Artificial Intelligence Platform Deployment Aims to Enhance Surgical Care

Using KelaHealth’s Surgical Intelligence Platform, the Advocate Aurora Research Institute aims to combine the capabilities of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to determine the efficacy of robotic surgical techniques and the types of surgical care that would help improve patient outcomes.

Amid the growth and application of technology in healthcare, researchers continue to explore how AI can effectively enhance care delivery practices.

KelaHealth, a surgical data analytics company, provides the KelaHealth Surgical Intelligence Platform that uses AI and ML to limit surgery-related issues.

Advocate Aurora Research Institute, a nonprofit company of Advocate Aurora Health, has deployed the KelaHealth Surgical Intelligence Platform. Platform insights will be used to improve surgical care across Aurora Health Care and Advocate Health Care sites.

The platform will enable care teams to review patient needs and surgical operations and highlight the methods that would be most beneficial in subjective circumstances.

“Our goal is to improve patient outcomes by analyzing and understanding the varied practices by surgeons coupled with the unique needs of the patient,” said Gary Chmielewski, MD, thoracic surgeon and robotics committee co-chair for Advocate and Aurora, in a press release. “It’s possible that, say, gallbladder surgery is best performed robotically for all of our patients or patients with specific health risks. This project will give us these kinds of insights, which can help us guide surgical decision-making, not just as a learning health system, but right down to the tendencies of individual surgeons, in the context of understanding how to deliver better care for patients.”

Using the Surgical Intelligence Platform involves researchers providing EHR data and robotics information to the system, allowing it to create risk-prediction models using AI and historical data. After analyzing patient-specific predictive insights, researchers would then be able to identify the surgical methods that would have supported the best outcomes for past patients.

This would provide them with a better understanding of subjective surgical care needs and strategies to improve outcomes, the press release notes. Once the platform has created a baseline, researchers can review the model over time and gradually make changes when necessary.

“With surgery comprising 50% of Medicare spending, it is imperative for health systems to explore new ways to improve their stewardship of these resources. The modern surgical process generates tremendous amounts of data – from robots, medical devices, instruments and sensors – yet its potential remains untapped,” said Bora Chang, MD, CEO of KelaHealth, in a press release. “Our core competence is translating these data points into predictive insights and effective interventions enabling hospitals to operate smarter, reducing the cost and improving the quality of surgical care.”

The use of AI to enhance patient care is growing. For example, in April 2022, Hitachi, the University of Utah Health, and the Regenstrief Institute worked to create an AI method to enhance care for type 2 diabetes.

The development of this tool included researchers collecting EHR data from various hospitals and using the information to create treatment plans. The AI method was designed to group patients based on disease status and analyze treatment and outcome patterns. Researchers found that it could assist in medication selection for more than 83 percent of patients.