About KKH U-PAL Chatbot

The Urgent Paediatric Advice Line (U-PAL) chatbot, jointly developed with KK Women’s and Children’s Hospital (KKH), provides virtual paediatric advice so parents can better understand if their children’s condition requires immediate medical care.

U-PAL aims to review the number of less complex and less difficult cases seen at Children’s Emergency – particularly the Priority Level 3 cases. Emergency Priority Level 3 cases refer to patients with acute symptoms but are in stable condition and are able to walk. This allows clinicians to better attend to patients who require more immediate care and attention.

Virtual paediatric advice chatbot

First-of-its-kind in Singapore

Powered by KeyReply’s Natural Language Processing (NLP) engine

KKH U-PAL CHATBOT at a glance

Opportunities

The Children’s Emergency at KKH is crowded with many cases that are less critical than life-threatening ones.

When clinicians are met with an influx of less serious cases, children with real emergencies may risk getting less immediate attention. With U-PAL providing virtual paediatric advice, parents can better understand if their children’s condition requires immediate medical care. This helps clinicians to prioritise the medical attention required to patients, according to the severity of their medical conditions.

Solutions

KKH and Synapxe have worked closely to build a live chat platform, which collects text messages and analyses them to build up paediatric medical knowledge and Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs). The chatbot is further enhanced by supervised machine learning to increase its efficiency and accuracy.

U-PAL performs basic medical triaging and provides responses for majority of common acute concerns. If U-PAL is unable to answer the question, it will be brought to the attention of the care team.

Impact

U-PAL provides parents and caregivers with a better understanding of the required medical care. This reduces anxiety and prevents them from making unnecessary trips to hospitals. In turn, this reduces the crowd at the KKH’s Children’s Emergency, allowing clinicians to focus on critical cases that require immediate medical care and attention.

Future Outlook

The care team at KKH and Synapxe are constantly enhancing the knowledge base for the chatbot engine to better interpret conversations and provide more relevant answers to users.

Partner