Affordable health care is benefiting from AI

A set of screens across the wall display rapidly moving figures that are tracking health care information and service being provided to thousands of patients. This is the mission control centre of healthtech company CallHealth based in Hyderabad’s Gachibowli neighbourhood. The control centre allows the company to monitor and assess realtime information. 

The young company led by an experienced team delivers a doctor consultation every 30 minutes, a customer every 1.36 minutes and medicine delivery 2.26 minutes. This focus on precise numbers is driving the growth of CallHealth, which is offering unique artificial intelligence based services by bringing patients and providers on a common platform. 

Doctors on the platform use an AI-based Clinical Decision Support System (CDSS) for speedy, efficient and accurate diagnosis. Moreover, it allows a patient to get ready access to a doctor on a virtual platform irrespective of their location. 

A simple case of fatigue or tiredness can be a symptom of a myriad possible ailments. When a patient logs in and seeks a doctor’s advice, the CDSS kicks in. Here is how it works. On the CallHealth screen, the doctor can click on fatigue as the primary symptom. The CDSS will then prompt several other options for associated symptoms like weight loss, fever, palpitation, abdominal distension. Once the patient confirms one or more of these additional symptoms the CDSS will begin to offer diagnosis options like diabetes, chronic fatigue syndrome. The more the symptoms that are added, the sharper is the suggested diagnosis. The suggestions are based on the AI’s ability to map various symptom configurations to ailments. Each configuration will include the patient’s own profile as well. The patients profile has six parameters that include current problem, surgical history, allergies, family history and social history. In many ways, each patient is unique once all parameters and symptoms are placed together. 

The final decision and diagnosis is always by the doctor. But the decision is aided by a wealth of information that most doctors will not have access to. Doctors also ask for home visits and checks up by partner organisations of CallHealth to get physical assessment done wherever required. Often times the patient does not have to stir out of home. 

In a country where patient-to-doctor ratio is poor even in urban areas, a virtual platform that offers accurate diagnosis can bring health services to many.  “We are eliminating the tyranny of time and distance to access health care while reducing costs,” says Hari Thalappalli, CEO of CallHealth. "We Democratise knowledge and reduce cognitive errors through our proprietary CDSS.” The system doesn’t replace doctors but helps them make better decisions. 

The CDSS is built on an electronic health record system that has sourced symptoms from the databases of World Health Organisation. While this is generic, the insights on India are enhanced with each diagnosis that doctors make on the CallHealth platform. Every month about 1500 such diagnoses get added to the CDSS, enriching the AI system and making it smarter and wiser. As it expands, the CDSS will be able to offer more precise suggestions to Indian doctors. 

CallHealth’s experience is proof that India needs a national level electronic medical database. The Ministry of Health is working on an Integrated Health Information Platform so that all health care services providers can pool information. Riding on such a medical database, AI-based solutions can help the entire ecosystem to provide accurate diagnosis. Doctors serving in remote areas will have equal access to deep medical insights using such systems. Healthcare for all may just be delivered by AI.