Tata Consultancy Report Shows AI in Healthcare on Rise

A study by IT services and business solutions specialist Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) shows that more than half (52%) of healthcare businesses expect AI technology to help productivity at least double in coming years.  

The ‘TCS AI for Business Global Study’, reports on the state of AI adoption and its impact on businesses, in healthcare and beyond. 

It finds that 69% of businesses are more focused on using AI to drive innovation and increase revenue than on productivity improvement and cost optimisation. 

It also shows most (86%) of senior business leaders have already deployed AI to enhance existing revenue streams or create new ones. 

Executives generally say they are positive about the impact of AI, with 57% being ‘excited’ or ‘optimistic’ about the potential impact of AI on business. 

Nearly half (45%) expect up to half of their employees will need to use generative AI capabilities to do their job within the next three years, with 41% believing genAI will have an even greater impact than this.

Most (65%) believe AI will augment and enhance human capabilities, enabling people to focus on higher-value activities that require creativity and strategic thinking.  

Wide & deep' AI adoption in healthcare

Dr Harrick Vin, TCS Chief Technology Officer said: “We are now entering an era of wide-and-deep enterprise AI adoption but enterprises are realising the path to production for AI solutions is not easy, and that building an AI-mature enterprise is a marathon, not a sprint. 

“Our study also highlights how enterprises feel underprepared both to deploy AI solutions at scale, and also to manage the profound shifts in the roles of people and ways of working resulting from such deployments.” 

The reports findings are borne out In the past year, with a raft of AI deployment across many areas of healthcare.

The UK alone has seen significant healthcare AI initiatives launched. These include British Telecom announcing it is working with the National Health Service to pilot a new AI-powered Patient Concierge tool to streamline patient communication, simplify referrals and reduce staff workload for the NHS. 

The tool aims to reduce missed or double-booked appointments through the smart use of AI and supports BT’s efforts to support greater use of responsible AI and digital diagnostic technology across the health service.

And NHS Scotland has also tested an AI tool that helped identify ultra-early signs of breast cancer in 11 women that had been missed by clinicians.

AI tool helps detect breast cancer

The tool, called Mia, was piloted alongside NHS Grampian doctors, and analysed the mammograms of over 10,000 women. Mia is developed by London-based Kheiron Medical Technologies, and the solution is supported by Microsoft’s Azure Cloud. 

Most of the cases were cancer-free, but Mia successfully flagged all of those with symptoms, as well as an extra 11 the doctors did not identify, because at very early stages cancers can be extremely small and hard to spot.

In the US, meanwhile, IBM has partnered with researchers from global health system Cleveland Clinic to explore strategies to identify new targets for immunotherapy through AI. 

The developments come in the form of both supervised and unsupervised AI that reveal the molecular characteristics of peptide antigens, small pieces of protein molecules that immune cells use to recognise threats.