Hallym University Chuncheon Sacred Heart Hospital

Hallym University Sacred Heart Hospital developed an AI program that is designed to improve the patient experience by innovatively reducing the patient’s waiting time for admission, discharge and medical exam.

Hallym Command Center of the hospital has recently launched the ‘Real-Time Care Situation Prediction AI Program’ which was developed from January on their own. The program greatly reduces the waiting time of patients by classifying the priorities of its patients based on their disease, age, gender, and severity, and analyzing the stages of the treatment in real-time.

There are three major solutions mounted in the AI program: Optimization of Medical Support for Critical Patient, Optimization of Bed Assignment and Case Manager in the Ward.

‘Optimization of Medical Support for Critical Patient’ system helps minimizing the waiting time for hospitalization in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU). In the past, medical staff had to make a call to check whether beds are available in the ICU or not, but now the AI solution helps them to hospitalize their patient in the right place at the right moment by analyzing treatment schedules of all ICU patients and stand-by patients. The shortage of beds in the ICUs has been a prolonged issue in all large general hospitals in Korea. But this program helps improve the management of ICU beds by discharging patients at the right moment based on the comprehensive Big Data analysis and the status of medical equipment usage.

‘Optimization of Bed Assignment’ system enables hospitals to dramatically reduce the waiting time of patients for hospitalization. The system suggests optimal beds by analyzing suitability based on more than 50 criteria such as length of hospital stay, comprehensive nursing care service, and the rounding path of attending doctors as well as other common factors. In addition, it helps medical staff to quickly process the complex assignment of wards by providing information on hundreds of inpatients in real-time. By applying an optimizer model that proactively reflects hospital policies rather than a simple method of learning data, the medical staff can flexibly cope with situations in the hospital that change from time to time.

‘Case Manager in the Ward’ system reduces the waiting time of inpatients for medical exam and treatment. AI provides an environment where medical staff can immediately respond to emergency situations by applying algorithms that predict patient care delays and patient safety risks. It analyzes various indicators of departments and exam rooms that have a high workload and then provides a guide to decision-makers to improve the entire workflow. In the future, the center plans to establish an integrated program that tracks the status of ER patients, outpatients, and exam rooms.

Director Me Yeon Lee of Hallym Command Center said, “AI prediction models will help us evolve into the most digitalized and innovative hospital by giving information on available hospital resources from bed assignment to the current status of ER and exam rooms. Also, it will create guidelines to help leaders make the optimal decisions for better medical service.”

“As we have difficulties in applying the existing solutions to the medical environment in Korea, we designed our own solution to suit the characteristics of domestic hospitals and the payment system,” explained Director Kyung Ho Yu of the hospital. “This is the first case of practical application of a medical data platform in a Korean hospital,” he emphasized.

Meanwhile, Hallym University Sacred Heart Hospital has been launching various projects to improve the patient experience based on its development plans announced at the ‘Mighty Hallym 4.0 Vision Proclamation Ceremony’ held in April 2019. As part of this project, the hospital opened Hallym Command Center and organized a team of five members including Director Me Yeon Lee, professor of Radiation Oncology, Manager Myoung Hui Ahn as the expert in various clinical fields and indicator management, Assistant Manager Sangkeun Hwang and Man Geun Seok as IT experts, and Assistant Manager Ho Youl Tae as an administrator. Hallym Command Center is now working on making a business process reengineering (BPR) and program that analyzes, redesigns, and optimizes all workflows of the hospital to innovate the hospital into the patient-centered and digitally innovative hospital in the era of the 4th industrial revolution.

By Hyun Ho Choi, Int’l Cooperation Team, HUMC (dullie1989@hallym.or.kr)