The future of healthcare, Ennio Tasciotti's vision: AI to improve relationships
What will medicine look like in the coming years? In his contribution to the Il Futuro della Cura (The Future of Healthcare) project, Professor Ennio Tasciotti, director of the Human Longevity Program at the IRCCS San Raffaele in Rome, outlines a professional who, thanks to artificial intelligence, will finally be able to return to caring for the whole person.
Prevention and molecular diagnostics: the era of dataThe "
The transformation starts with the ability to process information that was previously inaccessible. The doctor of the future will have digital tools capable of penetrating the smallest details of the patient's state of health, allowing early diagnoses based on increasingly accurate molecular diagnostics. This change does not only affect therapy, but also opens the door to decisive prevention: “Now we have [the data], we can integrate it, we can interrogate it in some way to understand how to operate”.
Recovering time for the patient
One of the most interesting aspects highlighted by Tasciotti is the paradox of technology: automation does not distance the doctor from the patient, but brings them closer together. Today, the doctor-patient relationship is often sacrificed due to the high number of patients, but AI can reverse this trend: ‘The transfer of some tasks from the doctor, perhaps to artificial intelligence tools, will free up the doctor's time.’ This ‘regained time’ will allow us to focus once again on the human relationship, a fundamental aspect of care that is often denied today by bureaucratic and operational routines.
Automatic diagnoses and resource management
In a scenario of healthcare staff shortages, Tasciotti suggests that some medical functions will be delegated to digital tools, always under professional supervision. Artificial intelligence is already capable of interpreting complex patterns of variables, detecting the onset of diseases in advance.
"Artificial intelligence already allows us to make diagnoses much more accurately and precisely than we were able to do a few years ago. We can expect that in the future, diagnoses will increasingly be made automatically.‘
