An Australian digital health company has won the blue ribbon at the World Summit Awards for predicting a patient’s likely future.
Forecasting a patient’s risk of hospitalisation has garnered a gong for health tech PenCS at the World Summit Awards hosted by the United Nations.
The awards are a global initiative that recognise digital solutions that work towards the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in significant ways.
PenCS won the good health and wellbeing category for their digital health informatics solution that leverages AI to forecast a patient’s risk of hospitalisation solution.
PenCS were one of 40 World Summit Awards Winners for 2023, selected from over 400 nominees from 88 countries. Other winners in the good health and well-being category include CheckPointCardio remote monitoring medical solution from Bulgaria, and Mediwave, a digital emergency response suite for Sri Lanka’s ambulance service.
PenCS’s Risk of Hospitalisation Module uses de-identified primary care data, and applies an algorithm to consider patient demographics, socioeconomic index of relative advantage/disadvantage, physiological information, medications, chronic conditions, pathology categories according to abnormal levels in test results, and lifestyle factors.
Risk of hospitalisation is then predicted and communicated to GPs who recall a patient to the clinic for a review which may reduce potentially preventable hospitalisations.
According to a PenCS spokesperson, in 2023 the Risk of Hospitalisation Module identified around 167,000 at-risk patients, across 51 general practices. These patients, if hospitalised, presented a potential cost of over $1 billion to the healthcare system.
