There’s a lot of buzz around the potential for AI to make a significant contribution on the clinical side of healthcare in the future, but there’s no shortage of organizations who are taking advantage of it now for a mix of clinical and non-clinical purposes.
For example, take population health management and patient recruitment. Health Quest, a four-hospital nonprofit system operating in New York’s Mid-Hudson Valley and northwestern Connecticut, recently signed an agreement with IBM Watson Health to start matching its patients to clinical trials for which they may be eligible, after beginning to work with IBM Watson early in the year on a program to help with population health management.
On the population health side, the group tapped IBM Watson to help them develop better real-time patient data to meet quality-based performance benchmarks, and according to Dr. Glenn Loomis, Chief Medical Operations Officer at Health Quest, “That success led us to start evaluating other ways that we could use the technology to become more efficient and effective. One area that we felt would be an easy win for us was clinical trial matching. That refers to using the program (including natural language processing) to look through the medical records of cancer patients and determine what cancer trial they are a best match for.”
Health Quest’s old model, Loomis explained, was difficult and time consuming and required Health Quest to pay nurses to spend hours going through medical records and trial information, trying to determine which patients were the best fit for trials that were recruiting. Even if the nurses were successful in that endeavor, they were only qualifying patients for the trials they were aware of.
Now, said Loomis, “the clinical trial software will allow us to qualify more patients for more trials, and do it in a much timelier manner. We will also be matching them to the best possible trial for their particular cancer and for their particular circumstance. Some of those trials will be within our own organization and some may be trials that we are not offering. Regardless, we are looking for the trial that will provide each patient with the best possible treatment available and give them the best chance for an optimal outcome.”
The AI solution, called Watson for Clinical Trial Matching, is a cognitive computing system programmed to match patients to trials for which they may be eligible. Information on patients can be input, along with a complete catalog of all available trials and their inclusion/exclusion criteria. The system will then report the best available trial for that patient.
“At one time, many clinical trials were only available to patients at large hospitals and healthcare centers in major urban areas,” said Loomis. “We are very excited about the ability to now offer this same level of care to patients in the mid-Hudson Valley.”