Humber River Health to introduce an AI-Enabled Virtual Triaging and Queue Management Application to help patients receive appropriate and timely care

Hospital receives $1.5 million from SCALE AI, through AI for Healthcare Initiative

Humber River Health is one of nine organizations that have received funding from SCALE AI, Canada’s Artificial Intelligence Supercluster, as announced at Canada’s ALL IN event in Montreal yesterday. Accepted onstage by Peter Bak, Humber River Health’s Chief Information Officer, Deloitte Partner, Arslan Irdees, the Hospital is set to introduce an AI-Enabled Virtual Triaging and Queue Management Application to help patients receive appropriate and timely care.

The Hospital has received $1.5 million from the AI for Healthcare Initiative to support hospital projects pioneering the deployment of AI solutions. This latest SCALE AI initiative promotes collaboration between hospitals and AI product and solutions providers across the country to innovate further and accelerate the deployment of AI in the Canadian healthcare network to improve operations, logistics and resource allocation.

Humber River Health recognizes the opportunity to develop an AI-Enabled Virtual Triaging and Queue Management Application to help navigate patients to the appropriate care at the appropriate time. Humber River Health will apply AI and Machine Learning to forecast and optimize patient queues in the Emergency Department (ED), determine the optimal pre-arranged time slot per patient, and dynamically adjust the time slot per patient to continuously optimize and manage the queue of patients using real-time/near-real-time data. The goals are to achieve more efficient use of health system resources and improve the patient experience by improving patient flow, reducing occurrences of unexpected surges in ED demand, and eventually redirecting the volume of non-urgent patients accessing the ED to the most appropriate care.

Barbara Collins, CEO, Humber River Health: “Humber River Health is committed to working with our community and other partners to collectively learn to deliver innovative, safe and equitable healthcare. Being one of the busiest Emergency Departments in Ontario, we are continuously leveraging technology to work for staff and physicians, giving them more time to spend with patients, eliminating inefficiencies, and reducing the chance of errors. AI furthers our ability to revolutionize the patient experience and deliver even higher quality care, resulting in a better patient journey from start to finish.”

Humber River Health is proud to work with partners Deloitte, MEDITECH Collaborative, Mackenzie Health to test this initiative.

Full news release can be found here: SCALE AI’s AI for Healthcare Initiative: $21 million in investments supporting 9 AI projects for better healthcare in Canada