Thank you for Subscribing to Food Business Review Weekly Brief
As the world revolutionizes towards artificial intelligence (AI), we are also witnessing the mushrooming of Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) practices in every growing industry i.e. finance, manufacturing, agriculture, construction and the list continues on. While the healthcare sector has also stepped up with these advancements and grabbing every opportunity along the way for business expansions, it also benefits the management of patients especially in the critical care departments such as the Intensive Care Unit (ICU).
Being an ICU nurse in this digital era and juggling with the accolades of ESG in hindsight really sounds like an impossible daunting task to accomplish. However, AI is already making its way to be ingrained in human lives and people accelerating on ESG routines gradually but surely. For healthcare professionals, especially in the nursing community, we do focus on the positive impact of what we do onto our patients. By harmonizing AI into critical care management, nurses will definitely be able to magnify the drives for ESG. For instance, having an ICU set up with fully AI automated in a healthcare facility would provide more time for critical care nurses to focus on patients’ needs as well as their quality of care. Thus, reducing extensive paperwork and vast carbon footprintsEsg Strategies Must Be Weaved Into The Organizations And Should Be Part Of The Risk Management Assessment And Strategy In Enhancing Reputations With Patients, Employees, Investors, Analyst As Well As The Public
Depicting an article from PubMed Central titled “Artificial intelligence in critical illness and its impact on patient care: a comprehensive review” published online in April recently, AI algorithms have been created for specific real-time data analytics in distinguishing and predicting disease progressions which aids in complex decision-making thus offering personalised solutions to unique patients respectively.
A profound example is briefly noted in Vincent X. Liu’s paper on “The future of AI in critical care is augmented, not artificial, intelligence” whereby normalizing the AI in healthcare nomenclature would greatly secure positive results if engaging of these technologies equitably executed. Generally speaking, by executing a robust mechanism of AI application in the ICU, machine learning techniques must still be made as simple and user-friendly as possible which can never be cumbersome to use.
According to Society of Critical Care Medicine, annual critical care medicine costs increased 92%, from $56.6billion to $108billion. Intensive care unit (ICU) costs per day in the United States in 2010 were estimated to be $4300 per day, a 61% jump since the year 2000 cost per day of $2669. Echoing to this, a Malaysian teaching hospital required a longer length of ICU stay. This was based on a study done by Aung YN et.al in 2020 when they published in Value in Health Regional Issues. Longer ICU stay translates to higher mortality rates. Hence, implementations of strategies that can reduce the length of stay and hospital costs without compromising healthcare would be much applauded by stakeholders who look forward to generating wider profit margin. ESG strategies must be weaved into the organizations and should be part of the risk management assessment and strategy in enhancing reputations with patients, employees, investors, analyst as well as the public. A simple motion such as practising green building, going paperless and recycling wastes or reducing food wastes could easily decarbonize the healthcare sector, leading to decreasing greenhouse gas emissions. Being a responsible steward to our environment and with good data on hand, I believe many organizations will be able to tout on the key ESG initiatives in developing a more structured road map for future endeavours.
I have seen many ICUs in the country and the Middle East in my total 20 years of Nursing. With the bountiful growing initiatives of ESG and development of AI across the regions, there is immense room for improvement to be done in every ICUs and any healthcare facility around the world. Significant changes can only be made when organizations increase ESG reporting and execute meaningful ESG strategies using the accurate tools with the architecture of AI aspirations to achieve maximum equipment usability. It will be pretty interesting sight to imagine if these efforts came true