Ian Maynard
CEO and Co-Founder
For over fourteen years, Real Time Medical Inc. has been providing hospitals across Canada with round the clock diagnoses and software solutions. Real Time Medical’s teleradiology network is the largest private, Canadian-owned and operated teleradiology service, with over 50 active radiologists who support on-site teams with remote diagnoses.
The company is also a leading provider of diagnostic software solutions for hospitals and clinics. Specifically, Real Time Medical provides artificial intelligence (AI) enabled workload balancing, quality assurance and communications software.
In 2019, Real Time Medical partnered with the National Research Council of Canada to develop AIKnowledgeEnableTM. AIKnowledgeEnableTM is a platform designed to help physicians keep up with the latest research and improve diagnostic accuracy.
AIKnowledgeEnableTM works by connecting physicians, researchers and patients to credible, peer-reviewed resources.
“Imagine a physician looking at a scan of an aortic aneurysm, and a recent research paper from Mayo clinic pops up with insights that helps with the recommended course of treatment for that patient,” explains Ian Maynard, CEO, Real Time Medical.
AIKnowledgeEnableTM delivers three things for users: Credibility, Convenience and Content. The sources are all credible, peer-reviewed, data sources. Convenience is delivered by not having to manually search multiple different data sources or shifting through a long list that typically results from a general search. Users don’t have to sift through piles of research to find the most relevant or most recent scientific findings.
The platform also allows healthcare professionals to rate and comment on the relevance and usefulness of articles, so users can better determine which data will be the most helpful, or directly applicable to their situation.
“It allows physicians and researchers to exchange ideas, recommendations and best practices, wherever they are in the world” adds Maynard. “We’re using artificial intelligence to get the data, and then leveraging the collective intelligence of physicians and researchers to make the findings more useful for everyone.”
Pivoting during the pandemic
While the platform was initially built for physicians and researchers, the COVID-19 pandemic created the impetus for making medical information, more available to the general public.
“One of the many challenges created by the COVID-19 pandemic has been the clutter of information and misinformation plaguing the public,” says Maynard. “The evolving nature of the pandemic poses yet another barrier. Patients have questions about vaccines or courses of treatment, depending on their underlying conditions and risk profiles.”
The COVIDKE app helps overcome these challenges
COVIDKE (short for COVID AIKnowledgeEnableTM) uses the AIKnowledgeEnableTM platform to compile the most recent, relevant and reliable research related to COVID-19. It uses trusted and peer-reviewed medical data sources to cut through the COVID-19 information clutter. The easy-to-use app then provides a valuable and time saving tool for users.
The information found on the COVIDKE app is restricted to peer-reviewed medical sources. Input from social media or general media sources isn’t added. And while the public can view article rankings and researcher comments, only physicians and researchers can add insights, so users can rest assured they’re getting credible information.
Take your health into your own hands
“We all want to make better informed decisions for ourselves and our loved ones,” says Maynard. “As a result we wanted to put the hospital based tools we’d developed for physicians into the hands of the general public.”
The hope is that with COVIDKE, patients can have more credible, better informed discussions with their physicians.
“How many of us already Google our symptoms before consulting our family doctor?” asks Maynard. “While those searches can be helpful, the results are not always credible and the share volume of information makes it difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff.”
Maynard says the next version of the AIKnowledgeEnableTM app won’t be restricted to COVID-19, but will allow users to research any medical condition at a fraction of the cost of comparable systems.
“The app not only empowers people to take better charge of their health, but it’s also designed to empower the partnership between patient and doctor,” he adds.