King Faisal Hospital, Kigali has deployed artificial intelligence in its emergency department to improve patient care through reducing the time taken in diagnosing patients.

The technology is in an online platform, dubbed Medikta, a health tool based on artificial intelligence designed to support the decision making of nursing staff during diagnosis to reduce the time spent during the process as well as increase the quality of assistance that they offer to the patients.

How it works

When a patient comes for consultation, a nurse uses the tool to interview the patient, suggesting a series of simple questions and the system uses the information to come up with a list of possible pre-diagnoses as well as the level of urgency of the patient’s situation.

The information is immediately accessed by doctors, and by the time the patient comes to them, the doctors already know a lot concerning the diagnosis of the patients’ situation.

The system’s process takes about ten minutes, though it may vary depending on the patient’s speed in answering the questions.

According to medics, the technology rests on three pillars: Artificial intelligence, Natural language recognition and Machine Learning (ability to improve its intuition on a case by case basis). The platform learns from every interaction, developing an advanced intuition after 1.5 million of symptom evaluations in 204 countries, similar to those of six medical professionals with 40 years of experience.

Jordi Jane, a health informatics medic from Barcelona, Spain, is in the country to teach local medics as well as other staff how to use the technology.

In an interview with The New Times, yesterday, Jane said the system will help the healthcare practitioners "to be able to streamline as much as possible the process of care for the patients” and ensure that the patients that come to the hospital are attended to as soon as possible.

He said that the platform has gone through clinical trials in hospitals in Barcelona, San Carlos, and Madrid in Spain.

At King Faisal Hospital, Kigali the platform will start to be implemented today (Friday).

The Mediktor’s platform is said to have a success rate of more than 91 per cent in pre-diagnosis.

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