Even though most healthcare facilities have now switched to a digital platform for storing their patient records, they still encounter practical problems with the processing of medical reports. These reports are still too often consisting of unstructured textual descriptions, which is purely descriptive and not standardized, making it a huge task to extract the right data and utilize it effectively. Since the hospitals’ databases are filled with such text reports from countless patient visits and clinical interventions, the work needed to review and interpret these reports in order to assign the correct medical codes to it, is tremendous.
Tiro.Health, a partner of InspireHealth, got the request from a large Belgian hospital to work out an innovative solution to convert procedure data from the medical reports into standardized SNOMED-CT codes. Given the 300,000+ possible SNOMED codes, this process is notoriously time-consuming, prone to errors, and frankly, a nightmare for the medical staff to do. Since artificial intelligence is perfectly suited to perform repetitive tasks with high performance, this case was perfectly suited to address with this technology!
Sophie Vercruyssen from Inspirehealth joined forces with Tiro.Health to develop an innovative solution to optimize the processing of the medical data available in the digital patient records. They created a tool that automates the conversion of medical descriptions into SNOMED-CT codes within an Excel environment. In addition, it offers the staff an easy look-up tool for SNOMED-CT codes. This not only aligns perfectly with the hospital's application ecosystem but also significantly reduces manual labor.
After this project, the hospital was very pleased to see that lots of cumbersome and error-prone manual labor can easily be automated by an intelligent application. The ability to combine medical expertise with smart application development made the outcome a perfect fit for the medical staff in the hospital. The hospital is now considering possible extensions of the product for other use-cases
Tiro.Health is a young startup in Ghent that focuses on building solutions to structure medical notes immediately at the time of creation. They are experts in medical data and artificial intelligence for clinical purposes. They aim to help hospitals speed up their medical reporting with standardized forms and generation of structured data to obtain instant insights..
Medical data harmonization
Medical data exchange