DIGI SOCIETY

During my working career, I have witnessed a huge change in the digitalization of the social and health sector. The development of electronic patient information systems has been a significant part of my career. Currently, each of the professionals in the social and health sector uses different digital methods in their work in the care of clients and patients.

The digitalization of health care improves the quality of patient care, improves the communication between professionals and contributes to the production of cost-effective services. Clients’ participation and opportunities to influence their own treatment have also improved significantly.

GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) is an EU regulation that entered into force in 2018. It has also set challenges for healthcare data processing. All information related to an individual’s health is classified as sensitive, and this sets requirements for data processing, data storage, and data disposal.The consents that patients must give to the processing of their data are often unclear both to the patients themselves and to the professionals. From the point of view of the systems, GPDR places restrictions on the visibility of data between professionals, and more attention should be paid to data protection, unfortunately often at the expense of open data flow.

I asked Chat GPT what are the biggest risks in the use of artificial intelligence in healthcare. Chat GPT gave the expected answer: the biggest risks are in the reliability and quality of data, the security of data processing, integrations with other existing systems and gaining the trust of patients. Chat GPT described the biggest challenge perfectly: AI systems are only as good as the data they are trained on. From the point of view of decision-making support in a critical field of health care where it may be the situation of “life and death”, clinicians must understand what is behind the recommendation given by AI. The use of artificial intelligence in health care should definitely be increased, but especially when it comes to clinical decision-making, great consideration should be observed in its use.

Learning Results
I believe that knowing and understanding history helps us understand the present as well. In digitalized healthcare, we must never forget what is most important: the patients and the customers. The increase of AI and automation brings opportunities, but they also set us new requirements for data processing, including our own professional ethics. The source materials helped me to understand how we are on the brink of great opportunities and challenges.

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