In the last decade we’ve seen a surge of digital health startups and companies that have made accessing healthcare much smoother for patients. While things have gotten more convenient from a patient perspective, telemedicine does not materially reduce doctor’s time and effort spent per patient. This means that in thinly stretched, high-demand specialties, such as dermatology, access has barely improved.
AI finally changes this. All information needed by the patient will be gathered beforehand, analyzed by AI, which may request additional information, packaged, and then sent to the right provider including a recommendation for diagnosis and treatment. What usually required a longer consultation now requires just a few minutes of the clinician’s time. As AI improves, less experienced clinicians will be able to treat patients on par with experts in the field. Healthcare professionals will move towards becoming more of a sanity check on AI recommendations and remain an important human conversational element.
Most AI health companies today take far too limited an approach. Healthcare is not just about diagnostics; it’s also the right referral systems, follow-ups, and prescriptions. To truly make a difference in today’s healthcare system, one needs to build AI and product interfaces that cover all of these end-to-end. A diagnosis or evaluation by AI is helpful and might make a patient more informed, but they will still have to go to a doctor to actually solve their problem. Solving the treatment and follow-up part with AI is what will truly revolutionize healthcare, as AI gets closer to being a full health companion in your pocket.
Something we underestimate is the amount of low-hanging fruit in healthcare in making people’s lives better by expanding care accessibility. There are countless conditions that people do not even bother seeking medical help for. Let’s take Acne as an example; there are millions of teenagers in the US that have acne at any given time. The majority of these teenagers will try to treat their acne with useless cosmetic products pushed at them from every direction. Meanwhile, there are incredibly effective prescription medical solutions with minimal side effects that will cure most milder acne. While simple and not as important as something like cancer, it would significantly improve the quality of life of these millions of teenagers with acne and prevent permanent skin damage and scarring. The general bottleneck for most people is access to a medical professional that knows exactly what they need. This is what AI will solve.
The only field in healthcare where we currently see AI widely deployed is in radiology, which has already been worked on for 20+ years. AI assistance has been shown to improve efficiency by 25-30 percent and has bumped sensitivity in radiologists from 72 percent to 99 percent in detecting abnormal findings. These are just the very early inklings of what will unfold in the next few years with recent AI advancements. Across Nolla Health’s two dermatology apps we’re already seeing a 90 percent efficiency gain in treating patients. This doesn’t even include the significant jump in quality of care unlocked by giving patients much closer follow-ups than would have previously been possible. Implementing such AI systems across the fragmented healthcare landscape remains a massive challenge. True initial transformation will come from vertically integrated players that own the entire stack, such as Nolla Health.
Despite all this, in-person dermatology visits will not go away in the near future. There are plenty of cases where in-person visits will still be needed, such as biopsy of potential skin cancer or treatment of conditions that require more advanced equipment. What AI enables in these cases is to filter those out, and triage them to the right specialists. AI will act as a significantly improved and more accessible primary care version of every specialty. This will free up time for doctors to focus on more important issues, and for patients to get much more closely followed-up care.
The author, Luis Wenus, is CEO & Co-Founder of Nolla Health, where he is building AI-powered personal care companions for everyone.