Digital Patient is an innovative medical technological platform developed by a team of researchers in Porto, Portugal. The system converts big data into valuable clinical information that doctors can use when making a diagnosis.
Machine learning platform improves patient care in Portugal
- 29 January 2021
The Digital Patient is a new tool for analysing, summarising, and classifying medical records that doctors can use to help process information when observing a new patient.
Doctors now have access to a wide range of clinical data. Although this valuable and critical information is digitised, it is often spread across numerous applications and platforms. The result is that accessing the information one needs can often feel like finding a needle in a haystack.
What is needed is a system that can quickly consolidate, correlate, and summarise all the relevant patient data and provide the user with the information they need, when they need it.
That system is the Digital Patient.
The digital doctor is in
The goal of the Digital Patient project was to create a digital assistant that could help physicians diagnose and treat patients. To do this, the project developed a technological solution capable of automatically identifying a set of attributes within free-text clinical records written in Portuguese. These records include a patient’s clinical history, previous diagnoses and procedures, medication, and any conditions that could be deemed relevant to clinical decisions, such as allergies or therapies.
The machine learning system uses natural language processing methods to analyse clinical data and classify it according to a clinical hierarchical catalogue. This makes it possible to for the system to interpret clinical records written in Portuguese. Based on this reading, the system provides a physician with a patient summary and graph, mainly in the form of keywords, highlighting the most frequent and relevant clinical episodes.
According to the project coordinators, this information is particularly helpful when a physician is working with a new patient. Whereas it would take a physician hours – if not days – to sort through all the patient’s clinical history, Digital Patient gets the job done in seconds. As the doctor can start treatment faster, the patient benefits from better care.
An award-winning digital solution
The Digital Patient is already being used at the Centro Hospitalar Universitário de São João. Medical personnel who have used it report that the system saves valuable time and has greatly improved the quality of care they provide.
The project was the result of a multidisciplinary effort that included clinicians, epidemiologists, language specialists and information technology technicians. It was awarded Portugal’s most prestigious prize for digital solutions.
Total investment and EU funding
Total investment for the project “Digital Patient” is EUR 1 037 427, with the EU’s European Regional Development Fund contributing EUR 881 813 through the “NORTE 2020, Portugal Norte Region” Operational Programme for the 2014-2020 programming period. The investment falls under the priority “Research, development and innovation”.