Interviews & Features

Healthcare is a rapidly growing field and the need for skilled, compassionate professionals is expected to accelerate in the next decade. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the demand for healthcare and related technical jobs is expected to grow 13 percent between 2021 and 2031.

While some bioinformaticians spend their entire careers working on highly specific programs or applications in limited fields, others spend much of their time in communication between the fields they combine: biology and computer science. One such individual is Danny Arends, PhD, an assistant professor at the University of Northumbria in Newcastle upon Tyne in the north of England.

Hospitals have added more than half a million jobs nationwide over the past decade. Just in the past year, hospital employment grew by 152,000, or about 3 percent, Bureau of Labor Statistics data shows. The U.S. population is growing and aging, and people are living longer.

To say that NLP has been a hot topic of 2023 would be an understatement. When OpenAI released ChatGPT—the first open-source generative AI model—it launched a paradigm shift in the tech world. Companies like Google, Amazon, and Meta were sent scrambling to the drawing boards to conjure up their own versions.

In 2005, TCGA sought to collect and analyze large-scale genomic data from thousands of tumor samples across multiple cancer types. The project focused on characterizing the genetic mutations, gene expression patterns, and epigenetic modifications in cancer cells.

The digital revolution in the health sector has long promised a future of a smoother, faster healthcare system: a new reality where hospitals’ clinical workflow will be streamlined, where interactions with insurance companies will be automated, and spreadsheets and fax machines will become relics of the past.

The concept of patient privacy is at least as old as the Hippocratic Oath, fragments of which date back to the third century. Today, it is as relevant as ever. Not only does privacy remain fundamental to patient-provider trust, but it’s also taken on new meanings. Health apps, fitness trackers, and electronic health records (EHRs) are all part of an explosion of health-related technology that, unified by the internet, has created a torrent of personal health data stored in various states of security.

Virtual reality simulations, augmented reality tools, and advanced medical software are driving transformation in medicine, offering hands-on experiences that allow students to practice complex procedures and develop sound judgment without real-world consequences. This educational technology cultivates confidence and proficiency and deepens understanding of patient care nuances.

For more than 4,000 years, humans have been keeping medical records. Everything from examinations, treatment plans, outcomes, and follow-ups have been charted on papyrus, tablets, and ancient books. In more modern times, paper charts have been the gold standard till they were replaced with electronic health records (EHRs) in 2011. These records have served individually to care for individual patients and aggregately to inform decisions system wide.

As artificial intelligence (AI) has become more advanced in recent years, technologists and healthcare professionals have noticed many opportunities for AI-based tools to improve the healthcare industry.