In order for something to be fully implemented in healthcare, its mechanisms have to be fully and precisely understood since an error can lead to health impairment or even death. Hence, the health legislature is very rigid. In addition, some of the AI methods are still “black boxes” meaning that nobody knows the exact logic behind AI’s predictions and why a certain prediction has been made. That causes a lack of confidence in the technology by both doctors and patients and could potentially cause another AI winter. Fortunately, there are a couple of good reasons for us to believe that this time the AI winter is not coming – the abundance of health data (from heart rate to genotype) which can be combined with data from other trackers (social media, GPS, billing data, etc.), and the immense computing power, especially in cloud services give us indications that AI will be a hot topic in the field for a while.

Until now, a huge amount of medical data stored in hospitals worldwide was fragmented, hard to collect and difficult to analyze. Now, for the first time in history, we have the ability to collect and analyze all those zettabytes of information which are continuously generated in the healthcare industry (that is a zettabyte per year). And this is a lot indeed since one zettabyte is a trillion gigabytes. Thanks to this information, it has become possible to analyze a human being in multiple dimensions (so to say) – biological, environmental and social. AI algorithms are finding all kinds of patterns in data which is comprised of static data such as EHR, diagnostics and genetic analyses as well as dynamic data such as variable sensors and monitors, and also the data acquired from social media. This will impact physicians, health systems and patients. This approach will assist physicians in diagnostics and therapy, both conservative by tailoring patient-specific therapeutics and surgical such as AR, MR, and robotics. It will also assist health systems in improving efficiency and cost reductions. Finally, it will increase patients’ overall satisfaction by improving their experience in contact with the healthcare system as well as by improving the outcome of treatments.