HealthTap, which calls itself the “world’s first global health practice,” is moving deeper into virtual care by introducing an artificial-intelligence engine to triage cases automatically.
Tuesday, Palo Alto, California-based HealthTap is launching Doctor A.I. It’s an AI-powered system that has been trained by clinical knowledge collected from the 104,000 physicians and millions of patients on the HealthTap network.
Doctor A.I. is, as the six-year-old company said, “trained in the art of digital empathy.” It scans the patient’s existing medical record, then takes a history. As patients enter their symptoms and answer a series of questions in a conversational format, the Doctor A.I. system applies clinical expertise from the vast HealthTap database to recommend proper care.
“We have created a triage tool to direct [patients] to the right level of care for them,” HealthTap CEO Ron Gutman said. It is designed to take some of the confusion out of self-triage when people check their symptoms online.
“You go to the Internet and you go from having a headache to a brain tumor in four clicks or less,” Gutman said, only half-jokingly.
Instead of letting people fret the possibility of having a life-threatening condition, Doctor A.I. is designed to present a series of treatment options. “We will direct people to the ER if it’s likely someone is having an emergency,” Gutman said. But the system also will recommend against a physician visit if it is a minor health issue.
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
“The cost of unnecessary doctor visits in the U.S. today is in the hundreds of millions,” Gutman said. He did note, though, that the technology is available worldwide.
HealthTap is offering several levels of service for Doctor A.I. For consumers, there is a basic, free option. Enterprise customers, including employers, health systems, physician practices and payers, can opt for a premium service that connects to patient records in HealthTap’s cloud.
Here’s a video from the company demonstrating the new system:
https://vimeo.com/198739350
Image: HealthTap
