At the beginning of this year, St. Joseph’s became one of Canada’s first academic community hospitals to deploy AI to improve patient care and streamline staff and physician workloads.

CHARTwatch, which was deployed in partnership with Signal 1, a Canadian health AI startup, is one of over 50 AI and analytics innovations developed by the Data Science & Advanced Analytics (DSAA) team at Unity Health. Our network has deployed more AI solutions into clinical practice than any other Canadian hospital. These innovations are designed to save lives and improve care across the network.

CHARTwatch started at St. Michael’s on the General Internal Medicine unit in 2020 and uses patient data like test results and vital signs to predict the level of support a patient will need. It can tell us which patients are at risk of getting more sick.

Since deployment at St. Michael’s, unplanned mortality has decreased by over 20 per cent. The same is expected to happen at St. Joseph’s.

Alice Feruelo, a Registered Nurse and Team Leader on the Medicine unit at St. Joseph’s, says this unique tool has made nurses feel more confident in their patients’ conditions and has given them back time to dedicate to other necessary tasks.

For Feruelo and other registered nurses like Emme Rose Villanueva, CHARTwatch has started conversations among the team and helped them learn about risk factors they hadn’t thought about before.

“It’s so much easier for us to tell who is high risk now,” says Feruelo.

Bringing CHARTwatch to St. Joseph’s was a collaborative project. Data engineers, clinical informatics specialists, data scientists, system administrators, physicians, nurses and project managers, among others, came together to bring it to life.

“From a technical perspective, the data sources and technologies at St. Michael’s and St. Joseph’s are different, so we had to make some adjustments,” says Chloe Pou-Prom, Senior Data Scientist.

The team trained the AI tool on a new model using data from patients previously admitted to the General Internal Medicine unit at St. Joseph’s. From a clinical perspective, the team tailored the system to fit the needs of the St. Joseph’s community hospital patient care environment.

While it’s still in its earliest phases, everyone agrees that the results seem clear: AI is preventing potentially life-threatening events before they happen and creating an even better system of care as it spreads across our network.