June 13, 2024 – Liz Wolf
No longer science fiction, artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics are revolutionizing healthcare. Whether it’s robot-assisted surgeries or virtual nursing assistants, AI technology in medicine is the wave of the future.
In fact, global professional services company Accenture projects that 70 percent of healthcare workers’ tasks could be reinvented by technology augmentation (like AI) or automation.
Currently, one of the most significant ways that healthcare systems are utilizing AI is the decision-making process. AI can process large amounts of real-time data, detect patterns and generate insights. Healthcare administrators can analyze patient data, which comes from everywhere today, including sensors, mobile apps, medical devices and electronic health records.
Computers can recognize visual patterns quicker and better than most humans. With all this information available, healthcare systems can improve healthcare delivery, make administrative processes more efficient, and reduce costs.
Reinventing healthcare real estate
But that’s not all. AI is becoming a critical tool for determining where and how healthcare facilities are planned, designed and built including optimizing space utilization and site selection.
“AI is the topic du jour and everyone is focused on it,” says Alison Flynn Gaffney, Healthcare Division President for JLL Work Dynamics.
Using AI is particularly critical in today’s site selection with the movement away from large, on-campus medical facilities to outpatient clinics. Healthcare systems are expanding in the suburbs, closer to where patients live and work, and often in retail-like settings. Greater clarity on which locations will meet critical demographics will lead to improved outcomes.
Site selection can be tricky. AI can take some of the guesswork out
AI has the potential to quickly transform healthcare site selection by combining different data sets on population demographics, competitive providers and availability of talent, which is a huge issue as there’s a significant health workforce shortage in the U.S
The Association of the American Medical Colleges predicts a physician shortage of up to 124,000 physicians in the U.S. by 2034.
“One of the things AI can do is help identify quickly in what pockets and what markets have more nurses or physicians living there, because like any profession, people want a reduced commute if they’re having to go into work,” says Jacob Crawford, U.S. Healthcare Practice Lead, Avison Young.
Finding the right medical space in the right location at the right time
AI tools can help healthcare systems find optimal locations for medical facilities and pinpoint specifically which healthcare services — such as primary care, pediatrics, OB/GYN and urgent care — should be targeted for which sites.
Avison Young’s Location Intelligence for Healthcare tool can identify underserved demand for each clinical service line in every U.S. market, say Avison Young experts. Their proprietary AI tool helps predict patient demand for 30 medical services lines across 800,000 metro-area locations nationally, resulting in more than 22 million place-based recommendations for its clients.
“Site selection itself is completely being reinvented,” says Olivier Maene, Principal, Global Director, Product Management, Avison Young. “Rather than having a user make assumptions about what matters and what might not, ask AI and actually let the models do the work for you and unearth all the patterns that correlate with a certain kind of medical service.”
As an example of the type of insights that AI can help uncover, Avison Young used its location intelligence tool to research the best locations for orthopedics facilities in Phoenix. Perhaps, unsurprisingly, pickleball played a significant role in this research. Pickleball’s popularity is booming around the U.S., and it’s one of the most popular sports in Arizona. With U.S. participation rates skyrocketing by 86 percent year-over-year and 159 percent over three years, recent data shows a massive 90-fold surge in orthopedic fractures, with pickleball-related fractures doubling since 2020.
Avison Young was able to identify the unmet demand for orthopedic care around Phoenix and pinpoint locations where urgent care services are in highest demand.
Drilling down further
Once AI points to neighborhood locations, “the next step is bringing this from the neighborhood level to the building level as well, so we can tell our clients, ‘You’re not supposed to be in just neighborhood A, B or C, but based on your space needs and the kind of building you want to be in with certain amenitization and building qualities, this is where you should be,’” explains Maene.
Healthcare providers have very specific buildouts, so they may require certain column spacing or ceiling heights. “We can look for all those qualities in addition to all the demographic- and business-based requirements, and combine all those together in one user interface,” Maene continues.
“It speeds up the process tremendously, allows our brokers to look for availabilities in a much more narrowed-down playing field, and deliver services faster and more intelligently,” he adds.
AI isn’t meant to replace human work
The success of a clinic depends on more than the right mix of demographics and business factors. AI doesn’t undermine the human element but instead streamlines workflow and decreases the time spent on research.
“There’s still a last-mile element,” notes Crawford. AI cannot make final decisions for a healthcare system. AI tools help whittle down all the options in the marketplace and make reliable evaluations for better-informed decisions.
“AI is not a replacement for humans but a co-pilot with humans to analyze demographic data,” agrees Flynn Gaffney.
Using AI for spacing planning, facilities management
Healthcare systems can also apply AI to understand how and where a provider’s time is spent in a clinic or hospital and interpret that data to plan facility usage. Understanding how healthcare workers interact with their space through utilization tracking can help improve efficiency.
“Imagine the ability for the healthcare field to utilize AI as a co-pilot in creating spaces that are based on factors such as physician expertise and current patient load,” says Flynn Gaffney.
“There are systems around the country and the globe that are doubling down on this, with the awareness that the use of the tools needs to be safe, properly monitored and accurate,” explains Flynn Gaffney.
Putting those protocols in place – while adhering to compliance and data security — is top of mind for the healthcare industry, she adds.
AI can also be used in designing the aesthetics of a healthcare facility. From the exam rooms and surgical procedure rooms to the restrooms, healthcare systems can take a design and blueprints, feed that into AI, and as a generative learning opportunity, come out with different ideas based on patient and employee feedback surveys of what works and doesn’t work.
“AI is something that’s here. It has been here,” notes Flynn Gaffney. “We need to embrace it thoughtfully and safely and utilize it to create not only greater healing environments and a safer environment for our patients, but also for our caregivers.”
AI can also be used to improve maintenance efficiency of healthcare facilities. For example, JLL points to tools like Hank, which allows for real-time adjustments to HVAC systems, and Infogrid, which uses sensors to manage performance, improve cleanliness and maintenance, and track energy use and emissions. JLL also recently announced a new AI-powered facility management app called JLL Serve (Serve).