AI will play ‘significant role’ in health insurance sector — just not right away
New report suggests the technology eventually will help identify people at risk for chronic diseases and lead to earlier treatment.
Artificial Intelligence offers health insurers a tool to identify medical problems earlier and treat them more efficiently, according to a new report from Moody’s Investors Service. Such data undoubtedly would benefit the industry in its long-term battle to control rising health care costs, Moody’s analysts say. But they also warn the technology is still emerging and don’t suggest the health insurance industry hold its breath.
“A significant role for AI in the health insurance sector is unlikely to emerge immediately,” notes a new report issued by the company, titled “AI promises cost savings and efficiency benefits but impacts will not be immediate.”
“However, the pace of AI development is so fast that the technology might have an impact sooner than industry participants expect. As AI is further developed, it is likely to benefit the industry as a whole, but we expect its impact will vary as some companies implement the technology better than others.”
Big data analytics can examine large and varied data sets to reveal key patterns and correlations that might otherwise go overlooked, and the process has become “an increasingly important resource for health insurers in their efforts to identify people at risk for chronic diseases and to treat them earlier in order to prevent or slow the progression,” according to the report.
That said, not only does the data need to be collected and analyzed, it also must “be effectively transmitted to health providers who can access it easily and make it part of their normal workflow. … AI will democratize data analytics by allowing many more people, beyond data scientists, to extract information from data and generate actionable conclusions based on it. Ultimately, this could put better, more tailored information in the hands of health care providers, allowing them to deliver more precise diagnoses and treatments.”
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All that takes time, Moody’s experts say. AI’s impact is likely to be noticed more immediately in automating business and administrative tasks, managing claims, pre-authorizing procedures, and helping identify fraud, waste, and abuse.