Laura Hyde |
Healthcare technology company Hero AI has reduced patient waiting times by 55 per cent by deploying its Microsoft Azure-powered solution at The Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, Canada.
“[We have] leveraged AI modelling and decision logic to assess whether patients who come into the emergency department with mental health crises need to be consulted by psychiatry or not,” said Dr Devin Singh, CEO and co-founder of Hero AI. “Instead of the patient waiting six to eight hours for the consultant to go in, we reduce patient wait time by 55 per cent. That’s giving the emergency room an extra 200 hours of room capacity within the past six months and we’re getting these kids the care they need faster.”
Hero AI, which was cofounded by Singh in 2020, is currently focused on reducing patient waiting times, as well as producing faster diagnoses, reducing serious safety events and reducing mortality. The Hero AI platform, which uses Azure AI Foundry and Azure OpenAI, is completely customisable to accommodate the nuanced workflows of each hospital and healthcare setting.
“As a junior doctor, I gained firsthand exposure to some of the inefficiencies that happen in care delivery,” said Singh. “To lose a young patient from a preventable death is devastating – and it really lit a fire in me to ask: how can we use data and real-time machine learning to improve patient care?”
Putting the right tools in the hands of healthcare workers is critical to enable better performance and health outcomes, as well as compliant data governance in an industry that has a strict and complex regulatory landscape.
“The beauty of Hero AI is we can reflect nuanced workflows while driving automation forward,” said Singh. “Knowing that our platform sits in Microsoft Azure takes away a lot of the fears around security, networking and encryption for our customers. Plus, on Azure, the cybersecurity approaches have an incredible ability to be adapted for the different clients we rollout to. Although we’re a small start-up, we set a high bar in terms of patient safety, transparency and explainability. And these are all areas where our close partnership with Microsoft benefits us. I think we’re just scratching the surface of what solutions like Copilot can do in healthcare.”