Identifying opportunities for AI applications in healthcare — Renewing the national healthcare and social services

A vast variety of artificial intelligence techniques have been deployed to specific healthcare problems during the last thirty years with varying levels of success while there is a shortage of systematic matching of AI capabilities with the breadth of application opportunities. In this paper, we describe the process of identifying opportunities for deploying artificial intelligence to healthcare and social services on regional and national levels in Finland. The project involved a large number of stakeholders from a variety of backgrounds ranging from governmental agencies to entrepreneurs. The process described includes idea generation of an application or solution and its elaboration in workshops using a design thinking method. The resulting idea pool was filtered down to 34 best use case descriptions, which went through an architectural design process identifying AI capabilities needed in the components of these designs reported in this paper. The potential ones of the use cases were selected for prototype development. The subsequent steps in the process include feasibility prototypes and evaluation of the economic and business value of the solutions and applications.