A team of over 100 engineers, millions of data and hard work of three long years – India’s largest hospital chain Apollo used all of this to create an AI-run application, which is quite like the ChatGPT of doctors.
The application – launched on the 90th birthday of the founder of Apollo Hospitals, Dr Prathap Reddy – called ‘Clinical Intelligence Engine’ (CIE) will help doctors make precise clinical decisions. Promoted as a decision support tool, it is available to all physicians in India for free.
In an interview with News18Dr Sangita Reddy, joint managing director at Apollo Hospitals, shared the journey of how the idea of CIE was conceived three years ago.
“The early conversations with chairman Dr Prathap Reddy and my sisters around CIE were to take advantage of 40 years of clinical knowledge of Apollo, along with technological expertise to create an intuitive clinical decision support assistant for doctors in primary care,” Dr Sangita Reddy said.
The CIE’s development was accelerated during the pandemic to help both patients and doctors. Dr Sangita’s father, Dr Prathap Reddy, believes that this app is a way to say “thank you” to all Indians.
In a video introduction to the app, he describes the application as a way to enhance India’s healthcare. “A combination of superb technology, love and care to make India truly healthy… by integrating clinical intelligence with the millions of clinical journeys witnessed at Apollo.”
The application is built by over 100 engineers, using 40 years of data from Apollo and the collective intelligence of thousands of doctors, she said. The team is led by Dr Sujoy Kar (chief medical information officer), Abdussamad GM (senior engineer), Chaitanya Bhardwaj (lead of clinical AI products), along with engineering teams.
Can CIE be compared to ChatGPT?
Apollo’s engine somehow works like ChatGPT, which was released in November last year and has sparked massive interest in the technology called generative artificial intelligence. This technology is used to produce answers mimicking human conversations.
Created by Microsoft-backed OpenAI, ChatGPT has been trained on enormous volumes of data, which makes the application competent in producing, summarising and translating text along with responding to inquiries and carrying out several other natural language tasks.
Dr Sangita said CIE was an expert knowledge system with reasoning power and highly specialised, deep domain knowledge in the clinical area.
“It uses probabilistic algorithms to determine clinical diagnosis and related information,” she said, adding that CIE comprehended all routinely prevalent case-mix with over 1,300 most common to uncommon diseases along with over 800 unique symptoms.
“In the near future, CIE will use generative AI models to enhance engagement and interactions with users (doctors) to answer their health queries,” she said.
Dr Sangita said the engine was trained on two main types of data. First, thousands of medical histories and case studies from Apollo’s proprietary clinical knowledge base built by in-house clinicians and, second, tens of millions of anonymised, real-world clinical data from Apollo.
How will the app help in the long run?
Dr Sangita Reddy expects that in the long run, the engine will help in achieving the bigger goal of improving public health.
“It will help in alleviating lack of access to care, improve clinical quality and outcome and deliver this at scale to impact the entire nation,” she said.
Calling it the next big thing in healthcare, she spoke about the same tool at the recent conference organised by Apollo Hospitals in New Delhi.
“Now at the centre of healthcare is the patient empowered by knowledge, data and artificial intelligence,” she had said while explaining how tech is taking the centrestage in healthcare.
With the health information exchange system coming in, recyclable data can be mined and using the power of AI, we can begin to analyse big health trends, she added.
In future, “deciphering data can give insights into things like why Manipur is getting more tongue cancer, why one area is finding more abdomen cancer cases, outbreak due to contaminated water and much more”.
Health maps with hotspots will emerge from such data and proactive planning systems can be put in place for weak areas of healthcare.
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