Using Artificial Intelligence to Reduce Healthcare Costs

The administration of inappropriate antibiotics costs a small fortune each year. Choosing the wrong drug or inaccurate dosage not only inflates costs to the psychological healthcare system, but it also contributes to increasing the number of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Lumed, an SME from Sherbrooke, proposes to correct the situation and promises hospitals savings amounting to millions of dollars (M$).

Which antibiotic to use and which dose to administer for how long some of the questions are that doctors must ask when faced with a patient struggling with a pathogen. The range of possibilities available to them can quickly become complex. In hospitals, there are more than 80 particles utilized, and there are lots of standards that make a prescription can be improved.

Faced with all these choices, some professionals sometimes play it safe, he notes. Frequently, experts have their instructions that they understand are effective, but in the end, it might not be the greatest solution when you see at all the constraints of optimum antibiotic therapy.

This is where the decision support software developed by Lumed comes into play. The software combines clinical info from the computerized record of patient and other data resources. It connects them to intelligent algorithms that identify prescriptions that are sub-optimal and that could be improved.

Once data processing is complete, the system issues an alert that notifies the hospital pharmacist that an antibiotic prescription is suboptimal, tells them why, and suggests alternative treatments. The pharmacist can then contact the doctor in order to modify the patient's treatment.

The Pilgrim's Way

The Center hospitalier universitaire de Sherbrooke (CHUS) has been using Lumed's decision support software since 2010. "Just in the first three years, the CHUS has saved more than $1 million in antibiotics", says Dr. Valiquette. He also says that the software gives for itself after its first year of usage.

The Chicoutimi hospital, the McGill University Hospital Centre, the three hospitals of the Hamilton Health System in Ontario, and a dozen establishments in the Vancouver region also use the solution developed by Lumed.

The 17-employee SME, however, had to be patient before managing to penetrate the Canadian hospital markets, explains Vincent Nault, its CEO. It actually took seven years of academic research before it reached the commercialization stage in 2012.

Negotiations with public hospitals can take 12 to 18 months. Not to mention that managers of public funds remain wary of the start-ups that come their way. We experimented with responding to calls for tenders outside Quebec independently. When the requester saw the size of our company. He canceled the call for tenders,” says Vincent Nault. Lumed then teamed up with the multinational bioMerieux to ensure its distribution in Canada. When they realized that we had authorized a contract with a large distributor. They re-initiated the call for tenders, and we won it. With the same software.

The SME now intends to tackle the San Diego hospital market. After a moratorium of nearly six years on the purchase of this type of equipment imposed by the provincial government. Lumed's software is also being evaluated at a healthcare facility San Diego from psych evaluation near me.