The University of Galway is planning a project to examine the use of AI-based dynamic appointment scheduling in the delivery of care to patients with diabetes.
The initiative follows a successful proof-of-concept study as part of the Home Health project, which used remote sensors and AI software to deliver chronic disease management to residents of Clare Island, off the west coast of Ireland.
Part of the Home Health project was a study investigating the development of a dynamic medical appointments architecture, where patients are scheduled to be reviewed based on clinical need rather than traditional static calendar appointments.
The project looked at AI’s ability to process and analyse data continuously to enable more dynamic care paths through the ability to analyse real-time data to detect subtle changes or patterns that might indicate a problem before it escalates.
Instead of waiting for scheduled visits to track progress, AI is said to be able to provide immediate feedback to both patients and care teams. For example, if a patient’s glucose levels are trending higher, AI can prompt timely interventions like medication adjustments or specialist review.
Speaking to Pulse+IT, consultant endocrinologist Ian McCabe of the HIVE Lab at the University of Galway’s School of Medicine said: “It makes sense because a lot of what doctors do, especially at consultant level, is to say, we need to see you in six months’ time to see how you’re doing but this person might spend six months getting worse and worse.
“It makes sense from both directions. From the patient’s perspective, if you’re going in the wrong direction you have ‘a guardian angel’ looking over your shoulder saying we need to get this person in sooner, and from the perspective of workflow management on the doctor’s side, you don’t need to see patients who don’t need to be seen.
“We are hopefully going to get a bigger project going on that next spring looking at diabetes and using a general principle of dynamic scheduling of appointments, having used the Home Health Project as a proof of concept essentially.”
Dr McCabe said dynamic appointment scheduling makes sense in terms of the ongoing pressures on diabetes services.
“Now, people with diabetes can slap on a continuous glucose monitor. It’s the size of a €2 coin on the back of their arm and it sends about 300 measurements a day. In parallel, current diabetes care in our hospitals is for patients to come in once a year with your little book that they record their blood sugars in.
“There is a clinic in Galway that is designed for 25 people and they have 75 people booked in to the outpatient clinic every time. Every hospital in the country is like that. They don’t have the capacity so if we can get something like dynamic scheduling, I think it will make a lot of sense from both the patient and the doctor’s point of view,” he said.
The research team has previously developed an AI algorithm to interpret trends in blood pressure measurements from remote monitoring devices, and trigger an appointment for review in the event of concerning changes.
The goal is that people who are deteriorating are seen by a doctor as soon as possible, while patients with steady blood pressure control will not need to attend as regularly for routine appointments.
Remote monitoring produces continuous streams of data. “It’s going to be a tsunami of information that the healthcare professional has to try to sort through,” Dr McCabe said. “We are going to need new tools to try to deal with that and one of them is artificial intelligence.
“Ultimately, I think this is going to be the future of medicine, especially chronic disease management. A patient isn’t going to have to go and be seen every six months or two months. It will be based on some measurements.”
