The Top 10 Use Cases for Generative AI in Healthcare

From fast-track diagnoses to identifying new drugs, generative AI is transforming healthcare.

If any industry could use generative AI advances to simplify and expedite processes, it’s healthcare. Doctors, nurses, and support staff take marathon shifts to provide around-the-clock services, often without the necessary resources or human capital to function efficiently.

Luckily, we’re already seeing substantial progress.

Major health providers, tech companies, and well-funded startups have released a proliferation of internal and patient-facing AI applications that make the jobs of health practitioners, researchers, insurance providers, and back-office support that much easier. From analyzing images to fast-tracking diagnoses to identifying new drugs and treatment options to a slew of automated administrative capabilities—GenAI is transforming the healthcare industry.

We’ve laid out 10 of our favorite use cases from companies leading the charge:

1. Clinical note-taking

Organizing vast quantities of patient notes and histories is a time-intensive, manual process—and one ripe for AI automation. Abridge bills itself as “the most trusted AI-powered clinical conversation platform, purpose-built for healthcare.” The company’s enterprise tech generates real-time clinical notes during patient visits, structured in the industry’s preferred formats (History of Present Illness, Assessment & Plan, Physical Exam, and more).

Crucially, Abridge secured a partnership with Epic Systems to become the ubiquitous healthcare software company’s provider of choice for AI-powered medical note-taking. By integrating Abridge’s GenAI for clinical documentation into Epic’s electronic health record workflow, doctors can fully utilize Abridge Enterprise without leaving Epic. Patients can also capture and share detailed notes from visits via the Abridge app and use the tech to learn more about diagnoses and medications.

2. Scheduling appointments

Scheduling a doctor’s appointment is often a hassle, and in 2024, there’s no need to play phone tag with an overworked receptionist. Enter AgentifAI, the AI scheduling platform tailored to healthcare.

With the help of an AI assistant named Alice, providers can offer patients personalized scheduling services that integrate within existing scheduling APIs. Alice can handle thousands of simultaneous conversations and identify specific requests across appointments, exams, and health insurance policies to ensure patients get the help they need—no more “please connect me to an actual person” requests to sub-par automated bots.

3. Drug discovery and research

Identifying new drugs can take years using conventional methods, but AI advances can greatly expedite the process. AlphaFold is an AI system developed by Google DeepMind that generates 3D protein structures from amino acid sequences—researchers have already used the tech to identify hundreds of thousands of potential new psychedelics. It can predict a protein’s shape in milliseconds down to atomic accuracy; the technology, per Google, is recognized “as a solution to the grand challenge of protein-folding by CASP (Critical Assessment of Protein Structure Prediction), a community for researchers to share progress on their predictions against real experimental data. At CASP 14 (in 2020), we presented our latest version of AlphaFold—which displayed a level of accuracy so high that the community considered the protein–folding problem solved.”

While some scientists are skeptical of the technology's potential to change the drug discovery field, Isomorphic Labs—DeepMind's drug-discovery spin-off—recently announced deals worth up to $2.9 billion to hunt for drugs using machine-learning tools such as AlphaFold.

4. Insurance claim submissions and appeals

Nobody likes dealing with insurance companies. Amperos Health is one of a number of companies putting AI to work to manage the process, building AI agents that handle healthcare claim collections and denial management.

The company’s first AI, named Amanda, calls insurance on clinics' behalf to check claim statuses, understand why certain claims are denied, and generate cover letters that reference payor policies for claim appeals. For those who wish to handle the intricate details, Amanda can even queue up the call and let you take over when a human is on the other end. Amperos is currently raising a pre-seed but is discussing implementation with multiple providers at a $2 million contract value. With time, the company plans to expand its roster of AI coworkers and use cases.

5. AI-powered echocardiograms

Those suffering from heart conditions may not even be aware a problem exists—and some of those who do may still eschew in-person scans for financial reasons. Caption Care claims to be the first company to integrate AI and ultrasound technologies to drive early disease detection and management, focusing on heart health. The company’s AI-powered software for cardiovascular imaging analysis allows doctors to perform echocardiograms (a type of ultrasound) more cost-effectively when and where patients need it—even from home.

The platform also uses deep learning algorithms to help providers understand the results of echocardiograms and detect cardiac conditions before they become a problem. This saves time, money, and, potentially, even the lives of at-risk patients who may otherwise not make a hospital visit for a scan.

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