Doctors across India can now access an AI clinical decision support tool from Apollo Hospitals.

Last year, the hospital chain launched the Apollo Clinical Intelligence Engine (CIE), a self-learning engine that analyses symptoms, determines causes, and helps recommend the best course of action. 

The technology, which is built, maintained, and periodically reviewed by an in-house team of over 500 Apollo doctors and specialists, is capable of analysing huge amounts of data – it has over 1,300 conditions and 800 symptoms in its vocabulary at present – to help identify patterns that may be otherwise missed by manual diagnoses. 

Built using four decades worth of hospital data, the CIE is touted as one of the largest connected health data lakes in the world. The platform also stays abreast of the development in the medical field – in 2022 alone, it took into consideration over 600,000 findings from clinical studies released that year. 

Designed specifically for the South Asian population, the CIE is now available to doctors outside Apollo Hospitals via the Apollo 24|7 platform.

WHY IT MATTERS

The decision to make the CIE open to doctors outside Apollo Hospitals was made as it immediately realised "tangible improvements" in diagnosis, doctor productivity and patient satisfaction after it was launched months back.

Over 4,000 Apollo doctors have seen a "considerable impact in their diagnosis outcomes" using the technology, which has also become a part of their routine OPD operations, according to Sangita Reddy, joint managing director.

"The CIE could not be restricted to Apollo but needed to be shared with doctors across India. I am therefore happy to offer the Apollo CIE to every qualified, practising doctor in India I am sure that together, we will be able to make Indians healthier through timely and more accurate diagnosis independent of geographical, regional or income divides," said Apollo Hospitals Chairman Dr Prathap C. Reddy.

THE LARGER TREND

The CIE is one of the latest innovations in medical AI that Apollo Hospitals has been working on in recent years. In 2021, the hospital chain unveiled the Apollo Cardiovascular Disease Risk tool, which was developed using 10 years' worth of patient data. This AI tool has been integrated with ConnectedLife's platform, enabling the latter to provide near real-time, continuous, longitudinal wellness and health data. 

The hospital chain has also ventured into mixed-reality technology to improve patient education. Last year, it launched the Apollo ProHealthDeepX which uses the Microsoft HoloLens 2 to show how a patient's risk factors for CVD affect their heart through mixed reality. It also generates their cardiac risk score using the same AI CVD risk tool.