Calces IO

Calces IO is developing an automatised nutritional screening, allowing hospitals to do nutritional screenings on more patients while using fewer resources.

In Denmark, up to 63% of all hospitalised patients are malnourished, which has major consequences for their hospitalisation. Among malnourished patients, the mortality rate is 130% higher, hospital stays are 50% longer and patients are re-admitted 60% more often within 30 days than patients who are not at risk of malnutrition. This means that malnutrition generates an additional cost of DKK 6 billion per year to the Danish healthcare system. However, malnutrition is a problem that can be managed.

If malnutrition is detected, a targeted nutritional intervention can change the patient’s outcomes for the better. Most significantly, mortality can be reduced by 30%, and it is estimated that this can save a cost of DKK 1.5 billion per year.

Since the healthcare staff performing the screenings have an abundance of other tasks, only about 1/3 of all patients are currently getting nutritional screenings. In this way, nutritional screening ends up being a task that is repeatedly postponed.

Solution

To manage this fundamental problem, the perception of nutritional screening as a burdensome task for the healthcare staff must be converted into a helping hand.

At Calces IO, we achieve this by changing nutritional screening from a manual to a fully automatised process. By reusing data that already exists in medical record systems, our screening algorithm can predict whether a patient is at risk of malnutrition. This allows staff to focus their time on providing the right nutritional interventions to patients who need it, rather than having to detect them first.

---