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Explore how generative AI is reshaping healthcare product development- from faster prototyping to smarter clinical and operational tools.
Explore how generative AI is reshaping healthcare product development- from faster prototyping to smarter clinical and operational tools.
Published: January 31, 2024
Product engineering in healthcare has always been a fairly contentious topic among providers and healthtech architects alike. The healthcare regulatory landscape is complex and constantly evolving, and any healthcare product must navigate this carefully, making sure to stay updated on any new developments. Keeping up with the current technology is also important, as these solutions must be scalable and easily accessible at any given time.
All this changes with the advent of generative AI, or gen-AI. Until recently, AI technology was limited, able to perform very specific tasks with a narrow scope of operations. Today, Gen AI is a step closer to the kind of artificial intelligence we see in movies, like a really smart assistant. It allows you to automate several of the tedious steps of product engineering so you can focus on coming together to create great custom products for your healthtech services. It also can play a role in the design process to help come up with solutions that could boost efficiency across all levels, like in clinical documentation, diagnostic assistance and medical imaging.
Intelligent ideation – Generative AI in Product Engineering
A typical product development phase could take anywhere from 6 months to years, from inception to launch. Let’s take a look at how gen AI could affect this.
Phase 1: Concept
This is when your team starts ideating for new products or services that could address this. Here, two of the most time-consuming aspects would be:
Gen AI can give you useful and actionable insights after parsing the relevant data and running simulations with the right set of parameters, in a matter of hours. It can also help harmonize all the inputs, perspectives and comments and make them available in real-time, so no one on the team misses out.
Phase 2: Design & Development
After the concept crystallizes, the most intensive phase, design, is kicked off. This is when the product takes shape, with detailed specs and models being drawn up. Everything about the product and its features is up for discussion, and there is a lot of cross-team collaboration. In a typical cycle, a lot of effort and time goes into the design iterations.
With gen AI, engineers can set the parameters, like user feedback and manufacturing costs, to generate several designs that address their needs, in a matter of minutes. What’s more, your custom AI can also help measure performance by running accurate simulations, making the final product a lot closer to its finished version even before market testing.
Phase 3: Testing
At this stage, a prototype of the product is prepared to be tested. Tests can range from ones performed in highly controlled environments like labs, to user feedback from focus groups. Previously, this step would also take a considerable amount of time in recording and collating the results of these varied tests, and analyzing them for useful insights.
Here, gen AI can collate all the different inputs seamlessly, and convert them into useful insights to take back to the drawing board. It can also help incorporate these insights in the prototype to return updated designs that are more user-oriented.
Phase 4: Product maintenance
Even after a product, especially software, is shipped, the product cycle is not over. As laws get updated, and user feedback on the product comes in, the product team has to make sure to keep it constantly updated to reflect these changes.
However, with gen-AI, compliance checks and incorporating inputs can be automated, making sure the tech team need only address the alerts they receive, and freeing their time for new projects.
Conclusion:
The possibilities of generative AI in product engineering in healthcare are not just speculative, but transform into real-world implications of saving time, energy and capital. Products and services will keep pace with the constantly shifting and evolving needs of patients, and also keep up with regulations and compliance standards without missing a beat. This development, on a national or global scale, could usher in a new age of healthcare within the decade, one that is effortlessly patient-centric, efficient and innovative.
About us:
Reveal HealthTech provides specialized engineering, clinical model, and strategy support to healthcare organizations. As leading AI healthcare pioneers, we take a curated approach to identify your business problems accurately and build custom enterprise-grade AI solutions to tackle them effectively.
