Infermedica, an AI-driven pre-diagnostics and care coordination platform – has launched a new paediatrics solution to enable preliminary diagnosis and triage of infants, toddlers and children.
With this new functionality, Infermedica can now deliver primary healthcare recommendations to patients from the day they are born and provide support for the whole family. It is available globally in 18 languages.
This offering will integrate with Infermedica’s existing AI tools – API, Symptom Checker, and Call Centre Triage, which have conducted more than eight million health check-ups – and will enable parents and caregivers to complete check-ups for their children, directing them to the most appropriate level of care.
The capability has been tested by paediatricians and partnering healthcare companies. External physicians assessed the solution’s triage recommendations as safe in 96.7% of cases.
The solution features:
- Third-person questions: The solution works from the caregiver's perspective, which is why all questions are formed in a way that responds to the view of the parent, nurse, or physician using it.
- Body models: Individuals engage more when we can identify with what we see. That is why Infermedica added children's body models adjusted to their age and gender.
- Exact date of birth: In the case of diagnosing infants and small children, knowing their exact age can significantly impact the results and recommendations. That’s why Infermedica asks for their date of birth and takes into account whether the child was born early, on time, or late.
- Questions about family: Asking about close relatives helps us learn more about the respective child. That is why, in some cases, Infermedica’s symptom checker asks for health information about the child's parents, siblings, or grandparents.
- Explications and instructions: This helps parents get a clear understanding of medical terms used across the interview and perform basic examinations at home.
Available 24/7, guidance includes whether they should visit a physician immediately, wait to see how conditions improve or selfcare, and the solution also provides instructions for simple check-ups to better evaluate a child’s state.
The AI learns from an extensive database of paediatric data to make informed decisions on patient care. The analysis takes over 200 paediatric conditions into consideration, which covers 90% of Global Burden of Disease (GBD), a tool to quantify health loss from hundreds of diseases, injuries and risk factors, for OECD countries, as well as specific risk factors relating to the child’s age to the day and ‘tuples’ – a group of different symptoms which are harmless in themselves, but when considered together, can mean something more serious.
Piotr Orzechowski, CEO and founder of Infermedica said: “Having a sick child is an incredibly worrying time for parents and carers, so we’ve developed our paediatrics solution to help ease that emotional toll. Available 24/7, it improves accessibility to specialist paediatric healthcare, helping parents who are not near any doctor's office, in out of hours situations, and even alleviates language barriers. Infermedica provides peace of mind by helping children get the in-person help they need quickly when required, while also reducing unnecessary trips to ERs which adds worry for parents and carers, reduces time physicians can spend with other patients, and increases costs for all stakeholders.
“We’ve conducted over eight million health checks globally, with our AI directing adult patients to the most appropriate level of care. Providing that same pre-diagnosis advice for children is more complex as symptoms that mean one thing one day can mean something else the next. Our paediatrics tool, which we needed to rewrite sections of our AI engine for, takes all of that into account to provide accurate guidance.”
