AI Amidst the Healthcare Revolution: Towards an ‘Intelligent’ Tele-Healthcare Information and Diagnostic Environment

The 21 century promises to usher in an era of online healthcare services, i.e. Tele-Healthcare, inspired by the emergence of sophisticated, ‘intelligent’ information systems/agents working in tandem with the Internet/WWW. Currently, world-wide healthcare delivery is undergoing a paradigm shift—patient centred services as opposed to provider centred services and wellness maintenance as opposed to illness management. Two prominent factors, amongst others, are perceived as the catalyst to this phenomenon; (1) Cutting-edge AI innovations assisting medical informatics and (2) AI’s tangible synergy with other computer technologies. This paper discusses the synergy between AI and the new trends in the healthcare delivery system, i.e. the delivery of healthcare via the Internet/WWW. The efficacy of AI in healthcare is demonstrated by discussing a Tele-Healthcare info-structure TIDE, a manifestation of an ‘intelligent’ information theoretic environment featuring knowledge-based medical reasoning techniques. TIDE incorporates two AI-based healthcare systems: (1) AIMS (Automated Health Monitoring System) for wellness maintenance and (2) IDEAS (Illness Diagnostic & Advisory System) for illness management. Our proposal comes from an attempt to rethink the sources of possible leverage in improving healthcare, providing a continuum of personalised healthcare that emphasises the role of the individual in self health maintenance and in an informed response to an illness episode.