Singapore-based health start-up, UCARE.AI announced in December 2019 the use of its innovative AI-Powered Pre-Admission Cost of Hospitalisation Estimation (APACHETM) system by private healthcare provider Parkway Pantai.
Adopted by four major hospitals operated by Parkway Pantai in 2018, APACHETM enabled the hospitals to offer fixed prices for certain medical procedures for greater cost transparency and bill certainty. The medical procedures include the removal of piles, breast lumps, ovarian cysts, gallbladder, thyroid and tonsils.
In line with the Parkway Pantai’s Price Guarantee Programmes (PGP) they will offer patients with better certainty of the hospitalisation fees, so as to empower patients to make well-informed decision on medical treatment options. Providing price guarantees also negates the need for patients to have financial counselling and may focus their energies on recovery instead. For healthcare providers, this offers greater operational efficiencies with automated processes and augmented insights.
Mr Neal Liu, Founder and CTO of UCARE.AI said, “Core to our mission is the ability to help healthcare providers leverage AI to provide better patient experiences at every stage of the hospital journey. The introduction of PGP by Parkway Pantai underscores APACHE’s ability to lead a paradigm shift in how patients understand hospitalisation bills and make decisions on treatment options. Looking ahead, we will continue roll out more AI systems and services to benefit patients globally.”
Using artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms APACHETM analyses a various parameters specific to the individual patient to predict the patient’s bill size from pre-admission until their eventual recovery. As a highly intuitive system, APACHETM accounts for dynamically changing factors during the hospitalisation journey, such as disease aggravation, unexpected complications, or unplanned surgeries to generate personalised healthcare bills with an 82 percent accuracy rate on average.
Through a process of self-learning, APACHETM has the ability to improve the accuracy of its estimations as it references more data collected over time.
Since the introduction of UCARE.AI’s APACHE in 2018, it has earned Parkway Pantai an award for Best Adoption – Enterprise at the SG:D TechBlazer Awards 2019, for successfully leveraging innovative technologies to improve hospital operations. APACHETM was also named by the Singapore government as the first successful case to align with the five principles espoused in the new Model AI Governance Framework set out in a white paper published by Personal Data Protection Commission (PDPC).
The company has also attained accreditation from Singapore’s Infocomm Media and Development Agency, recognising its innovative products and better position the company to scale overseas, and awarded the 2019 Asia-Pacific Healthcare AI Technology Innovation Award by Frost & Sullivan. [APBN]