Specialist Recommender is now available

Photo of Aleksandra KwiecieńAleksandra Kwiecień
December 3, 2020
... min read

The transition to digital healthcare services is inevitable. With the growing number of digital patients, we strive to find new ways to improve their experience, bring them closer to healthcare experts, and provide medical help that they need in as short a time as possible.

At the same time, we have observed the need of healthcare providers to improve the digital journey of their patients, which would lead to higher satisfaction but also better patient management, faster routing to the right help, and support optimization of the resource limits they are facing. Specialist Recommender is the answer.

Better patient routing

The newest addition to Infermedica’s technologies allows us to extend the recommendation of pre-clinical triage with the information about the suggested specialization of the physician. The recommendation takes patient profile, provided evidence, and its related severity into account.

"Analyzing possible conditions and evidence allows us to see the big picture and provide a recommendation that is not necessarily linked with the most likely outcome, but also with the most serious scenarios, guiding patients to the experts who can expand the interview, run detailed diagnostics and initiate treatment", explains Jakub Winter, Head of Implementation at Infermedica.

Users, no matter if that’s a patient, nurse, or call center agent, would see one of 27 specialties, like pulmonologist, hematologist, allergologist, or infectologist. For initial diagnoses pointing to common diseases, a General Practitioner (GP) will also be available.

What’s important is that the specialties available in Specialist Recommender can be configured in a way that takes regional, regulatory, or clinical settings into account, as well as the types of medical experts available at the healthcare facilities, to be sure that the recommendations are appropriate and actionable.

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Specialist Recommender, an example of implementation as a part of the pre-diagnosis process.

Well adjusted way of communication

Additionally, Specialist Recommender uses the triage recommendation and links it with the best way to connect patients with the physician. Nowadays, we all focus to avoid unnecessary visits to healthcare centers. With the channel recommendation, we can easily see if a personal on-site visit is a must, and what the alternatives are, including text, video, and audio teleconsultation.

Channel recommendations won’t be available for cases connected with symptoms and conditions marked with red flags, which are potentially life-threatening and where users will be guided directly to hospitals and emergency help.

Comfort without complexity

Specialist Recommender is a tool that taps into existing patient paths and enriches them, without the necessity of creating additional steps on their journey. It leverages learnings from the existing /diagnosis and /triage features, available across all solutions created with Infermedica's technology, and uses it to make recommendations.

The new feature is optional and can be easily used in the existing projects, as well as new ones, either white-labeled like Symptom Checker or custom built with Infermedica API.

In either case, Specialist Recommender is a natural continuation of digital pre-diagnosis and triage processes, an improvement of the patient routing, and a simple step towards the automation of appointment booking. With this type of feature, we are adding new levels of efficiency creation - not only is it guiding patients to the right triage level, it’s also an immediate recommendation of the right professionalist that can help with the particular health problem. Thanks to this, we are able to shorten the time to recovery of a patient.

“Specialist Recommender is not just additional information for patients, it is a milestone that brings us closer to a fully digitalized and optimized patient path from the initial diagnosis to medical consultation. We see that this solution can, at the same time, help healthcare providers make faster decisions and, in the future, decrease the engagement of nurses or healthcare workers to a minimum and let them focus on helping patients” adds Maciej Malenda, Head of Sales EMEA at Infermedica.

Pricing and availability

  • Specialist Recommender is available as an optional endpoint for Infermedica API users and an optional feature for Symptom Checker customers.
  • It was released with the recent updates of Infermedica API (v. 3.1) and will be available in Symptom Checker (v. 2.2) and Call Center Triage later this year.
  • The /recommend_specialist endpoint is linked to the triage logic from the /triage endpoint.

To learn more details about Specialist Recommender please contact our team →

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