SiloGen and Tietoevry Care are developing a Finnish-speaking AI assistant for healthcare professionals

Harnessing generative AI to help healthcare can free up medical staff’s time for patients, improve treatment outcomes and save costs for society.‍

There is no shortage of data in healthcare. However, to ensure quality treatment medical staff has to retrieve data manually from different sources, which is slow and inconvenient. To solve resource challenges in health care, it’s important to find ways to free up professionals’ time for more productive work, such as time with patients.

Tietoevry Care, a leading provider of welfare and healthcare software and digitalization solutions in the Nordics, and AI company Silo AI are currently developing a solution to tackle these challenges. The objective of the collaboration is to build the first AI-assisted search and discussion tool in Finnish on Tietoevry's Lifecare patient information system’s user interface, on the doctor's or nurse's desktop, where it provides effective support for searching and visualizing patient data. When a doctor or a nurse has questions about a patient's data, the AI assistant can provide answers without the need to search for information from different sources or to open multiple
applications. This frees up medical staff’s time for actual patient work.

Novel AI solutions together with partners

Tietoevry Care has been building the foundation for the use of data and AI in healthcare for years already. AI-assisted solutions have been created for example for faster diagnosis of rare diseases and more efficient treatment of acute leukemia with partners, such as the Hospital District of Helsinki and Uusimaa (HUS).

‍"We are now taking significant steps in next-generation generative AI services. They introduce a significant number of new opportunities for solving major challenges in healthcare. Pilots and conceptualization with partners to make more efficient use of healthcare data accelerate the development of new applications and solutions. Even though times change, and technologies evolve, we remain committed to developing responsible and ethically sustainable technology", says Ari Järvelä, Managing Director, Tietoevry Care.

GPT language model learns healthcare vocabulary

The AI assistant’s ability for dialogue is based on an open Finnish GPT language model. In the first phase of conceptualization, the language model will be finetuned for conversation, and it will be taught Finnish healthcare vocabulary by utilizing the technology of Silo AI’s subsidiary SiloGen specialized in language models. Moreover, the suitability of the language model for the Lifecare patient information system will be confirmed. The AI assistant works based on the semantic similarities between the user's own searches and the data from the language model. Testing of the AI partner will be carried out on Tietoevry's own platform instead of a public cloud service. This ensures the secure processing and the privacy of the data.

‍"In terms of value creation and digital sovereignty, it is particularly important that European technology companies develop their own artificial intelligence and language models which are tailored to their specific needs. At the same time, we can ensure that the models are based on data and information representing the citizens and organizations of the region, and that private data is processed in a secure manner. Tietoevry Care is a great example of a software company with a good foundation to utilize data and artificial intelligence, and which as a pioneer tailors open models to their needs", says Peter Sarlin, CEO and founder, Silo AI.

Tietoevry has actively driven the adoption and scale of new technologies across industries and in society over decades and through several technology evolution cycles. Tietoevry sees that Generative AI has created the next widely impacting evolution cycle and is actively working to discover and concretize the benefits of GenAI to accelerate its implementation by running efficient use cases across industries together with customers and expanding network of partners – with ethical AI as a key design principle.

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