Discovery@FI

EMPOWER: Using AI to Harness Electronic Health Records for Empowering Cancer Patients ​

Active
5/2025 ⟼ 12/2028

Accurate, accessible information is crucial in healthcare. It helps patients manage their health and navigate medical care, reducing anxiety and improving adherence. It enables informed decisions, clarifies medical procedures, aligns expectations, and fosters control over patients’ healthcare journey. This is especially important in the context of diseases like cancer that can have a disruptive impact on the lives of patients and their broader social circles.

The EMPOWER project will build on three cutting-edge technologies we have already investigated in a prototype of an empowerment application:

  1. recommender systems for information delivery tailored to patient’s needs, where the needs are automatically learned from electronic health records (EHRs) and the patient interactions with the assistant (what we call their physical and digital phenotype, respectively);
  2. multilingual large language models for personalised medical question answering based on authoritative information sources;
  3. intelligent user interfaces for seamless and intuitive interaction with the assistant. The assistant will help patients and their families understand information in their EHRs at their own pace and in the comfort of their homes. They will also be able to seek related information from public sources explaining their condition and journey through the healthcare system in detail. By facilitating access to clear, concise, and relevant medical information, our AI assistant will empower the patients and their caregivers to truly comprehend their health status, treatment plans, and potential side effects. Additionally, it will prepare them for future clinician consultations by helping them articulate their concerns in a much more focused manner than possible now. This proactive approach ensures that patients are not only well-informed but also more engaged and confident in their treatment decisions, ultimately enhancing the effectiveness of medical consultations and improving health outcomes.

Our role in the project is to coordinate the consortium and deliver the bulk of the R&D results.