MedEduPro (formerly i-cme), held a webinar on “Medical writing in the era of Artificial Intelligence” on Friday, 9th July, 2021, an overview of the topics that were to be discussed and began with an introduction on ‘AI and how it is a part of our everyday lives’.

How does AI impact our daily lives?

AI touches our everyday lives from consumer specific online shopping habits to sports statistics. It works by taking in the data generated and recommends similar patterns. Many of us picture AI as robots working or driverless cars, but in reality, that is not the case, as it is very much present even in our smart watches to track fitness and influences our day-to-day lives in profound ways.

What is the role of AI in healthcare?

Mr. G. Vishwanand elaborated on the aspect and importance of AI in healthcare and all the greater healthcare opportunities this introduces. He spoke about how telesurgeries, Virtual Reality surgery planners would be a possibility in the future just like healthcare chatbots and healthcare games. He explained how AI would help healthcare navigators – who are qualified healthcare workers – to provide care management. It may also provide support in the therapeutic recommendations about patient’s diet and so on, to improve their quality of life.

The speaker then elucidated point by point on other areas of healthcare where AI is significant such as in:

• Using virtual reality in consumer health applications for patient’s well-being
• Early detection of cancer or cardiac diseases that can be monitored by the use of wearables and other devices that can be applied
• Detection of any probable misdiagnosis
• Clinical analysis and decision making for patient-care
• Robotic surgery and patient’s self-management
• End of life care – by supporting elderly track and improve their health and daily activities
• Research digitization that helps in decision making and new discoveries
• Improving the training experience of healthcare professionals by providing realistic and accurate simulations therefore helping them in comprehension

What is the role of AI in medical writing?

The basic feature that AI provides is spell check and grammar corrections. It also helps in providing advanced services such as writing style and tone changes. News outlets have taken advantage of AI that allows them to repackage a single element of information into many formats and dispatch them on different social media platforms. It also helps writers in reformatting articles, translating content, content personalisation, eliminating plagiarism, image recognition and auto-tagging. AI also finds new peer reviewers with broader searches with a multidisciplinary approach.

Mr. G. Vishwanand talked about how AI has improved the writing process especially in the regulatory domain. Many healthcare services actively make use of AI. With the help of AI repetitions and redundancies that occur manually can be avoided. Through its machine learning capabilities, it gathers and cross checks information presented, which would be otherwise overwhelming and time consuming for human workers. On the whole, he emphasized that it is essential to remember that AI is not capable of replacing you, rather it compliments and helps you write better. It does so by speeding up the process and reducing errors.

Additionally, he highlighted some of the examples where AI helps eases documentation proceedings such as in scientific writing, technical writing, regulatory gap analysis, regulatory affairs submission strategy and regulatory compliance follow up.

How does AI work?

Here are some details about how AI functions and benefits its users:

• AI gives computers and machines the power to mirror the problem-solving and decision-making abilities of human intellect.
• It uses combined processes of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Natural Language Generation (NLG) to automatically analyse, synthesize and identify the most significant data and generate information.
• This allows companies to gain the ability to improve digital experiences, and keep the operations streamlined and cost-effective.

He remarked that, AI is a very good pattern detection system. It works by feeding on data sets and large amounts of case files that serve as examples for it to learn and function with practise.

AI vs human intelligence- who wins?

Towards the end, Mr. G. Vishwanand concluded that, although the technology has evolved to this level it cannot match human creativity and empathy. Also, there is an affordability factor for AI as these programs are quite expensive. They require well-trained professionals to build, launch, use and manage its functionalities. AI can replace and organise all the tedious writing process however, only humans can meet the exact needs and demands of Healthcare.

The speaker then opened a line of communication with the audience in order to address their questions on the subject.