Against a fast-evolving backdrop of digital transformation, healthcare organisations are increasingly seeking AI-driven digital solutions to better support patients and healthcare professionals by leveraging AI and machine learning (ML) solutions.
AI technology is gaining traction in hospitals, clinics, pharmaceutical companies, healthcare device manufacturers and also in the healthcare supply chain.
In hospital settings, AI algorithms are employed for image analysis, assisting radiologists in interpreting medical scans with greater accuracy and efficiency. An AI tool tested by the UK’s National Health Service in Scotland has identified ultra-early signs of breast cancer in women that had been missed by clinicians.
AI solutions are also helping healthcare professionals. An example is Google’s Vertex AI Search for Healthcare, which helps developers build better technology to ease the administrative burden on clinicians and other health workers.
AI is also being used to enhance clinical decision making, providing physicians with data-driven recommendations for diagnosis and treatment planning.
Pharmaceutical companies, meanwhile, are harnessing the power of AI to accelerate drug discovery and development processes. Firms such as Insilico Medicine and Atomwise employ AI techniques to identify potential drug candidates, optimise molecular structures, and predict efficacy and safety profiles, thus reducing the time and cost associated with traditional methods.
In the realm of healthcare manufacturing, companies such as Siemens Healthineers and GE Healthcare use AI-powered predictive maintenance solutions to identify and prevent manufacturing problems, so ensuring uninterrupted operation and patient safety.
And in telehealth, AI-driven virtual assistants and chatbots are being deployed in clinics and healthcare facilities to streamline patient interactions, triage inquiries, and provide personalised health information. Companies such as Babylon Health and Ada Health have developed AI-powered platforms that enable remote consultations and symptom assessments.
AI has the potential to revolutionise all healthcare sectors, and here we look at ten companies leading the way in healthcare-related AI tools and solutions.
10 Babylon Health
Babylon Health is a digital-first health service provider that combines an AI powered platform with virtual clinical appointments for patients. Patients are connected with healthcare professionals through web and mobile applications and can seek medical advice, referrals and prescriptions as well as having easier access to medical services. Babylon services cater to more than 24 million people globally.
09 Komodo Health
Komodo Health offers a suite of powerful software applications that partner with customers to improve patient care and “reduce the burden of disease through data-driven insights”, the company says.
Komodo’s Healthcare Map delivers patient-level insights by analysing an array of data linked to patients, practitioners and health systems. Komodo says its goal is to “extend the reach of innovative therapies and help healthcare practitioners address unmet medical needs in their communities”.
08 Philips Healthcare
Once known primarily as a consumer electronics company making radios, TVs and light bulbs, Dutch conglomerate Philips has successfully transitioned into a leading provider of healthcare technology products and solutions.
The company provides clinicians with diagnostic tools that help them deliver personalised treatment. One, Philips AI Manager, is an end-to-end, cloud-based AI solution that offers radiology departments access to an ecosystem of AI applications from multiple vendors that can assist with diagnostic reading of images.
07 Siemens Healthineers
Siemens Healthineers is a market leader in diagnostic imaging, offering systems for computed tomography (used in radiography), magnetic resonance imaging, molecular imaging, X-ray products, ultrasound systems and imaging IT.
Siemens Healthineers is transforming big data into precision medicine, by researching and developing scalable AI solutions that can automate clinical routines around complex diagnostics and therapies. It calls this process ‘AI Factory’, and says this is built on “a reliable infrastructure that includes hardware, software, and experts”.
06 NVIDIA
NVIDIA helps healthcare institutions better harness the power of AI and high-performance computing (HPC). In March 2024, the company announced a new suite of NVIDIA healthcare microservices that include optimised AI models and workflows based on industry-standard application programming interfaces to serve as building blocks for creating and deploying cloud-native applications. These offer advanced imaging, natural language and speech recognition, and digital biology generation, prediction and simulation.
05 Intel
Intel is working with healthcare leaders to revolutionise health and life sciences, from accelerating drug discovery to speed pharmaceutical development to improving healthcare access and affordability. Intel’s influence in open source AI is helping device manufacturers, clinicians, and laboratories find cost-efficient solutions while avoiding expensive, proprietary offerings.
It helps companies explore a wide range of AI use cases, including medical imaging, predictive analytics and AI-enabled robotics. Intel has also partnered with Samsung to improve healthcare workflows.
04 Amazon Web Services (AWS)
AWS provides a scalable, low-cost cloud infrastructure platform that powers thousands of businesses in 190 countries worldwide. The company helps healthcare and life sciences organisations integrate, interrogate, and analyse multiple types and modes of data to optimise drug discovery, disease prevention, diagnosis and treatment.
As part of its automated healthcare solutions, it offers AWS HealthScribe, a service that helps healthcare software providers build clinical applications that use speech recognition and genAI to save clinicians time by generating clinical documentation.
03: Merative LP
In 2022, IBM spun-off its Watson Health division into Merative into a standalone company. Merative provides AI, data analytics and cloud computing products and services in medical and clinical research and healthcare services. Merative is able to generate actionable insights that healthcare organisations use to inform clinical, operational and financial decision-making. It also offers open-source capabilities that provide new opportunities for collaborating with stakeholders.
“We’ve been at the forefront of health innovation for nearly 50 years,” it says. “We pioneered the use of cloud, real-world data and industry-leading AI.”
02 Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare
Microsoft’s Cloud for Healthcare is a comprehensive cloud solution tailored for the healthcare industry. It is designed to address the unique regulatory, operational, and technical challenges faced by healthcare organisations. Using AI-powered technology, it brings together capabilities from Microsoft Azure, Dynamics 365, Microsoft Power Platform, and Microsoft 365 to “transform the healthcare journey through more secure and connected patient experiences”.
The solution streamlines clinical and operational workflows, helps with data interoperability, and unlocks insights through advanced analytics.
01 Google DeepMind
Google DeepMind was founded in 2010, and is an Anglo-American AI research laboratory that serves as a subsidiary of Google. Last week, it launched an AI model for predicting the structures and interactions of all life’s molecules, the company has announced.
The solution, called AlphaFold 3, can accurately model the shapes of proteins and DNA, and the next-generation tool is expected to help scientists unlock new discoveries in biology.
AlphaFold Server, meanwhile, is a newly available free platform for scientists worldwide to use for non-commercial research.
Google DeepMind says AlphaFold 3 “takes us beyond proteins to a broad spectrum of biomolecules”, and that this will unlock more-transformative science, “from developing biorenewable materials and more resilient crops, to accelerating drug design and genomics research”.