This article was originally published on Forbes, authored by Nitin Rakesh, CEO and Executive Director, Mphasis

Late last year, the head of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Robert Redfield, cautioned that the next few months will be some of "the most difficult in the public health history of this nation."

His warning came on the heels of a sharp increase in the number of daily reported deaths in mid-December, along with a parallel increase in the number of admissions and infections.

Against this somber backdrop, there is some welcome news. A recent survey of healthcare decision-makers by Intel revealed that the proportion of respondents who are either currently using or will use AI to improve healthcare outcomes has nearly doubled since the onset of the pandemic.

This is a significant development. The willingness to embrace it has undoubtedly been fueled by the urgency the pandemic has occasioned, but it is a trend I believe is here to stay. Why do I say that? As a seasoned, customer-driven industry leader, I have witnessed firsthand the remarkable improvements AI has helped deliver to our clients across verticals. The technology’s success stems from its stellar ability to provide companies three powerful capabilities: smart data, contextual insights and the extrication of structured and unstructured data across formats and file types.

In the context of healthcare, AI cannot only enable predictive analytics for early intervention - a crucial function in times of crisis - it can also support clinical decision-making and empower more holistic patient care by leveraging collaboration across multiple specialists.

Let us take a look at how some players in the tech and healthcare space have leveraged AI to improve patient health outcomes and why this has relevance to what others can do to help save lives during the current crisis and beyond.

Consider, for example, Israeli startup Vocalis Health. The company’s proprietary AI technology enables the emotional analysis of vocal intonations, irrespective of language, in real time. By extracting acoustic features from a speaker’s voice, the startup is able to provide granular insights on different aspects of the speaker’s health, including health conditions, overall well-being and emotional understanding.

The startup’s internal database has grown to include many labeled patient records, correlated with their medical reports and investigations.

By using its patented AI algorithms, Vocalis Health has come up with vocal biomarkers that provide non-intrusive, continuous and scalable information into patients’ health. During the Covid-19 pandemic, the company launched an initiative to discover vocal biomarkers that can procure insights on the symptoms and early detection of the coronavirus infection. The initiative’s objective is to correlate the voice of an individual with the symptoms of Covid-19 using AI to help correctly identify, treat and prevent the spread of infection.

Elsewhere, scores of companies are considering the deployment of AI to accelerate and improve patient outcomes. Consider, for example, Swiss pharma firm Novartis. Its social arm, the Novartis Foundation, is working alongside São Paulo's government to create "a national ecosystem" that leverages data science, AI and innovation for better health.

One of the first steps this partnership took consisted of developing an "AI nucleus" at the country’s largest hospital, the São Paulo University Hospital. This then paved the way for the creation of an AI-enabled platform dedicated to helping its hospital staff treat and diagnose Covid-19.

In its first few months of operation, the solution looked at 10,000-plus images of lungs to identify 70% of them as positive for the Covid-19 infection. In having access to a huge database of images from hospitals across Brazil, the platform is uniquely placed to identify patterns related to Covid-19.

Covid-19 has shaken up what we knew, and one lesson it has taught us all is to look beyond what has typically worked across domains. AI shows promise in the healthcare space to help providers and payers correctly identify hidden patterns and trends and thus help improve and save lives.

When we work alongside our customers on strategies to help them employ AI algorithms within their healthcare operations, we see industry leaders ensuring they have a solid data strategy in place. The use of AI is simply a means to "listen" to the data there is effectively and deriving insights that may have not been apparent without the use of technology.

Technology partnerships have the capacity to assist health care payers and providers in the analysis of data strategies as well as with transformation deployment. Equally, access to appropriate talent to facilitate cultural change and collaboration across client organizations is key. This includes putting in place teams that can collaborate to prioritize the most impactful uses of data to enhance the healthcare space. These are purposeful investments that will set organizations up for business success, as well as facilitate global impact in improving health through the use of enterprise AI.