I'm afraid there is no AI that can predict A&E admissions a day in advance, never mind a week. This is typical over-hyping of technology for the benefit of nobody but the investors in companies like Faculty. There are already ways to make statistical forecast for admissions, and these tools use machine learning to refine them a little.
Having dated a couple of nurses over the years, they were not bad at predicting whether they would be busy or not. Certain things were certainties - Friday night would see an increase in fights and alcohol related issues, Monday mornings always had several people coming in because they couldn't get to see their doctor, and so forth. Bad weather would see an increase in cuts and bruises and more serious accidents. Snow would see more car accidents but less bike accidents as bikers didn't use their bikes in the snow.
So, all these factors, which I assume are used with others in the AI version of the nurse's experience, fed into the system.
But for this system to work (just like with the old system), you also need the ideal number of staff available somewhere. You can't drag just anyone into A&E in the same way that you can't just deploy A&E staff elsewhere. There has to be specialist training and experience to match where you are sent. And if there are not surplus staff, which I assume is an efficiency they are looking for, how does the AI A&E modelling take into account sudden surges elsewhere in the hospital?
Some surges, for instance, will involve both. A terrible, large-scale accident not only puts pressure on A&E, but down the line into theatres and wards. And those are unpredictable events, of course.
Although I can see how this can work to an extent, I worry that it is probably too limited because it doesn't apply to the hospital as a whole, and also, is missing one vital bit of data - staff gut instincts based on their holistic experience. Gut instinct is an incredibly important human faculty that has saved people countless times over thousands of years, especially when it comes to human behaviour.
A last thought: this is beginning to sound like psychohistory, Asimov's fictional science developed for the Foundation series. That was a long-term, predictive science of human behaviour taken to the extreme of whole countries and empires. But even in that, there was a problem - The Mule: The unpredictable creature created from two similar creatures. The science knew a mule could happen, but it couldn't predict it. And it brought down the empire.
I'm afraid there is no AI that can predict A&E admissions a day in advance, never mind a week. This is typical over-hyping of technology for the benefit of nobody but the investors in companies like Faculty. There are already ways to make statistical forecast for admissions, and these tools use machine learning to refine them a little.
Having dated a couple of nurses over the years, they were not bad at predicting whether they would be busy or not. Certain things were certainties - Friday night would see an increase in fights and alcohol related issues, Monday mornings always had several people coming in because they couldn't get to see their doctor, and so forth. Bad weather would see an increase in cuts and bruises and more serious accidents. Snow would see more car accidents but less bike accidents as bikers didn't use their bikes in the snow.
So, all these factors, which I assume are used with others in the AI version of the nurse's experience, fed into the system.
But for this system to work (just like with the old system), you also need the ideal number of staff available somewhere. You can't drag just anyone into A&E in the same way that you can't just deploy A&E staff elsewhere. There has to be specialist training and experience to match where you are sent. And if there are not surplus staff, which I assume is an efficiency they are looking for, how does the AI A&E modelling take into account sudden surges elsewhere in the hospital?
Some surges, for instance, will involve both. A terrible, large-scale accident not only puts pressure on A&E, but down the line into theatres and wards. And those are unpredictable events, of course.
Although I can see how this can work to an extent, I worry that it is probably too limited because it doesn't apply to the hospital as a whole, and also, is missing one vital bit of data - staff gut instincts based on their holistic experience. Gut instinct is an incredibly important human faculty that has saved people countless times over thousands of years, especially when it comes to human behaviour.
A last thought: this is beginning to sound like psychohistory, Asimov's fictional science developed for the Foundation series. That was a long-term, predictive science of human behaviour taken to the extreme of whole countries and empires. But even in that, there was a problem - The Mule: The unpredictable creature created from two similar creatures. The science knew a mule could happen, but it couldn't predict it. And it brought down the empire.