In what could be viewed as a significant achievement, an AI warning app has helped hospitals save fatalities by upto 26%.
Imagine being admitted to hospital after being bitten by an animal and suffering from fever. The doctors have attended you and given you the treatment. Now what’s left is the rest part.
UNTIL….
An alarm system goes by and alerts the nurses who finds out that your WBC are way above the normal parameters.
Thats exactly what happened in real life. A patient admitted to St. Michael’s Hospital in downtown Toronto due to cat bite and a fever didn’t showed any other signs of complains. However, an early alert from an AI app compelled the nurses to check for other warning signs. Upon immediate blood test they found that the patient’s WBC count was way high due to a condition called cellulitis, a dangerous bacterial skin infection which can lead to amputations and even death if not dealt quickly.
But luckily for this patient, the app alerted the nurses and staff way before the symptoms would have appeared in the blood report on the next day as the nurses take blood samples in afternoon only.
The patient was quickly given a dosage of antibiotics that prevented any serious condition which could have become a reality if traditional supersvision method would have been followed only. This is one of the incident where the app Chartwatch prevented fatality.
The study published in Canadian Medical Association Journal was done between Nov. 1, 2020, to June 1, 2022 between 13 649 patient admissions in General Internal Medicine ward and 8470 patient admissions in subspecialty units.
The AI app name is Chartwatch and is made by the in-house team of Unity Health AI who has put more than 50 AI tools for healthcare into practice till now.