According to a recent study, robotic process automation RPA, one of the foundational technologies that comprise intelligent automation platforms, has the potential to save lives in certain surgical situations.
One of the serious risks associated with many kinds of surgery is the patient suffering a heart attack during or soon after non-cardiac surgery—called perioperative myocardial infarction (PMI). The way hospitals try to attenuate that risk is by manual screening to identify high-risk patients. A research team from the University of Basel in Switzerland found that using RPA to automate the screening process results in more accurately predicting which patients were at risk for the condition.
“We hypothesized that robotic process automation could accurately replace experienced clinical staff,” the authors wrote in the report, which appeared in the British Journal of Anaesthesia. “Manual screening by experienced clinical staff and RPA screening were carried out simultaneously and blinded to identify high-risk patients eligible for active surveillance for myocardial infarction/injury, according to predefined screening criteria. Discrepant identification was reviewed by an independent clinician blinded to the origin of the identification, generating a reference standard classification of paired reader-controlled patients to investigate the primary diagnostic endpoint: relative true positive fraction.”
Of 660 participants, the team found that 77 were eligible for active surveillance for perioperative myocardial infarction or injury according to the reference standard classification. RPA screening identified 75 of the eligible patients, while manual screening by clinical experts found 63.
A description of the study and a list of the researchers can be found here.