Earlier this year I wrote about some interesting applications of big data and AI to improve hospital admissions. The Assistance Publique-Hôpitaux de Paris (AP-HP) hospital group have analyzed ten years worth of data on hospital admissions, flu rates, weather and so on by its Trusted Analytics Platform (TAP). The aim is to better predict hospital admissions, and therefore better route people to the best facility.
TAP is an open source platform that uses machine learning to help analysis of data. The AP-HP project is the first to use the platform for time series analysis, but should the project be successful, it will be rolled out across all of the 44 hospitals in the group.
The system aims to provide admissions staff with accurate predictions up to 15 days in advance, thus hopefully providing sufficient warning to allow suitable staffing and other resources to be on hand in periods of high demand.
Swift response
Of course, predicting admissions is one thing, but firstly the first responders have to get to patients as quickly as they possibly can. A new app has been developed to help first responders get to cardiac arrest victims up to 3 minutes before emergency services arrive, thus potentially increasing survival rates by 30%.
The EHRA First Responder App was created by the European Heart Rhythm Association (EHRA), a registered branch of the European Society of Cardiology (ESC).
“Sudden cardiac arrest is lethal within minutes if left untreated,” the team say. “In Europe, the emergency services arrive around nine minutes after a cardiac arrest. Every minute earlier raises the probability of survival by 10% and reduces the risk of brain injury, which starts four minutes after cardiac arrest.”
The developers reveal that CPR is conducted by bystanders in just 30-60% of cardiac attacks outside of a hospital. The new app was designed to increase this and uses GPS technology to located trained ‘app rescuers’. It aims to automatically direct them to the scene of a cardiac arrest, with the team hoping to get them to the scene within 3-4 minutes of the arrest being reported.
The app has already been tested in Germany, where approximately 600 app rescuerers were signed up to the platform. They were able to arrive on the scene of a cardiac arrest roughly 3 minutes before the emergency services. Roughly 70% of these volunteers had medical training.
The next step is to recruit emergency dispatch units across Germany to connect up to the app so that they can start tapping into this network of first responders.
“The software has a standard interface and can be easily connected to most emergency alert systems in Europe in just a few steps,” the team say. “We provide insurance for app users and we have a guarantee of data security from the German Department for Data Security in Schleswig-Holstein.”
“Ultimately we will roll the app out across Europe. We hope to raise bystander resuscitation rates to 70-90% and for cardiac arrest patients to be resuscitated in three to four minutes on average,” they conclude.
