Tietoevry Care — a digital assistant for care
Many countries face overburdened health and social care systems, with aging populations driving an increased need for care. Public healthcare budgets are not growing at the same rate, and the availability of skilled workers may also be constrained. Thus, the health sector has a high need for tools that can help provide cost-effective and high-quality care. Machine learning and artificial intelligence are critical in enabling this. Tietoevry Care is on a mission to reduce the burden on care workers and improve health outcomes by using AI. The company has been working with AI in healthcare for several years and has multiple AI projects underway. This has helped Tietoevry Care learn a lot about customer needs, technology challenges, and asseing the suitability of AI.
“We envision AI being a health and social care assistant, with care professionals able to use the technology to surface, e.g., valuable information, write up patient notes, and even make connections between various data points. Automating administrative tasks in this way frees up more time caring for patients,” explained Niina Siipola, Portfolio Lead, AI and Data Solutions at Tietoevry Care.
Tietoevry’s Lifecare Data Platform enables the multi-source data collection and management needed to power AI-driven health and social care services. The platform is widely used in Finland. A key part of the offering is a solution that removes any potentially identifying data before Large Language Models (LLMs) are used. This capability is not a given among software providers working with healthcare data.
One of the regulatory developments guiding Tietoevry Care’s work in Finland is a legal change that allows medical professionals to proactively contact citizens. This is relevant when machine learning tools pick up on disease markers that humans may overlook. The authorities can now contact a person who has a clinically significant finding for a specific disease unless that person has opted out of being contacted. Tietoevry Care and Helsinki University Hospital (HUS) (featured in this CNN healthcare report) have been working together in this domain, developing the machine learning algorithms and data lake capabilities needed to diagnose three groups of rare diseases.
Tietoevry Care participates in a new two-year research project to assess the potential of LLMs for different healthcare use cases. The project, which is led by Helsinki University, received recently more than one million euros in funding. It brings together several healthcare organizations and private companies. An important use case being explored is how AI can speed up the documentation process in both healthcare and social care settings. Tietoevry Care is currently piloting a new solution that uses AI speech-to-text technology, enabling care workers to dictate notes after patient visits instead of manually typing them up. The solution also structures the data and corrects typos. Powered by Microsoft Azure’s AI capabilities, the solution is currently being tested by over 50 care professionals to ensure it meets a wide range of needs.
“Finnish is probably one of the most challenging languages for LLMs, especially in the clinical context. But we believe this pilot solution can easily be adapted for the Swedish and Norwegian markets, where the language models are an even better fit for the need,” said Siipola.
Read the whole article on Tietoevry’s website.
Source (text and image): Tietoevry Care