Inside a bustling unit at St. Michael’s Hospital in downtown Toronto, one of Shirley Bell’s patients was suffering from a cat bite and a fever, but otherwise appeared fine — until an alert from an AI-based early warning system showed he was sicker than he seemed.
While the nursing team usually checked blood work around noon, the technology flagged incoming results several hours beforehand. That warning showed the patient’s white blood cell count was “really, really high,” recalled Bell, the clinical nurse educator for the hospital’s general medicine program.
The cause turned out to be cellulitis, a bacterial skin infection. Without prompt treatment, it can lead to extensive tissue damage, amputations and even death. Bell said the patient was given antibiotics quickly to avoid those worst-case scenarios, in large part thanks to the team’s in-house AI technology, dubbed Chartwatch.
“There’s lots and lots of other scenarios where patients’ conditions are flagged earlier, and the nurse is alerted earlier, and interventions are put in earlier,” she said. “It’s not replacing the nurse at the bedside; it’s actually enhancing your nursing care.”
Ok, so Lifelabs posts patient lab results online for them to see. They CLEARLY mark “high” and “low” for items that are out of range (of the norm).
A nurse would quite literally crosscheck 50 blood markers in a matter of seconds, without the need for expensive AI or at a risk of them losing their job/qualifications.
In this specific case, the fever + high WBC would be more than enough for a nurse to know that something was up. It makes me think that adding AI just adds another step.
I’m not saying that the application of AI to detect abnormalities is wasteful, but I do think it’s unnecessary and possibly a negative in the context of basic lab work.
Yes, but also a nurse has bazillion other things to do. That’s probably why, as the CBC journalist reports, “the nursing team usually checked blood work around noon”. So even though it costs a second to do, it’s done was done once a day. Now it’s done continuously because it’s an alert system instead of something the nurse has keep an eye on.
Sure, there’s another computation step. But that’s cheap. Nurse time is the bottleneck. From the POV of a nursing team, before, there was a step (check blood pressure at noon), now there are no steps. They replaced a process of checking some numbers with an automated metric-based alarm. This is textbook operations process optimization, great for everyone involved.
I understand the optimisation. The hospitals must be happy, but if I were a nurse (or doctor), this would make me nervous.
Any good healthcare professional would still want to look over the results, even if an obvious flag wasn’t raised.
To me, it’s just good practice (as a patient).
Or maybe they still do, and this system is simply a reducency safety check.