About 150 distinct AI and automation tools can be used to improve healthcare, predict cancer risk and optimize medical resources.

A university hospital in Singapore has announced that it is using AI to shorten hospital patients’ length of stay, assist in identifying breast cancer, optimize bed allocation and other important operational functions.

The National University Health System (NUHS) is using its ENDEAVOUR AI platform to enhance the future of healthcare through the use of data analytics and AI to support the integration of real-time medical data from the country’s Electronic Medical Record (EMR) systems.

With this platform, multiple complex AI tools are integrated to provide aggregated predictions and visualization of insights, enhancing patient care and services.

Said Associate Professor Ngiam Kee Yuan, Group Chief Technology Officer, NUHS: “Healthcare institutions aggregate vast quantities of data, but most of the data collected is only analyzed retrospectively,” but with the AI platform, data can be used to improve healthcare practices and outcomes through proactive and predictive analytics. This can in turn enable clinical practitioners to make faster, more accurate diagnoses and precise treatments.

Endeavoring to heal better with data

NUHS plans to deploy as many as 150 distinct AI and automation tools as microservices on their ENDEAVOUR AI platform.

These AI tools incorporate multi-domain patient information such as demographics, text, images, lab data, and prescription information to provide a synthesis of a patient’s condition. This translates into significant cost savings—from formulating a patient’s care plan at admission, to predicting a patient’s length of stay—to optimize scarce bed resources.

For breast cancer treatments, the NUHS platform can be used to improve detection rates and predict breast cancer risks in female patients, regardless of the reason for admission.

According to a spokesman for the firm supplying the AI and analytics technology, TIBCO Software Inc stream data in real time and feeding live data into the platform’s AI models can produce actionable insights on the fly.

Said Erich Gerber, the firm’s Senior Vice President (APJ and EMEA): “Healthcare’s digital future looks promising as patients become more comfortable using digital services for complex and sensitive issues.”