Is it an Emergency? Patient-Facing Triage Platform Predicts Need for Healthcare from Home
Researchers at MCIRCC and Michigan Medicine have developed an artificial intelligence-based platform that helps patients make informed decisions about their healthcare long before they leave the house.
ANN ARBOR — When symptoms arise, it can sometimes be difficult for patients to determine what kind of medical care they should seek. Should they make an appointment with their doctor, visit an urgent care center, or go directly to the emergency department (ED)?
It is a situation that is very familiar to Prashant Mahajan, M.D., professor of Emergency Medicine, of Pediatric Emergency Medicine, and of Pediatrics, as well as vice chair of the Department of Emergency Medicine. “Nationally, as well as in my personal experience, 40% of ED visits can be avoided,” he notes. “However, patients do not know when, and if, they need to use the ED instead of primary or urgent care. There is a lack of tools geared toward them to help them make that decision.”
Empowering patients to make informed choices about their healthcare became the impetus behind HealthIntel, an artificial intelligence-based platform developed by Dr. Mahajan and a team of MCIRCC data scientists and physicians from the Michigan Medicine departments of Emergency Medicine and Pediatric Emergency Medicine.
Stemming from Dr. Mahajan’s prior work in developing clinically meaningful prediction rules to assist ED clinicians, HealthIntel serves as a user’s at-home guide to their personal healthcare. After creating a secure profile on the HealthIntel web application, the user inputs their daily symptoms and vital signs (heart rate, temperature, and pulse ox) using FDA-approved devices. The platform then analyzes this data and provides the patient with a “no-touch” personalized risk stratification status. This gives the patient an idea regarding their disease severity and advises them on their “next best health action”—i.e. their need for emergency versus primary care.
"Patients do not know when, and if, they need to use the ED instead of primary or urgent care. There is a lack of tools geared toward them to help them make that decision."
Prashant Mahajan, MD
What enables HealthIntel to weave a plan of action from a complex tangle of data is its use of sophisticated health informatics tools, including machine learning and natural language processing, trained on an extensive dataset from emergency departments around the country. This is an aspect of the project that MCIRCC’s own Data Science Team is heavily involved in. Sardar Ansari, PhD, a research assistant professor in the Department of Emergency Medicine and the Data Science Team’s director, explains that leveraging these tools ensures not only a high degree of accuracy, but also consistency: “The data that HealthIntel’s users input comes through as unstructured text. We had to find a way of mapping that text to these different datasets,” says Dr. Ansari. “This approach helps address inconsistencies between EDs and how they code different physiologic variables and symptoms.”
While a large part of HealthIntel’s focus is on the patient, its benefits also extend to the greater healthcare system by helping to divert avoidable ED visits to alternative sites of care that may be more timely, efficient, and appropriate. This allows on-site physicians to focus only on the most critical cases within their centers. Also, when patients present their HealthIntel-generated results to their physicians, that data can then be used to inform more accurate diagnoses and reduce harm from unnecessary and inappropriate therapies or interventions.
Currently, HealthIntel’s main use case is for COVID-19, but Dr. Mahajan and his team are now building disease signatures for flu and “long-COVID”, as well as symptom specific signatures such as chest pain and headache. A HealthIntel mobile application has already been developed, and the team is collaborating with various wellness platforms, insurance companies, and device makers for future implementation.
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Disclosures
The HealthIntel platform is licensed to EMPOWR-ME LLC (d/b/a HealthIntel). Prashant Mahajan is the founder and CEO of EMPOWR ME LLC. and has an equity position in the company. The University of Michigan also has an equity position in HealthIntel. To learn more, visit www.healthintel.ai.
About MCIRCC
The team at the Michigan Center for Integrative Research in Critical Care (MCIRCC) is dedicated to pushing the leading edge of research to develop new technologies and novel therapies for the most critically ill and injured patients. Through a unique formula of innovation, integration, and entrepreneurship, their multi-disciplinary teams of health providers, basic scientists, engineers, and data scientists, commercialization coaches, donors and industry partners are taking a boundless approach on re-imagining every aspect of critical care medicine. For more information, visitwww.mcircc.umich.edu.