What is the problem/issue being addressed?
In the EU-28, Cardiovascular Diseases (CVD) account for 37% of all deaths, over 1.8 million deaths annually, and it costs the EU economy an estimated €210bn per year mainly due to health care costs and productivity losses. As CVD prevalence and costs are projected to increase substantially, Out-of-Hospital Cardiac Arrest (OHCA) is projected to rise in the same proportion during next years. To date, OHCA is one of the leading causes of death in Europe, and worldwide. Currently, Emergency Medical Services (EMS) dispatchers use set medical protocols as a support to recognize medical conditions, like OHCA, during emergency calls prior to activating the emergency response system. However, EMSs are struggling as calls have increased in Europe from 100 million calls in 2003 to 300 million in 2018, stretching already thinned resources to the limit. Assistant decision tools will be necessary to help EMSs to faster identify time-critical conditions like a OHCA situations, and in a more sustainable way.
Our solution, AI4EMS, is a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform that integrates state-of-the-art speech recognition and machine learning for augmenting in real-time the performance of human EMS dispatchers. AI4EMS is the first and only smart digital assistant for EMS dispatchers that supports triage decision-making process by (1) real-time processing and analysis of emergency calls; (2) real-time recognition of cardiac arrest in an evidence based process for Danish, English, French and Italian (and more languages to come); and, (3) presenting the most important insights to dispatchers in a user-friendly way. With AI4EMS, OHCA recognition is faster (reducing the EU average of 3’39’’ to 50 seconds) and more accurate (increasing the EU average of 73.9% human accuracy to 95%).
Why is it important for society?
Healthcare is like every other market driven by the relationship between supply and demand, and patients demand medical expertise since nobody wants mediocre medical treatment. This means that every job function is usually highly specialized, and it takes a lot of training and retraining to keep every employee up to date with best practices. This drives up the cost of treating each patient, which in turn makes resource utilization and allocation more important than ever before. Resources that are already scarce considering the growing aging population and the widely documented imbalances and shortages of health workforce in the European region, and globally. In this scenario, Emergency Medical Services (EMSs) are no exception. Effective decision assistant tools will have a large impact in healthcare, bridging the widening gap between medical professional resources and patients' needs.
What are the overall objectives?
AI4EMS aims to impact the economy and society at large by improving access and quality of healthcare. Our goal is to disrupt the Artificial Intelligence (AI) market for healthcare becoming world leaders in EMS artificial intelligence, saving lives and unnecessary costs. Sales will render revenues of €86.7 million in the first five years of commercialization and a total of 127 new jobs will be created by 2024, generating an estimated total economic benefit for all our end users of €108m.
