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Transforming Diagnostics, Treatment, and Patient Care

Amanda Gravitis, CEO of Smart Salem, highlights how AI is reshaping healthcare by enhancing preventative health services with data-driven insights, and better outcomes for patients and clinicians alike

The healthcare industry is on the brink of a technological revolution, driven by the rapid advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Over the past few years, AI has made significant strides in enhancing diagnostics, improving treatment outcomes, and streamlining patient care. By harnessing vast amounts of data, AI is enabling healthcare providers to make more accurate predictions, detect diseases earlier, and deliver personalised treatment plans that are tailored to individual patients’ needs.

From AI-powered medical imaging systems that accelerate diagnoses to advanced algorithms that can predict patient outcomes with greater precision, the potential of AI in healthcare is vast. It also holds promise for making healthcare more accessible, efficient, and cost-effective, particularly in regions with limited medical resources. At the same time, AI is transforming how clinicians interact with patients, enabling them to focus more on patient care and less on administrative tasks.

Amanda Gravitis, the CEO of Smart Salem, envisions a future where Artificial Intelligence (AI) plays a central role in transforming patient care, optimising medical practices, and enhancing patient outcomes. As AI continues to evolve, Gravitis sees it becoming a fully integrated element of health systems, revolutionising the way healthcare providers approach diagnostics, treatment, and patient interaction.

In this exclusive feature, Gravitis shares her insights on the challenges and opportunities of AI in healthcare, its current and future impact, and the importance of maintaining the human touch in an increasingly digital world.

AI’s Role in Shaping the Future of Healthcare

Gravitis believes that AI will fundamentally change the healthcare landscape within the next five years. AI will become a fully integrated element of existing health systems across the whole clinical journey, universalising access and enhancing diagnostic speed, accuracy, and insights. It will enable earlier identification of currently complex cases and conditions and drastically optimise medical imaging process speeds. This will mean we can implement more effective interventions earlier, leading to greatly improved outcomes across multiple core disease processes.”

She highlights how AI will not only improve diagnostic efficiency but also personalise treatment plans. “It will also dramatically improve the extent to which testing and treatment can be personalised. For example, we will see the use of personalised digital twins to gain more precise insights, predict patient outcomes, and accelerate and inform treatment decisions. Ultimately, AI will give clinicians the ability to make better recommendations and provide the general public better access to preventative testing and insights, allowing them to make more informed decisions about their health and lifestyle.”

Overcoming Challenges in AI Integration

The integration of AI into healthcare systems comes with its own set of challenges, with data being the most significant hurdle. “There are several significant challenges for the healthcare industry, the most critical being data. Not only is universal and integrated data access and availability across healthcare providers crucial, ensuring the data used to train the AI is of the required quality, quantity, relevancy and representative of the population to be treated is also paramount; this is particularly important for us given the diversity of the population in the UAE,” according to Gravitis. Moreover, the successful adoption of AI technologies requires healthcare professionals to be adequately trained. “It’s incredibly important that healthcare professionals are trained in and understand what AI can do, the underlying concepts and how it is developed, so that they can identify opportunities where it could be implemented. At the same time, they need to be able to critically challenge AI systems, to ensure its design, validation, and usage is as accurate and trustworthy as possible.”

Investment in infrastructure and regulatory evolution are also key factors. “Alongside this, significant investment is required in data and infrastructure, plus crucially, regulation must evolve to ensure AI is applied ethically and safely, with the right level of data accessibility and controls. A high degree of collaboration is needed across the private and public sectors to address these challenges, and at an organisational level, leaders will need to rethink strategies and processes, aligning AI to foster collaboration within the organisation,” Gravitis explains.

AI’s Current Impact and Future Potential

Smart Salem has already begun leveraging AI to improve diagnostic accuracy and treatment outcomes. “This year we have launched several cutting-edge preventative health services including gut microbiome analysis and a series of Smart DNA tests for nutrition, ageing, hair and skin health that are powered and made possible by AI,” Gravitis shares.

The use of AI in analysing large datasets has opened new possibilities in personalised healthcare. “Technology advancements and the associated cost reductions have given us the ability to process enormous volumes of data - such as the trillions of micro-organisms in the gut microbiome or the billions of nucleo tides in DNA - in a fraction of the time, making this kind of comprehensive analysis almost universally accessible.”

Looking ahead, Gravitis is particularly excited about the future of agentic AI, a step beyond current generative AI systems. “AI in 2025 will be defined by agentic AI evolving from the generative AI (LLM) systems we are implementing today. We are excited to see how it develops and what that means for our people, customers, and the advancement of preventative health in the UAE.”

Maintaining the Human Element in Healthcare

While AI promises to revolutionise healthcare, Gravitis is committed to ensuring that technology complements, rather than replaces, the human touch in patient interactions.

“In the healthcare setting, AI is actually used to free clinicians up to spend more time with patients rather than the data. It is seen as a time-saving tool that allows for a greater focus on the patient and their needs. AI optimises the entire diagnostic value chain so that everything and everyone becomes more efficient.”

Gravitis emphasises that while AI enhances efficiency, the human element remains vital in patient care. “In our clinics, the entire process is digital however, there are person-to-person touchpoints at every step of the way because nothing replaces a smile and a friendly face! Our customer happiness officers meet our customers and support them as much or as little as they need. For medical assessments and procedures, the AI frees up our nurses and doctors to be able to focus on the patient, and so the human element of the journey is optimized, not detracted from.”

Addressing Ethical Concerns in AI

As AI becomes more integrated into healthcare, ethical considerations must remain a priority. Gravitis points to data security and ownership as critical concerns. “Data security and ownership are key; patient data belongs to the patient. Patients have the right to understand and decide how and by whom their data is being used and visible to.”

Ensuring that AI systems are free from bias is also vital. “Equally important is building equitable sociodemographic representation to remove any form of bias that could be introduced when training the AI due to an over-indexed data group. AI poorly generalises to cohorts outside those whose data was used to train and validate the algorithms, so populations in data-rich regions stand to benefit substantially more vs data-poor regions, entrenching existing healthcare disparities.”

Despite the tremendous potential, challenges remain in integrating AI into healthcare systems, including concerns around data security, ethical issues, and the need for widespread training. As AI continues to evolve, its integration into healthcare promises to reshape the entire patient care experience, making it more proactive, personalised, and efficient than ever before.

Gravitis sees AI as a transformative force in healthcare that will improve diagnostics, personalise treatment, and enable better patient outcomes. However, she emphasises the importance of collaboration, data security, and maintaining the human element in patient care as essential components for success. As AI continues to evolve, Smart Salem is positioning itself at the forefront of this exciting new era in healthcare.

— anam@khaleejtimes.com