Five years ago, the Hong Kong Hospital Authority tapped Cloudera to streamline its data storage and manage patient information from the 30 different data source systems it receives.
Partnership key highlights
Cloudera also enabled the Hong Kong statutory body to train AI models to diagnose and detect potential abnormalities. The partnership reduced extended patient wait times from 12% to 3% by the third quarter of 2024. Using batch processing, the Hospital Authority can process all patient information to be pulled from when necessary.
With Cloudera, it has built its Hospital Command Centre to check bottlenecks, has portals to manage the patient admission and discharge process, and assists in visualising individual records.
Thanks to these innovations, the Hospital Authority has significantly reduced access block, with only around 3% of patients experiencing A&E admission wait times of four hours or more by the third quarter of 2024, down from approximately 12% in Q4 2022.
Hospital Authority has also employed innovations such as Smart Patient Listing, which allows clinicians to perform treatments based on specific patient conditions, an Antibiotics Stewardship Program to monitor individual patients' antibiotic prescription usage, and a new data platform called AIDA (AI and Data Analytics Platform) to support different data-driven business cases and AI model development.
The future of medicine
Looking ahead, the Hospital Authority and Cloudera will partner to develop more real-time dashboards and data-driven business cases. They also plan to train AI models further to identify abnormalities in X-rays and brain CT scans and recommend an effective method of patient treatment using patient data and AI-generated smart recommendations.
Eric Ho, senior systems manager at Hong Kong Hospital Authority, said, "Nowadays, AI can do it in the clinical process, and AI is an area we are focused on now."
