AI assists patients and managers at Fraser Health

SURREY – Meet Fraser. Born with the assistance of artificial intelligence and bearing the health authority’s name, Fraser is a digital navigator that recently celebrated its first birthday by helping more than 67,000 people over the past year find the closest, most appropriate care.

Fraser lives on Fraser Health’s Digital Front Door, a self-serve triage service accessible by smartphone or computer.

The digital front door functions as a primary point of entry – or front door – to healthcare, helping patients find care based on their location, symptoms, and availability of services.

When people enter through the digital front door and meet Fraser online, they are asked about their symptoms and where they live. Fraser helps them decide if they should seek emergency care, urgent care, virtual care, palliative care or care for mental health and substance use concerns. Patients are matched with the nearest available care option that best suits their needs.

For urgent and primary care, Fraser Health’s digital front door allows people to ask for a callback from an Urgent and Primary Care Centre nurse, enabling them to not have to wait on hold on the phone or in line in person before triage.

Matching people with the closest, most appropriate care helps to ensure people get the right care where and when they need it. In some cases, it may reduce emergency department admissions and readmissions by directing people to more appropriate care options.

Fraser provides navigational recommendations but does not make independent clinical decisions. For example, in the event of a navigational error or uncertainty, the system has built-in safety nets, automatically directing patients to human care providers, such as Fraser Health Virtual Care, for further assessment.

The Digital Front Door is a key component of Fraser Health’s Digital Twin, the first digital transformation project of its kind for a health authority in B.C. The digital twin provides a digital replication, or mirror, of Fraser Health’s physical operations and real-time information that can be used by staff and medical staff to make data-informed decisions to support our patients and clients.

The digital twin taps into Fraser Health data and key clinical information systems and can represent how people move through our health system. In doing so, this assists us in implementing efficient, effective changes that will benefit our patients as well as the staff and medical staff who support them.

“Timely and convenient access to care is a key pillar of our digital strategy,” said Dr. Victoria Lee, president and CEO, Fraser Health. “The digital front door and digital twin are major steps in our digital transformation and will evolve so our system becomes more agile and better able to meet the needs of our patients, staff and medical staff.”

“The digital twin technology enables us to be insightful in the planning of our operations in a digital construct, and it allows us to ask operational questions as we see the flow of people through our system,” said Sheazin Premji (pictured), executive director, Centre for Analytics, Data Science and Innovation, Fraser Health.

She added, “For example, if we’re looking at diagnostic services or maternal services, our digital twin will help us to determine the best location for those services by creating a digital model of them based on accurate patient volumes before we bring in any staff or medical equipment.”

The new platform for the digital transformation is in the Cloud, which allows safe and timely access to information from anywhere and adjusts automatically as needed to serve our growing population and demand for services.