Hong Kong Hospital Authority cuts A&E waits with data & AI

The Hospital Authority of Hong Kong has undertaken a data-driven transformation of its healthcare system with the support of Cloudera's platform.

The Hospital Authority oversees 43 public hospitals and manages over nine million patient records across the region. Seeking to address the challenge of handling vast quantities of medical data from more than 30 source systems, the organisation partnered with Cloudera five years ago to streamline data storage, consolidate information, and support a more unified healthcare infrastructure.

Hong Kong is noted for having some of the highest life expectancies worldwide. Figures from the Centre for Health Protection show that, as of 2023, average male life expectancy stands at 82.5 years and females at 88.1 years. The medical treatment provided through the territory's healthcare system plays a major role in supporting these numbers, as highlighted by the Hospital Authority's ongoing digital initiatives.

Eric Ho, Senior Systems Manager at the Hospital Authority, discussed the reliability of the new data platform and its importance for critical operations. "Cloudera helps in data management for both structured and unstructured data. As one of the most critical infrastructures, we have set up our disaster recovery site in the past few years. We found that Cloudera is a very reliable platform," Ho explained.

The partnership's core objectives have focused on alleviating bottlenecks affecting patient treatment times, enabling data-driven patient care, and deploying artificial intelligence (AI) in diagnostic processes. One measurable outcome has been a reduction in prolonged A&E admission wait times. In the last quarter of 2022, an estimated 12% of patients waited four hours or more for admission. By the third quarter of 2024, this figure had dropped to 3%.

As part of its long-standing commitment to data management, the Hospital Authority launched its first data warehouse over 25 years ago. However, during the COVID-19 pandemic, there was a pressing need to expand and harmonise data storage in order to provide up-to-date information across its network. This involved consolidating more than 30 terabytes of structured data and nearly 100 terabytes of unstructured data gathered from across its hospitals.

The statutory body implemented batch processing to allow overnight collation of all patient information from the previous day. This enables departments including physicians, surgeons, and radiology teams to access recent data when required.

Central to these improvements has been the creation of a Hospital Command Centre, built with Cloudera's platform. The centre provides oversight for admission and discharge processes, identifies potential workflow bottlenecks, and allows visualisation of individual patient records. After this centre was introduced, the administrative efficiency of hospital admissions saw marked enhancement, reflected in the decrease of extended A&E wait times.

Additional initiatives have been implemented with the support of the Cloudera platform. Smart Patient Listing now allows clinicians to tailor treatments based on specific patient conditions by aggregating clinical data from multiple IT systems. The Antibiotics Stewardship Programme was also introduced to monitor antibiotic prescription and usage patterns for individual patients.

The rollout of AIDA (AI and Data Analytics Platform) enables the development of various data-driven use cases and supports AI model training with data stored on Cloudera's infrastructure. The Hospital Authority is exploring options to further integrate real-time and streaming data capabilities to support proactive care. These functions are expected to enhance dashboards and facilitate the development of real-time clinical applications.

Looking ahead, the Hospital Authority intends to harness AI further for detecting abnormalities in X-rays and brain CT scans, providing augmented support for doctors in clinical decision-making. By combining patient data with AI-generated recommendations, the authority intends to support hospitals in delivering the most effective treatment options in ongoing efforts to improve patient outcomes and support the region's high life expectancy.

Reflecting on the broader impact of data and AI, Ho stated, "Without data, you cannot know how a situation appears in local hospitals. Nowadays, AI can do it in the clinical process, and AI is an area we are focused on now."