Augmented intelligence gives doctors advanced notice to help detect heart failure

Augmented intelligence gives doctors advanced notice to help them find the most critical heart failure patients.

Heart failure is a common, costly condition affecting over 6 million U.S adults, that’s about one in 250 people.

When a patient reaches advanced heart failure, medications no longer work. That’s why it’s vital to catch the problem early.

Finding the best route, googling the answer, and facial recognition on our phones are just a few examples of how we use augmented intelligence every single day.

Now, A-I is fast becoming the future of health care.

Dr. Jane Wilcox, Chief of Heart Failure at Northwestern Medicine’s Bluhm Cardiovascular Institute said, “It’s helping the clinician and in this age of medicine that is highly complex.
There are so many things to learn.”

Up to 25% of all heart patients have advanced heart failure. Wilcox is part of a team at
Northwestern that’s using A-I to detect patients at risk.

“Advanced heart failure can be sort of tricky or nuanced to identify. And so, we’ve created algorithms, using A-I, using machine learning to try to find patients, and we found patients successfully,” Wilcox said.

Data science teams are using tens of thousands of data points from their data warehouse, which includes clinical data and imaging.

“If we can catch patients who are less sick, potentially, they could be a candidate for a clinical trial,” Wilcox said.

The team also used A-I to help pinpoint two patients who needed L-VADS two people who may have not been helped until it was too late.

“It doesn’t let people fall through the cracks,” Wilcox said.

A-I is transforming the way doctors take care of patients, just like it’s transformed our daily lives.

Other ways augmented intelligence is changing healthcare, virtual visits, diagnosis and predicting outcomes, medical image interpretations, and training.

A study from Medtronic’s found that 72% of healthcare executives trust A-I to help in patient care.