Editor's Note: The following article, about our Future Truth predictions for the healthcare industry, was originally published in the Oliver Wyman Health Innovation Journal, Volume 4.

AI Will Help Us Hear Our Bodies

Here’s something you might think is science fiction but is a hard medical fact: Artificial intelligence-based (AI-based) applications can now listen to one single heartbeat and detect congestive heart failure (CHF) with 100 percent accuracy. It’s not a stretch to imagine that the dreaded nightmare of ending up in an emergency room (ER) on a gurney has now morphed into a new reality – one where you can proactively detect CHF and then walk into your doctor’s office to discuss options for managing it.

Prevention in this way is powerful. Yet, it has proved elusive for many reasons. None are more telling, perhaps, than the inability to continuously listen and harness our bodies’ voices and messages.

Preventative services constitute three percent of overall US healthcare spend. Almost 75 percent of all healthcare spend is tied to treatments for patients with chronic conditions. These figures trend even higher for publicly funded programs – as high as 83 percent for Medicaid and 96 percent for Medicare.

We expect AI will significantly enhance our ability to proactively and accurately detect the likelihood of acute events for a patient with chronic conditions and minimize expensive and unnecessary ER visits or hospital admissions. We also expect it will transform chronic care, prevention, and waste.

This article is courtesy of Oliver Wyman and may be completed at this link.