Digital Twin – The Health Care Blog

Who Needs Humans, Anyway?

Jun 5, 2024

By KIM BELLARD

Imagine my excitement when I saw the headline: “Robot doctors at world’s first AI hospital can treat 3,000 a day.” Finally, I thought – now we’re getting somewhere. I must admit that my enthusiasm was somewhat tempered to find that the patients were virtual. But, still.

The article was in Interesting Engineering, and it largely covered the source story in Global Times, which interviewed the research team leader Yang Liu, a professor at China’s Tsinghua University, where he is executive dean of Institute for AI Industry Research (AIR) and associate dean of the Department of Computer Science and Technology. The professor and his team just published a paper detailing their efforts.

The paper describes what they did: “we introduce a simulacrum of hospital called Agent Hospital that simulates the entire process of treating illness. All patients, nurses, and doctors are autonomous agents powered by large language models (LLMs).” They modestly note: “To the best of our knowledge, this is the first simulacrum of hospital, which comprehensively reflects the entire medical process with excellent scalability, making it a valuable platform for the study of medical LLMs/agents.”

In essence, “Resident Agents” randomly contract a disease, seek care at the Agent Hospital, where they are triaged and treated by Medical Professional Agents, who include 14 doctors and 4 nurses (that’s how you can tell this is only a simulacrum; in the real world, you’d be lucky to have 4 doctors and 14 nurses). The goal “is to enable a doctor agent to learn how to treat illness within the simulacrum.”

The Agent Hospital has been compared to the AI town developed at Stanford last year, which had 25 virtual residents living and socializing with each other. “We’ve demonstrated the ability to create general computational agents that can behave like humans in an open setting,” said Joon Sung Park, one of the creators. The Tsinghua researchers have created a “hospital town.”

Gosh, a healthcare system with no humans involved. It can’t be any worse than the human one. Then, again, let me know when the researchers include AI insurance company agents in the simulacrum; I want to see what bickering ensues.

Accepting your Future Avatar: Leveraging Digital Twins for Transforming Healthcare

Dec 29, 2022

by SMRITI KIRUBANANDAN

A possibility to do better and be better by observing yourself (your twin) reacting to various feeds and gaining the ability to gain better care and improve research, seems like a super power. The concept of a Digital Twin is the ability to replicate a person, an object or a process derived from extracting various data points from internet of things (IOT) that are attached to the original object. One can view how the digital twin responds to various feeds and give us a deeper understanding on the possibilities and impact for the real person or object. Shifting this concept into healthcare, I am going to take this up a notch and propose, what if a person has an opportunity to accept their future avatar presented to them and it is reflected and implemented immediately?

As per Research and Markets report

Up to 89% of all IoT platforms will include digital twins by 2025
Digital twinning will be a standard IoT feature by 2027
Nearly 36% of executives across a variety of industries understand the benefits of digital twinning, with about half of them planning to use it in their operations by 2028

Here are some of the ways a Digital Twin would play a role in making healthcare accurate, smart and reliable while greatly improving member experience:

Delivering the right Frequency of Care

In the United States, 400,000 hospital patients experience some form of preventable harm each year, accounting for a cost of over $20 billion annually.

Giving the proper care at the right time is vital in improving patient experience and the quality of care, and reducing healthcare costs. By using the digital twin concept, we can replicate the process, understand a person’s reactions to different treatments, and help customize the frequency of care needed. That might include understanding and getting more precise with the medication doses based on the Twin’s reactions or refining a type of surgical procedure based on possible recovery and impact. It might inspire a patient to make the right decisions based on the digital twin at the right time. Accepting their future avatar might give a patient hope and psychological comfort before starting a treatment or procedure and, most importantly, could build trust with their provider.