Apollo hospitals, India‘s largest healthcare provider is set to launch an app called Clinical intelligence engine for the doctors which will assist them in taking precise clinical decisions on the occasion of the 90th birthday of its chairman Prathap C Reddy on Monday.

In an exclusive interview to ET, Reddy said the new technology which he is going to gift to the doctor community free of cost on his birthday -will give patients “the best possible care”.

“I thought about passing on the benefit to the doctors of the country. It will be free for doctors who can use this clinical intelligence engine and get probable diagnosis. This directs them to say exactly what is the condition of the patient,” he said.

The Clinical Intelligence Engine has been trained using the case sheets, journals and critical medical information that Apollo has access to and has been trained by using the real world data. The app will be made available to all doctors for free.

The system mimics a doctor trained on Apollo data. It is also a symptom checker which offers an opportunity for the doctor to diagnose better using the system.

The clinical intelligence engine powers interaction, which is currently available on Apollo 24/7, but most importantly, it also empowers a clinical decision support system to all the doctors of this country.

The piece of technology will assist the doctor in their primary care. ” It essentially interacts just like how in the real world a doctor would have an assistant who would also be a junior doctor, and this junior doctor will interact with you as a patient before you can actually see the specialist. It collects all the information, symptoms, past history, allergies and everything, Conducts a detailed clinical interview, creates a case sheet out of it, analyzes that case and provides certain suggestions and recommendations to the doctor about the case,” said a hospital executive. This, he said, is seamlessly done so that the doctor has access to all the important information about the patient before the consultation as it provides assistance with key pieces of information such as differential diagnosis, The technology has the capability to give such answers to the doctor in order to help them in their consolidation.

The app can be used by any doctor as a reference tool for decision support. The app understands over 1200 diseases, 800 different symptoms. By and large, 1200 diseases cover almost 95% of all cases generally seen in primary care

Once a case is analyzed, the app gives equal amount of information to the patient about what could be causing their symptoms, and gives them information about the differential diagnosis, how it is treated. It gives them information about what kind of medicines are prescribed. And once the prescription or a test is ordered, then it gives them useful information about what does this medicine mean, what are the contraindications, among others.

Apollo says a lot of safety mechanisms have been put in place so that it doesn’t result in self prescription.

Apollo has been collating the data for the last six to eight years. “It is quite unique with what we have built and the most important thing is we built it using Apollo’s vast clinical expertise and experience which no other player has access to. So we have a huge advantage and we’ve taken advantage of that data, which obviously also stands for extremely good clinical outcome. Since it’s trained on that data, almost any doctor who uses this decision support system can literally treat as if he or she is an Apollo doctor,” added the executive.