Bringing AI to healthcare

More than 60% of deaths in the US happen in an acute care hospital. This predictive model helps the Palliative Care team to be engaged early enough to ensure meaningful services.

Although number of palliative service teams are at an all time high (67% of US hospitals have such teams), only 50% of patients in need of palliative care, receive service. The reason for the gap is two fold. First, physicians may not refer patients to palliative care for reasons of overoptimism, time pressures, or treatment inertia. Second, there isn't sufficient capacity to proactively identify candidate patients via manual chart review, an expensive and time-consuming process. This leads to patients experiencing end of life discomfort.

This particular study, uses data from EHR to accurately predict patients who may need palliative care. Most hospitals in US now have 10-20 years of Electronic Health Record (EHR or EMR). It is becoming increasingly possible to harness the EHR data to aid healthcare and a study like this is a demonstration of the possibilities that lie ahead.

Nov 28, 2017: "A New Algorithm Identifies Candidates for Palliative Care by Predicting When Patients Will Die" - MIT Tech Review