By clicking “Accept All Cookies”, you agree to the storing of cookies on your device to enhance site navigation, analyze site usage, and assist in our marketing efforts. View our Privacy Policy for more information.
News

Sweden turns to artificial intelligence during medical emergencies

Corti
2/12/2020
-
3
 min read
Sweden turns to artificial intelligence during medical emergencies

The nation-wide Swedish emergency service provider SOS Alarm, announces that it has partnered with the Danish Artificial Intelligence (AI) company Corti, to get Corti to assist on all their Swedish emergency calls.

One of the most important companies in the Swedish healthcare sector is SOS Alarm, the nation-wide service provider powering the 1–1–2 emergency number across Sweden.

Every year, SOS Alarm receives around three million emergency calls, funnelling hundreds of thousands of patients into the Swedish hospital sector, saving lives every single day. However, as the global surge in emergency calls kept on rising, patient expectations increased, and the lack of qualified personnel became even more apparent. The management team at SOS Alarm started to look for a different approach to keep up with the increasing demands.

After evaluating cutting-edge innovation from across the globe, SOS Alarm’s management team, and a group of researchers from the Karolinska Institute, came across a fellow Scandinavian organization, that had built a decision support technology with some of the world’s best emergency service departments. The technology helps in making emergency call-taking faster and more accurate.

Corti offers a platform that resembles a “GPS”, but for emergency calls and patient interviews. When implemented, Corti will learn the medical protocol used in all local areas and start listening in during the emergency call to help guide the call-taker to the right conclusion faster, just as a modern GPS will guide the driver safely through chaotic traffic.

The purpose of the technology is to give the heroes of the public safety sector a much more dynamic tool that provides valuable insights during critical decision-making, not long after.

“At Corti, we believe that the pivotal part of the word “healthcare” is “care”, which is a human capacity. We want to support that by offering tools that work around flawed human inclinations and build on our strengths, offering infinite memory, tireless attentiveness to detail, and reduced bias, hopefully improving the odds we face on the worst day of our lives”, explains Corti’s CEO Andreas Cleve.

By utilizing Corti’s AI, SOS Alarm will build an “emergency knowledge graph” that will remember symptom patterns from all of the emergencies happening across Sweden, and use these data points to support the human decision-maker in real-time, leading to more lives saved and an even safer community.

“Corti’s technology will help our employees make faster and more accurate decisions in the most complex situations the collaboration between SOS Alarm and Corti marks the starting point of a crucial change in technology that introduces the next generation of emergency call taking”, says Maria Khorsand, CEO of SOS Alarm.

SOS Alarm has diligently been testing the technology, on anonymized data in secure premises, for months, and the technology team from SOS Alarm will now slowly roll out the technology across Sweden.

“Everyone at Corti are immensely proud to take part in this colossal step for global healthcare, where such an iconic institution as SOS Alarm has chosen to trust artificial intelligence technology built in Scandinavia, to save lives and empower key employees, which is a tremendous privilege and responsibility to help make it happen”, says CEO Andreas Cleve.