Fujitsu has unveiled a new healthcare solution designed to improve clinical decision-making, following a successful field trial with San Carlos Clinical Hospital in Madrid.
The solution has been developed on the back of the company’s in-depth research into applying advanced data analytics for healthcare applications. It has involved working in close collaboration with San Carlos Clinical Hospital’s expert clinicians, applying Fujitsu’s principles of co-creation to deliver tangible value in the field of mental healthcare. It deploys Fujitsu Laboratories’ state of the art anonymisation technologies and Fujitsu’s data analytics technologies, tailored to meet the specific needs of the local Spanish healthcare sector. The technology will form the basis of a new Health Application Programming Interface (API), to be deployed in the Fujitsu cloud or delivered locally in a private cluster or cloud.
This development represents an important step in the provision of advanced healthcare services, as Kunio Suzuki, director of Innovation, at Fujitsu Spain explains: “Our collaboration with the clinicians at San Carlos Clinical Hospital highlighted the importance of finding new ways to support the clinical decision-making process. In the future, our Health API will give clinicians immediate access to aggregated and integrated data, gathered from both clinical and non-clinical data sources. This information was previously only available in paper format, from a multiplicity of sources in different formats. During the field trial, we demonstrated that our solution could more than halve the time needed for clinicians to pre-screen patient records, giving them significantly more time to spend with the patients themselves. It is a very exciting development, with the potential for many additional applications, including training new doctors in this highly specialist field.”
The field trial took place over a 6-month period, involving senior mental health clinicians from San Carlos Clinical Hospital and a core database of over 36 000 anonymised patient records. Fujitsu leveraged this database to develop its Advanced Clinical Research Information System, based on its advanced artificial intelligence expertise including data analytics and semantic modelling. In the field trial, each of the clinicians looked at issues associated with the main diagnosis, any co-morbidities, potential risks from suicide, substance or alcohol abuse, and the patient history of using the healthcare system. Fujitsu’s system demonstrated a very high degree of risk assessment accuracy, with the system accelerating and systemising the verification of key clinical data and identification of existing clinical problems. It achieved results of over 85% to identify suicide, alcohol and drug abuse risk.
Dr Julio Mayol, Chief Medical & Innovation Officer of San Carlos Clinical Hospital, believes that Fujitsu’s Health API has the potential to revolutionise the clinical decision-making process. “We gained real value from this project with Fujitsu, and are now in the process of scaling and rolling out the solution to provide access to more psychiatrists in the hospital. It is essential for clinicians to understand the potential health risks associated with a given patient, in order to be able to prescribe the appropriate treatment. This involves taking into account the patient’s medical history as well as their current situation, requiring comprehensive health risk and diagnosis assessments. This critical activity is conducted daily by more than 250 000 clinicians across Spain. The ability to integrate information from different departments, for example from the emergency department, in-patient services and the mental health department, gives us an immediate total view. This is achieved in seconds compared to hours beforehand, leaving our hard-pressed doctors with much more time to treat patients.”
Open innovation and co-creation represent essential elements in Fujitsu’s objective of applying advanced data analytics to create a truly integrated healthcare solution, as Dr Tsuneo Nakata, CEO of Fujitsu Laboratories of Europe concludes: “Working collaboratively with San Carlos Clinical Hospital has allowed us to accelerate the innovation process and achieve important results, solving real-world problems much more quickly and efficiently. The field trial’s success has been key to developing the new Health API, demonstrating how the R&D and innovation process can be transformed rapidly into a tangible business solution. We will continue to enhance the technology behind the Health API, showing how our advanced artificial intelligence expertise can be deployed in state of the art solutions that benefit society.”