Dasa invests in ML to offer Brazilians an even smoother health journey
About Dasa
Dasa is the largest integrated health network in Brazil. As part of the lives of over 23 million people a year, it offers high-quality technology, an intuitive experience, and a forward-looking attitude. The company has over 50,000 collaborators and 250,000 partner doctors, in addition to more than 59 diagnostic medicine and hospital brands across hundreds of units in Brazil.
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Contact usSupported by API Vision and Document AI, Dasa deployed an OCR platform connecting patients to the convenience of medical prescription digitalization and smart reading.
Google Cloud results
- +700,000 readings since deployment
- 97% of readings feature response times under 15 seconds
- 10% higher conversion rate when using OCR for scheduling
Serving nearly 360,000 requests per month
With over 50,000 collaborators, Dasa is an integrated health network serving patients throughout their health journey. In addition to diagnostic medicine, the company combines a substantial number of hospitals across Brazil with a large group of providers and operators.
Dasa's goal is to transform how health is addressed in Brazil by offering value-based comprehensive care. Driving transparency in medical and hospital processes has been the company's mission since day one, making things easier for patients, doctors, labs, and hospitals alike.
This mission crystallized recently with Dasa's value index, a number resulting from a weighted calculation of 13 relevant public and audited indicators of Dasa's quality, security, and results. The company's core aim is to offer a comprehensive patient-centered approach, based on data gathered at various points throughout the process, which helps provide proactive care.
After consolidating a number of mergers and acquisitions in recent years, Dasa began doing business in an even more complex operation network. With business expanding into other, increasingly diversified industries, having a centralized repository of large volumes of data generated by several company units was becoming a challenge.
Relying on cloud technology for a more connected healthcare
Having tools that could easily connect with data lakes to view data and drive insights became a strategic priority for Dasa. The company also needed a platform that would help create, assess, and monitor unique machine-learning models (ML).
Faced with this scenario, and despite having another cloud data storage provider, Dasa decided to try out Google Cloud in 2020. The main reason was that the platform has the variety of products the company needs to meet its main requirements: not only does it offer a repository, but it also features a wide array of comprehensive solutions that use this data for ML purposes.
"We were looking for a partner that would think forward and share our genuine interest in healthcare and company growth."
—Hommenig Scrivani, Data and Analytics Director, DasaBigQuery and Dataproc are the foundation for processing, managing, and analyzing large data volumes. On that note, Vertex AI performs analyses and runs models in a much simpler way, given its powerful capacity to combine several types of information. And not just models: it is a full, unified artificial intelligence (AI) platform supporting the entire operation.
Nav and Google Cloud: Deploying a complete, resilient OCR system
Thanks to the deployment of these and other Google Cloud tools, Dasa has managed not only to create a robust infrastructure for its business, but also to drive its strategy for constant service improvement. As a result, building its own optical character recognition (OCR) system for prescription reading stopped being an idea and became a reality.
The system was deployed on Nav, Dasa's digital health platform. It was automatically able to recognize text in prescriptions, whether digital or handwritten. This helped speed up test and appointment scheduling via the application, as patients are no longer required to enter the name of each test ordered.
"Our goal is to make scheduling simple and transparent for patients, so the only thing they have to worry about is taking a picture of the prescription and making decisions about things that depend solely on them, like the time and place for the test," said Rafaela Braga, Senior Data Science Manager at Dasa.
For that to work, AI was a crucial element. A key tool was API Vision, a service that extracts insights from images and videos without the need to train and, consequently, to have experience with AI.
In turn, Document AI enables data extraction from photos of patient health insurance cards to make it easier to validate insurance plan information and optimize service processes.
"Google Cloud's machine learning platform has everything our Data Science team needs. Google Cloud manages to read handwritten prescriptions that are sometimes hard to understand."
—Daniel Izumi Katagiri, Data Science Coordinator, DasaA positive diagnosis for Dasa and users
The deployment of OCR technology in Dasa's customer service through the Nav platform reduced calls to the company's call center for test and appointment scheduling, thus reducing contact friction, as everything is solved using just one application.
"We're talking about a solution that is directly connected to the end-user platform and available 24/7," said Rafaela Braga.
The diagnosis was positive for the company: since deployment, the system has already read over 700,000 prescriptions and has served nearly 360,000 requests per month. Scheduling with OCR has resulted in a 10% higher conversion rate compared to scheduling without using the technology.
The system's downtime has been reduced to a minimum, and response times are impressive: 97% of calls to the Nav platform feature response times under 15 seconds, and 73% of those are under 5 seconds.
"Adopting Google Cloud's ML solutions enabled OCR deployment to read prescriptions and it resulted in significant improvements in our patients' experience with test scheduling and the digital journey."
—Rafaela Braga, Senior Data Science Manager, DasaBringing clinic and technology together: Planning ahead
Building on the success of the OCR project, Dasa will continue investing in machine-learning modeling and using artificial intelligence in its ongoing journey of service improvement and excellence.
The company is working with generative AI tools to boost patient experience and provide customized service in its network of diagnostic medicine, hospitals, and care management.
Completed projects include a tool designed to help doctors in the network spot relevant findings in test results and, consequently, notify the prescribing physician, who has the patient's consent to access them, always ensuring data privacy.
The next steps involve further developing this project using language models as support to detect relevant healthcare issues in medical histories and reports, in addition to other tools that help doctors provide their services.
Listen to this Google Cloud Cast episode and learn why Dasa considers generative AI a vital element in predictive medicine.
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About Dasa
Dasa is the largest integrated health network in Brazil. As part of the lives of over 23 million people a year, it offers high-quality technology, an intuitive experience, and a forward-looking attitude. The company has over 50,000 collaborators and 250,000 partner doctors, in addition to more than 59 diagnostic medicine and hospital brands across hundreds of units in Brazil.