Jul 24 2019
Ping An Insurance (Group) Company of China, Ltd. has announced the launch of AskBob—an AI-based medical decision support tool—by Ping An Smart Healthcare (PASH) to Singapore via partnerships with SingHealth and the National University Health System (NUHS).
Interface of AskBob, AI-based medical decision advisor. (Image credit: Ping An Insurance)
Created by Ping An, AskBob offers up-to-date and critical medical information to clinicians while handling patients at the point of care as well as for medical research and self-learning, for example, case discussions.
In the case of point of care, AskBob offers precise diagnosis and treatment recommendations for over 1,500 diseases. In contrast to other clinical decision support systems (CDSS), AskBob is a “knowledge + data” two-wheeled drive intelligent CDSS that is based on millions of clinical guidelines, unidentified patient medical records, and a core medical knowledge graph that covers tens of millions of medical data.
The treatment recommendations offered by AskBob are patient-centric, authoritative, and personalized.
For self-learning and medical research, AskBob leverages Ping An’s leading medical knowledge graph and sophisticated natural language processing (NLP) technologies to carry out more precise, user-friendly, and intuitive online searches and literature analyses.
AskBob can trends in predict scientific research and offer up-to-date literature analysis summaries. In addition, it has the ability to track the scholar team network in a specific research field to connect researchers across the globe.
The partnership with SingHealth, one of the largest public healthcare groups of Singapore, commenced in April 2019. The goal is to offer doctors with customized treatment recommendations for patients with Type 2 diabetes at the point of care. In Singapore, diabetes is a serious health problem, with one in nine residents aged 18 to 69 having diabetes.
Recommendations from AskBob can possibly help realize better diabetes control and health outcomes, such as minimizing complications related to diabetes, such as kidney failure and stroke.
NUHS, the academic health sciences center in Singapore, is piloting AskBob with clinicians for medical research trend analysis and smart literature search.
We are delighted to cooperate with SingHealth and the National University Health System. They are both authoritative healthcare institutions in Singapore.
Dr Xie Guotong, Chief Healthcare Scientist, Ping An Group
Guotong added, “With Ping An’s advanced healthcare technologies and through validating and customizing AskBob with SingHealth and NUHS, we believe our smart decision support tool could effectively empower clinicians in Singapore, bringing better health outcomes for Singaporeans.”
According to Dr Bee Yong Mong, Head of the SingHealth Duke-NUS Diabetes Centre, “An AI-based clinical decision support system could potentially help doctors increase the accuracy and efficiency of diabetes treatment. With the tool, we hope to better predict risks of complications and offer more personalized treatment recommendations to patients.”
More than a search engine, AskBob uses a medical knowledge graph and a natural language processing engine to empower precise literature analysis without giving you information that you don’t need. This is the power of using AskBob. I believe it will be extremely helpful for clinicians in medical research and case discussions.
Prof. Ngiam Kee Yuan, Group Chief Technology Officer, NUHS