Vensa and Precision Driven Health focus on AI for lab results

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Picture: Vensa Health CEO Ahmad Jubbawey

Vensa Health is working with Precision Driven Health to research and develop the use of artificial intelligence to analyse lab results, taking pressure off busy clinicians.

The three-year research project starts this month and aims to automate the retrieval of lab results and analyse patterns for patient notifications on vensa.com.

Tens of thousands of lab tests are ordered in primary care and processed daily across New Zealand. This equates to millions of lab test results to be interpreted by clinicians and explained to patients on a yearly basis, resulting from around 18 million annual GP visits.

Vensa Health CEO Ahmad Jubbawey says the company saw an opportunity to retrieve lab results data from patient management systems and other sources to help clinicians and patients. The project will use AI to learn the clinical guidelines of the clinician, providing insight into analysing results.

“This will help to detect uncommon lab trends and even disseminate lab results on behalf of clinicians to patients. We already have clinical leadership committed to helping with research and development,” he says.

Dr Jason Hwang, a global expert in disruptive healthcare innovation and a principal investigator of the study, says “the project aims to accurately automate and disseminate lab results to improve clinical decision making and save a clinician’s time.

“We’re also interested in how insights from collective clinical best practice could be used to identify lab results patterns from longitudinal trends that could lead to new recommendations for interpreting individual lab results.”

Jubbawey says the project has the potential to advance the role of automation and AI in clinical decision making and dramatically improve a clinician’s workload at the same time.

“I have had many GPs come to me and say that they are working until midnight every day to process lab results. Providing GPs with a tool that extends their clinical guidelines will free up a lot of valuable time,” he says.

Precision Driven Health’s general manager Dr Kevin Ross says shared lab results is an area where data could be more meaningfully used to better deliver healthcare in New Zealand.

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