Artificial Intelligence Can Improve the Healthcare System for Good

By Amanda Kule
December 8, 2021

Between unlocking a phone with your face and having your car park itself, it seems like all industries are using artificial intelligence, or AI, to their advantage.

Except the healthcare industry, which has become more time-consuming, inefficient, expensive, and frustrating than ever. 

That’s where K Health comes in. We’re leveraging AI in new ways to try to change the quality of healthcare—for good.

AI Can Fix Our Broken Healthcare System

Some of the largest issues in the healthcare system, like siloed information, inefficient visits, inaccessible doctors, misdiagnoses, and increasing costs, can be alleviated with AI. 

Until recently, information doctors need to properly diagnose and treat people was all over the place—in the files of a past patient with similar symptoms, the mind of a colleague or specialist, a medical journal, or an article that they once read in school.

Similarly, patients have to work too hard or rely on too many people for answers about their own health. Their doctors can’t always get on the phone with them or fit them in for an immediate appointment, and online search engines like Google or WebMD offer anxiety-inducing information which is often inaccurate and irrelevant. 

When (or if) accurate information is eventually found, or a patient is successfully diagnosed, there’s also no smart way for a doctor or patient to document it so that others can learn and benefit from the information.

Smarter medicine with more informed patients and doctors can improve health and save lives.

K Health Is Using AI to Bring Higher-Quality Care to Millions

K Health has taken the power of AI and combined it with the expertise of 100+ world-class doctors and nurse practitioners to build the most informed primary care solution ever. It’s offering everyone—insured or not—higher quality healthcare than we ever thought possible.

In addition to its top-tier medical team, the secret to K Health is its AI, a machine built to collate health information in real time and uncover patterns that no one person can. 

It offers that information to patients and healthcare providers for free.

The AI has access to millions of anonymous medical records, firsthand experiences of thousands of clinicians, and billions of data points from partners like Maccabi Healthcare Services and more.  

The AI can look at someone’s symptoms and medical history and instantly provide information on how similar patients were diagnosed and treated—offering a multitude of benefits for patients, doctors, and the broader healthcare system.

What AI can do for patients

K Health’s AI gives patients free, relevant, and on-demand information about their health that’s completely personalized to them. 

One of the first tools K Health built using the AI was the free Symptom Checker, which asks questions about your symptoms and medical history and in seconds surveys its proprietary database to compare your symptoms to millions of people like you.

The Symptom Checker can provide details to help you determine if you may have a migraine that can be treated at home or something more serious that requires in-person care. Nearly 75% of in-person medical visits can be treated remotely, and the Symptom Checker is sharing information to help people decide if they can save a trip to the doctor’s office (and a copay) or need emergency help. 

What AI can offer doctors

Doctors are the cornerstone of our healthcare system, and K Health is empowering them with more information than they’ve ever had access to before. 

No doctor, regardless of how talented or experienced, can scour every past medical record, article, or journal to figure out what’s wrong with their patient—no human can! 

K Health’s AI brings together the vast amount of information available to doctors and puts it right in their hands. This can reduce human error and misdiagnoses and give them more time to focus on their patients. 

The AI also doesn’t need much time to collect data and get it into the hands of others—it’s all instantaneous. This means a doctor can benefit from the experiences of their colleagues in real-time—and a visit that happened yesterday can help a new patient today.

The data collected from every interaction with the AI enriches what doctors have access to, which can help them efficiently and accurately diagnose and treat more patients in the future. 

Additionally, K Health gives all doctors, regardless of specialty, the ability to understand and treat the whole person—not just the part of them they know best. 

The AI is capable of handling all of the triage and intake, letting the medical team focus on the diagnosis and treatment plan. Plus, it remembers those details forever, reducing triage time for future visits. 

What AI means for the healthcare system

AI can reduce wasted medical costs and resources, overcrowded facilities, misdiagnoses, and more, ultimately improving the quality of the healthcare system as a whole.

By using AI to share anonymous medical information, individuals get more control of their health and doctors become more efficient and accurate in their diagnoses.

By using K Health’s AI-powered 24/7 Symptom Checker, people may no longer need to completely rely on a doctor whenever an issue arises. This can help patients decide if seeking in-person care is actually necessary, potentially freeing up the system for others who need it while also reducing wasted costs. 

During the pandemic, the AI helped relieve overworked doctors and overcrowded facilities by providing information remotely. 

Finally, with every patient encounter, the AI gets smarter. This means that the more medical events it has access to, the more patterns it can uncover in real-time—helping providers make more accurate diagnoses and assisting healthcare researchers in identifying new trends, potentially leading to discoveries of things like new viruses.

K Health Arms Clinicians with Tools to Practice Better Medicine

Over a hundred affiliated clinicians practice data-augmented, text-based, remote medicine right from the K Health app. 

The medical team is available 24/7 and has access to all the information the AI has, helping them diagnose and treat hundreds of urgent and chronic conditions accurately and efficiently. 

The AI reduces the need for triage and paperwork—essentially the medical charts write themselves. 

Clinicians also don’t need to worry about insurance or billing. People pay per visit, or they can sign up for a membership which includes visits whenever you need them plus chronic condition management, preventative care, and mental health treatment. The cost is way less than most copays and saves doctors and medical teams hours of headache.

K Health’s AI is helping patients take control of their healthcare journey, and augmenting healthcare professionals with all the information they need to practice medicine better. Over 6 million people have used K Health to date, and as more people (and doctors) continue to use it, the better our healthcare will become.

In Summary

  • Higher quality: Patients are empowered with information to alleviate reliance on their medical providers and help make the right health decisions, and doctors and the system are empowered with information that can help treat people more promptly, efficiently, and effectively.
  • Better information: People can use their phones to get instant information about what might be causing their symptoms based on millions of similar cases—as opposed to an online search engine that’s based on a few medical journals or ad dollars. 
  • Speed to treatment: AI offers doctors instant access to all the medical information available to help them treat more people quickly, while reducing human error or misdiagnoses.
  • Lower costs: AI makes medical care more efficient, meaning clinicians can spend more time with patients and less time on admin and paperwork. It also helps provide clinicians with more information to order the necessary tests and make correct diagnoses and treatment recommendations. This helps reduce wasted time and money for all.   
  • Always available: AI never sleeps and can help millions of people at the same time. It can give you health information day and night, and if it suggests you chat with a clinician, one is available 24/7 on the K Health app.   
  • Constantly getting smarter: AI is always learning and can quickly pass that info on to doctors and patients right when they need it. The more people that use K Health, the smarter it becomes, improving overall quality of care.

Amanda Kule

Amanda joined K Health in March 2021 as the Director of Communications. She has over 12 years experience working in the health and technology industries, in cross-functional roles that span PR, social media, writing and marketing. She loves working with doctors and experts to produce compelling content that inspires and educates others.