlds, while it is 100% preventable (if people followed proper oral hygiene). This reactive mindset is fundamentally wrong given the core objective and definition of healthcare, but it is a reasonable one considering the technological capabilities and the knowledge we had… up until now! With AI, we can combine enormous health datasets and patient records to train models to identify subtle patterns in medical imaging, lab results, and patient records that human physicians may miss and thus enable proactive interventions, such as lifestyle changes, targeted screening, and early therapies, which can help save millions of lives per year at a fraction of the cost.
Evolve or die
It is finally time to accept the truth; healthcare systems are approaching a breaking point. Aging populations, rising costs, and increasing demand are pushing existing models beyond what human labor and traditional infrastructure can sustain. Policy and decision makers must understand that by continuing with incremental improvements or waiting for the next administration or the next generation to make decisions when the problem reaches its peak (a sign of weak leadership that is observed among western countries for a couple of decades) is not going to be enough. AI offers a different path by allowing systems that are currently reactive, expensive, and inefficient to become proactive, precise, and scalable.
The question is no longer whether AI will enter healthcare. It already has. The real question is whether we will invest aggressively enough to unlock its full potential. If we do, healthcare could become more accessible, more affordable, and far more effective than anything we have ever known. If we do not, the pressure of demographics and costs will continue to mount until the system begins to fail.
We must understand that no system built for the twentieth century can survive the twenty first without intelligence at scale.
AI is not just the future of healthcare… it is medicine itself.