Member Article

How can technology complement human intelligence?

How do businesses ensure technology is balanced with human intelligence and imagination?

The Economist Intelligence Unit has produced a report on the use of technology within the healthcare sector, and how the two components enrich, rather than compete with one another.

Steve Chilton, University Hospital Birmingham’s (UHB) ICT director, says: “Technology-led automation and development have freed up creativity.

“Contrary to negative perceptions, we’ve seen individuals empowered, obtain greater autonomy and achieve greater job satisfaction.”

The EIU’s report looks at the delicate relationship between healthcare practitioners, and finds enthusiastic anecdotal evidence of technological innovation within the sector, but also finds uptake is often slow progress.

A survey of healthcare professionals revealed that two-thirds report one or more instances of employee failure to learn a new technology in the past six months.

The report touches upon the work underway to bring machine learning and computing power to bear in diagnosis.

According to IBM executive architect Rick Robinson, as many as 50,000 papers are published each year in the field of diabetes alone.

Diagnosis in any field requires the ability to draw on disparate pieces of information to formulate an assessment of the patient’s likely to condition.

IBM have developed a supercomputer known as “Watson” that can digest a million medical textbooks in just three seconds while also processing other information such as insurance claims and electronic medical records to enhance the diagnosis.

Could the Watson replace a doctor? Mark Coeckelbergh, assistant professor at the University of Twente and MD of 3TU Centre for Ethics and Technology, said: “I think there will always be the need for a human to decide and act in more complex situations.”

He added: “There are certain things where you need emotions and where you need improvisation, imagination.”

Elsewhere, remote monitoring of patients or “telehealth” is becoming a new reality, to free clinicians of information processing-intensive tasks, to focus on patient care.

George MacGinnis, a telehealth expert at PA Consulting, said: “The current way of working is not sustainable from a future workforce perspective; there simply aren’t going to be enough doctors and nurses either domestically or available to recruit from overseas.”

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Tom Keighley .