“There has never been a better time to be going into medicine. AI is the most radical transformation in health since the introduction of antibiotics,” said Dr. Lloyd Minor, dean of the Stanford University School of Medicine, in an interview with the Wall Street Journal in October 2023.

The AI revolution in healthcare is well underway. It builds on previous technological developments in the sector, such as developing and adopting electronic health records (EHRs) and digitizing clinical and administrative data, which have proven to be ideal fodder for AI systems.

The application of AI in healthcare has progressed with the evolution of AI, from predictive AI to deep learning and, more recently, generative AI (GenAI). Since the advent of GenAI,  published research on AI in healthcare has exploded, along with expectations on how it can transform the sector.

Why does healthcare need GenAI and how does it add new value to AI applications that are already in use? What is Big Tech’s involvement in healthcare GenAI and how is GenAI already being used? These are the questions explored in this Insight.

This Insight also looks at more than 80 real-world examples of GenAI applications in healthcare, drawn primarily from news updates published on the SPEEDA Edge platform over the past 24 months, to examine where GenAI is currently being applied.