Can artificial intelligence make health care more efficient?

I f you want to see a spiffy new protein structure, ask an ai. If you really need a fax machine, try a doctor’s office. It will be somewhere in the corner under a clipboard with a variety of paper forms attached to it. Not true for all doctors, or all health-care systems, but true enough for a wry grin in many; the sector’s digital transformation has been patchy at best. Economists think technology has been responsible for between 25% and 50% of growth in health expenditure in oecd countries over the past 50 years, growth which has seen the sector’s share of gdp grow relentlessly. In many of those countries it has achieved much. And yet, after decades of costly effort, stories still abound of incompatible it systems, confidentiality breaches and paper records that need to be held on to in parallel to electronic health records. Is there any reason to think that ai can really sort this out? There is. And it is offered, in part, by the sheer size of the problem. America spent $4.5 trillio

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