Acquistions of AI startups are rapidly increasing while the health AI market is set to register an explosive CAGR of 40 percent through 2021.
Artificial Intelligence can help drive the Triple Aim in healthcare, reducing cost, improving quality and expanding access, according to Artificial Intelligence: Healthcare’s New Nervous System from Accenture.
Acquisitions of AI developers in health will be fast-paced, growing at a compound annual growth rate of 40 percent – “explosive” in the word of Accenture – moving from $600 million in 2014 to $6.6 billion in 2021.
What these AI startups will do is to enable machines to sense, comprehend, act and learn, Accenture foresees, to augment administrative and clinical tasks which could free up healthcare labor (doctors, other clinicians, and accountants) to work at their highest-and-best-use.
The most impactful AI-driven application would be robot-assisted surgery, generating $40 billion of value, annually, by 2026. Next in AI-health value-creation include virtual nursing assistants (valued at $20 billion annually), administrative workflow support ($18 billion), fraud detection ($17 billion), and medication error reduction ($16 billion).
Together, the ten AI applications Accenture studied could generate at least $150 billion worth of value in U.S. healthcare.
