Pennsylvania-based Temple Health is using artificial intelligence (AI) technology from Israeli firm Aidoc to help reduce patients’ length of stay, a metric strongly correlated with the cost of patient care.

The AI technology, implemented across the health system’s facilities, targets the cardiovascular, neurosciences and radiology service lines to optimise clinical operations by identifying more appropriate patients in need of interventions; streamlining communication across critical care teams; prioritising patients with suspected urgent medical conditions; and helping shorten the length of stay for patients in the health system’s hospitals.

An American Hospital Association report from April revealed a third of hospitals have been operating on negative margins, with average patient length of stays, at an average cost of over $2000 per patient, per day, growing by just under 10% and healthcare worker shortages driving up labour costs by 20%.

Health systems are turning to technologies such as AI to boost operational efficiency, sustain high quality of care and cut costs. Aidoc’s medical imaging AI showed they could help reduce hospital patient length of stay by 1.3 days for patients suffering brain bleeds and 2.07 days for patients suffering lung blood clots.

In a clinical case study, on retrospective review, Aidoc’s AI for cardiovascular care coordination could have captured an additional 72% of patients who merited a physician treatment consultation for a lung blood clot that did not receive one by the AI-unaided physician team.

“As the challenges of sustaining delivery of high-quality care continue to mount, we at Temple Health continue to seek solutions that can accomplish two things – support our physicians in improving clinical efficiency and reducing the overall cost to deliver the care,” said Nick Barcellona, executive vice president at Temple Health. “In Aidoc, we have found a collaborator and platform whose solutions have demonstrated in both research and real-life clinical settings the ability to do just that. We believe this AI, for both medical imaging and care coordination, will give our physicians the tools they need to streamline clinical processes.”

Temple University Hospital is a safety net hospital for the local community it serves in Philadelphia and has integrated several of Aidoc’s FDA-cleared medical imaging AI products. By extension, Temple’s cross-specialty care response teams have integrated Aidoc’s care coordination, which both lets physicians get to the right patient and clinical context faster and helps capture more patients who need interventions that might otherwise have been delayed.

“As a safety-net hospital, Temple University Hospital serves a vital role in its north Philadelphia community,” said Demetri Giannikopoulos, Aidoc’s VP of innovation. “Aidoc’s AI supports Temple’s mission by supporting high quality care for every patient at every stage of their healthcare journey. We believe that in integrating artificial intelligence, health systems like Temple can help be empowered to lift the community with state-of-the-art healthcare provision and reduce the cost to serve at the same time.”

Aidoc’s AI-driven technology analyses medical images directly after the patient is scanned, suggesting prioritisation of time-sensitive pathologies, as well as activating multidisciplinary team workflows to reduce turnaround time, shorten length of stay and improve overall patient outcomes.

Temple University Health System is a $2.4bn academic health system dedicated to providing access to quality patient care and supporting medical education and research.