The NHS Implements Artificial Intelligence to Support Emergency Calls in Wales

The NHS Implements Artificial Intelligence to Support Emergency Calls in Wales
Corti is proud to announce a partnership with the NHS and the Welsh Ambulance Service to test
Corti's #artificialintelligence platform on their 250.000 yearly emergency calls to see if Corti could
help increase the odds for cardiac patients across Wales and hopefully someday the entire UK. The
team will do their best to prove that Corti's technology could support patients and the heroes at
WAST in a powerful way.
Copenhagen, February 19, 2021 -- The Welsh Ambulance Services NHS Trust is collaborating
with Corti.ai to detect critical illnesses during emergency calls using artificial intelligence.
Bordering England to the East, the Irish sea to the North and West, and the Bristol Channel to the
South; Wales is known for its rugged coastline, beautiful mountainous national parks, and
distinctive language.
One problem that isn’t unique to Wales, is the battle against ‘out-of-hospital cardiac arrest (OHCA),
which is one of the biggest killers in the U.K. According to NHS (2019), OHCA survival rate is
currently at 8.6% in the UK, close to the international average.
But over the last couple of years, thought-leaders in the prehospital emergency space have
experimented with a new type of technology to bring down OHCA, artificial intelligence (AI).
Researchers in Seattle and Copenhagen have together with the Danish company Corti.ai, tested a
new AI technology that acts as an assistant to the emergency call-takers sitting behind the 1-1-2 and
9-9-9 emergency numbers.
Here, the AI listens-in during the emergency calls, takes notes, and looks for critical signals in what
the patient or bystander is describing to help the call-taker detect the cardiac arrest faster. Recent
research from Copenhagen has proven that the AI technology from Corti has the potential to reduce
more than 40% of the undetected cardiac arrest cases, which have led to a survival rate in
Copenhagen around 20%, much higher than the U.K average.
The Welsh Ambulance Services NHS Trust (WAST), is one of the most vital organizations in the
Welsh medical sector and it is the ambulance service providing emergency care to the citizens of
Wales, with more than 250,000 emergency calls to attend to each year.
With a mission to elevate pre-hospital preparedness across the Welsh communities, WAST have
chosen to join forces with Corti, and implement their artificial intelligence solution - to detect
OHCA faster and more accurately, and making it useful in the local dialect:
While English is the most commonly used language, the Welsh country-side retains a distinct
cultural identity, with many residents speaking the local language.
WAST is paving its way to the forefront of innovative healthcare solutions by adopting digital tools
to assist them in saving more lives.
“Every second count in an emergency and this is a great example of how we can harness technology
in the control room to determine exactly what’s happening to the patient and dispatch the most
appropriate response. “Immediately life-threatening calls will always receive the highest priority
response, so artificial intelligence could speed up our response and potentially save lives. We’re
delighted to be working with Corti and look forward to reaping the benefits for patients and staff
alike.”

- Dr Brendan Lloyd, Executive Medical Director and Deputy Chief Executive at WAST
The solution will utilize learnings from the thousands of historical emergency calls to enable the
emergency call-takers at WAST to detect critical illnesses faster and more accurately when handling
an emergency. However, the main beneficiaries are the patients, as Corti’s artificial intelligence
offers the risk to reduce premature death from OHCA by reducing errors and increasing the calltakers
speed.
As Corti’s artificial intelligence technology is rooted in understanding audio through speech
recognition, training the tool for the local environment is central to the collaboration's success.
Although the technology has already been validated on millions of medical calls and piloted in
other cities such as Copenhagen and Seattle, it will be trained on local historical calls to adapt the
system to the Welsh context and dialects.
The intricacies of the regional Welsh accent, notable for its lengthened vowels and letters, highly
differ from what Corti’s artificial intelligence has been trained on in the lab.
"At Corti, our mission is to provide equal access to healthcare no matter where the patient is.
Having the opportunity to work with Welsh regions representing a language minority proves to be
an exciting challenge and a huge opportunity to extend the accessibility of our solutions. We believe
that Corti-like services will be a must-have infrastructure in patient consultations going forward,
acute or not, and we are committed to proving this through this project."
- Andreas Cleve, CEO, Corti
Contact us at press@corti.ai for more information
Contact:
Lili Kovari
Corti
Store Strandstræde 21, 4tv
1255 København, Denmark
+45 89 88 36 78
press@corti.ai
https://www.corti.ai