The World Health Organisation (WHO) has praised Clalit, Israel’s largest health provider, for its effective use of artificial intelligence to treat patients.
It highlighted the AI-powered analysis of patients’ medical records, which proved to be more than 100 times as effective as traditional screening at identifying undiagnosed cases of hepatitis C.
Clalit was also praised for developing a platform that allows it to run multiple medical imaging algorithms from different suppliers, at a time when recruiting radiologists is proving difficult.
It was also praised for being among the first health providers in the world to establish a structured way of evaluating AI systems before implementing them into clinical care.
WHO singled out 11 real-world AI case studies from Finland, Latvia, Portugal, Spain, Norway and the UK as well as Israel, in a report designed to demonstrate its practical applications and patient benefits.
Clalit is the largest of Israel’s four largely government-funded health funds and is responsible for delivering healthcare to just over half the population.
WHO highlighted its hepatitis C system, which was able to identify 38 carriers out of around 500 at-risk patients using existing medical data.
Annual screenings using a traditional blood test had previously found only a few dozen carriers out of 50,000 people tested.
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