Infermedica expands platform with pediatric assessment tools

Every parent knows the feeling of uncertainty that occurs when our children are experiencing symptoms. In many cases, we seek simple answers and guidance that can lead us toward fast and effective medical help for our children. This is why we launched a pediatric screening tool for the initial symptom assessment and triage of the youngest patients, which provides 96.7% of triage safety.

With our pediatric content, parents and caregivers can initially assess their children’s health with an easy-to-use digital tool. We added over 1,300 new medical concepts–conditions, symptoms, and risk factors from the pediatric specialization to Infermedica's medical knowledge base. It answers 90% of the conditions listed by the Global Burden of Disease (GBD) for OECD countries and responds to multiple specializations within the pediatrics field. All of them are aligned with our AI-powered digital triage engine and become a starting point to analyze health, run symptom assessments, and recommend the triage level for little patients.

"We built the pediatrics screening tool to answer our clients’ needs, but also to provide medical support to all family members,” comments Piotr Kurkiewicz. “Work on pediatrics started over two years ago. Today, after complex validation processes, we present it with the full confidence that our solution is safe and ready to serve all end-users, despite their age,” he adds.

A symptom checker and triage platform support parents and caregivers in better navigating healthcare services for children. They can use the tool to verify the severity of present symptoms, learn if urgent care is necessary, and schedule a meeting with the right specialist. Furthermore, by providing healthcare centers with initial health and triage information, they can quickly and accurately recommend and provide care to children. The platform is also beneficial for healthcare systems, as they can use it to decrease the costs for unnecessary care while enhancing patient navigation and experiences. Collected data can be easily integrated into EHR systems and used by physicians in health assessment processes.

So far, Infermedica solutions have been used to analyze the health of over 8 million people across the world.

Together with the pediatric medical content, we introduced multiple mechanisms and features that support parents and caregivers. The most important mechanism is what we call “tuples”. It is a system that recognizes combinations of symptoms that are harmless when present alone, but combined with others can predict more serious conditions. Adding tuples allowed us to raise the security of all our tools.

Our goal was to make it seamless to complete the digital health assessment interview and provide the most accurate results possible. Here are some features that were developed to achieve this purpose:

The tool works from the caregiver's perspective, which is why all questions are formed in a way that responds to the view of the parent, nurse, or physician using it.

In the case of assessing infants and small children, knowing their exact age can significantly impact the results and recommendations. That’s why we ask for their date of birth, calculate the child's exact age, and take into account whether the child was born early, on time, or late.

Asking about close relatives helps us learn more about the respective child. That is why, in some cases, our symptom checker also asks for health information about the child's parents, siblings, or grandparents.

We engage more when we can identify with what we see. That is why we added children's body models adjusted to their age and gender, including infant, toddler, and child.

Some terms or questions that we use might require basic medical knowledge, so we complement them with explanations.

Sometimes a simple examination of a child will be necessary. In those cases, we add step-by-step instructions, helping caregivers examine the child independently.

Our pediatric medical content is filled with concepts gathered exclusively for this feature. All medical cases were developed carefully by the Medical Team and verified by the Clinical Validation Team working at Infermedica.

Whether a symptom, risk factor, or condition, every medical concept was derived from well-established medical journals (e.g., Nelson Textbook of Pediatrics, BMJ, NEJM), guidelines from international organizations (e.g., WHO and CDC), and the in-person experience of our physicians.

"Working on the pediatrics assessment tool was extremely complex, as some symptoms or diseases can be identified differently in children of different ages. It took hours of data-driven work to build precise connections and variations of every element,” comments Filip Banaszak, Leader of Pediatric Medical Content. “Our priority for these tools was the security of the little patients. To ensure that, we looked at the best practices used in ER departments and developed new mechanisms of triage tuples, which allow us to also observe important combinations of symptoms and propose safe triage levels,“ he adds.

Infermedica’s new pediatric screening tools, along with the medical content presented within them, were created, validated, and maintained in accordance with the rigorous and well-established procedures that we use at Infermedica.

Furthermore, the new tools have become the subject of clinical tests conducted with independent pediatricians and external partners. The group of external physicians assessed the pediatric triage recommendations as safe in 96.7% of the cases.

In total, we performed tests on over 1,700 test cases that helped us confirm the safety of this tool and incorporate improvements. Detailed information about validation of the pediatric tools is available in the report.

Pricing and availability

Pediatric assessment tool can be added to the medical knowledge base for all users of Infermedica API, Symptom Checker, and Call Center Triage. It is also available as a part of Symptomate, where it can be used and tested.

Detailed pricing is available through Infermedica’s business development managers. Get in touch →

BL/EN/2021/06/07/2