As an intern for H2O.ai, I am amazed to see how instrumental AI has been in transforming people’s lives for the better. Especially in healthcare, AI is bringing increased efficiency, ease, and helping people lead healthier lives. In this blog, I learned about how AI is helping potential patients find the right specialist for their needs and preferences.

Finding the right specialist is the first step to receiving the right care. However, sometimes it can be daunting to navigate the healthcare system. For instance, it can be difficult to know who to approach for different health situations. Receiving a referral for a specialist from a primary physician is simply not enough. Do you rely on a google search to find a specialist that fits your needs? Or do you ask your neighbors who happen to know someone with similar symptoms?  It can be a long process until you find the right specialist who can accurately treat you while also providing a satisfactory patient experience.

ArmadaHealth is a health data science  and services company that was founded to help people access the right physician or expert for them. They consider knowledge from consumers and experts to deliver objective and accurate matches for consumers. The company applies sentiment analysis  on customer reviews and advanced analysis of experts’ wisdom to make critical medical decisions.

ArmadaHealth uses H2O Driverless AI , an automatic machine learning platform, to build and train a Natural Language Processing  (NLP) model to identify the sentiment in each customer review. They look at three main aspects in each review: treatment outcome, communication, and attitude. These three aspects are critical to finding the best expert that matches customer preferences.

H2O Driverless AI is an essential part of reaching the company’s goal of delivering accurate patient-expert matches. Driverless AI is key to understanding characteristics derived from the data, not to mention that the NLP features and interpretability features make it easier to understand sentiment. Driverless AI is also very easy to use and allows the company to reach its goal quicker. In fact, Bharat Sudharsan, Director of Data Science at ArmadaHealth, emphasizes that “if you had to traditionally build models, you would have to bring in a team of PhDs and work on it for months together. Now we are able to reach the same level of results if not better.”

Instead of relying on opinions and traditional methods of finding a medical expert, customers can now depend on objective data-driven decisions generated by machine learning and NLP techniques in order to receive the best possible care and outcome.

It’s interesting to see how AI is helping improve and even save people’s lives. Other companies like ArmadaHealth are also using AI to improve lives.

Check out how the Reproductive Science Center of SF is using AI .