The pandemic brought about an explosion in the use of telemedicine. Now, artificial intelligence is set to further transform health care.

AI-driven health care goes beyond chatbot doctors and AI diagnoses. Many of the transformations happen behind the scenes with productivity and comprehension enhancements. With 83% of executives agreeing science tech capabilities could help address health-related challenges around the world, the move to AI-driven health care may seem slow at first, but the wave appears to be building.

Prenuvo is one company using AI to uplift its offering: whole-body MRI scans for preventative health screenings. While these scans are available to individuals at clinics across North America, companies like TDK Ventures and Caffeinated Capital have employed Prenuvo’s enterprise services to support their workforce.

“When you start screening people across their entire body, there’s so much data that’s being collected that it becomes an informational challenge for radiologists,” said Andrew Lacy, CEO and founder of Prenuvo. “AI can basically supercharge the work that they’re doing.”

Lacy added that they’re actively researching training models to identify ultra-early stages of disease that radiologists might not yet be able to see with their own eyes. They’re also training models to speed up image acquisition (potentially trimming MRI time by 90%) and to segment organs to compare them to what Lacy calls a “normative aging curve.”

For example, the average human brain atrophies at 3% per decade, Lacy says, but a Prenuvo study found that vigorous physical activity predicted larger brain volumes, including those relevant for cognition and vulnerable to neurodegeneration. If a person meets what Prenuvo defines as vigorous physical activity, but still experiences a certain level of brain atrophy over time (as evidenced by AI-enabled MRI scans), it could be a signal of one of the more than 500 conditions Prenuvo can diagnose.

Companies using AI-enabled health scans to prioritize preventative care is reminiscent of another workplace benefit boon in the recent past. Peter Nieves, executive of fertility startup WINFertility, cited a 500% boost in employersadding fertility support benefits from 2019 to 2020. However, Prenuvo’s services benefit companies beyond making benefit packages more competitive or simply being altruistic. 

Missed prevention is costly for all parties involved, including employers who insure their workforce. The CDC says that 90% of the $4.1 trillion in annual health care expenditures are for people with chronic and mental health conditions, and preventative care is considered the key interceptor for chronic conditions.

While some health-care startups have AI in their bones, others have it on their roadmap. Sesame Care is in the latter camp. Sesame connects users with providers on a cash-pay single-visit or membership basis. An element of the platform, Sesame @ Work, lets organizations provide employees with access to a low-cost health-care marketplace.

Sesame plans to incorporate AI to help with notetaking and other provider productivity improvements. On the patient side, they plan to leverage AI for search and question prompting to better understand their needs.

The startup’s efforts show how the transition to an AI-driven approach is inevitable in the health-care space even for companies that didn’t start there, and that getting ahead of things can be beneficial for employers. 

By cutting through the noise, Sesame hopes to provide lower-cost (and clearer-cost) services, increasing the leverage of both patient and provider and contributing to the improvement in the system’s total capacity.

“At the surface, health insurers are the governing force on the deployment of AI,” said Rich Birhanzel, senior managing director and global health lead at Accenture. “As for AI in care itself, that’s really a decision at the provider level.”

That leaves employers with the option of incorporating these addendums as a way to fill the gaps until health-care systems catch up. 

For Birhanzel, legacy health-care systems are likely to use AI to help with task management first. With both a clinician shortage and a document-heavy standard, Accenture estimates that 70% of health-care workers’ tasks could be reinvented by technology augmentation (like AI) or automation. “There’s already an opportunity there to change how much time is spent in capturing the essence of the visit and creating a summary that the patient can use,” said Birhanzel.

Experts across the board agree that responsible AI implementation is key. Employers should watch AI pilot programs and advancements in the geographic regions where their workforces live. They should also avoid getting distracted by the shiny new thing, but rather consider what can increase company savings, benefit competitiveness, and employees’ quality of care and life.