Digital side-effects monitor

A secure and accessible guide for cancer patients: they report any problems by voice or text, and the doctor is notified in good time. The data remains within the hospital.

The app helps cancer patients between treatment cycles. Side effects often occur at home, and patients are unsure whether they are experiencing a common issue or a condition that cannot be delayed. Doctors, for their part, receive so many alerts from today’s apps that urgent ones can easily get lost in the mix. Patients use the app to describe how they are feeling in Czech: they can speak into the app, write in their own words or select options using large buttons. Hlídač only asks for any information that is still missing. For minor issues, the patient receives clear, pre-approved advice. For serious issues, they can see immediately what to do, and the care team is alerted straight away via the app and by email. If no one acknowledges the alert in time, it is forwarded to a backup contact. The app has been designed from the outset for people with disabilities: it works with a screen reader, offers enlarged text and voice output, has no time limits, and provides the option to select ‘I don’t know’ for every question. Safety is our top priority. AI merely helps to understand what the patient has said; it never determines the severity. Decisions are based on fixed, versioned rules that always produce the same result, and every proposed severity level is confirmed by a doctor. Every decision can be traced back to the patient’s own words. Patient data never leaves the hospital. The solution fully supports locally operated models: speech recognition runs directly on our device and the recording is neither sent nor stored anywhere; the text comprehension model can be switched to a local model within the hospital with a single setting. The model never sees medical records, only the patient’s own report, from which names, national insurance numbers, telephone numbers and addresses have been removed in advance. No messaging apps or third parties. Every access and every AI call is logged, and security measures are verified by automated tests. At the heart of the solution is InterSystems IRIS for Health. It stores actual hospital data, which Hlídač merely reads and never alters, and retrieves treatment details (e.g. the date of the last dose) directly from it. Patient reports are recorded back into the hospital record in the HL7 FHIR R4 standard (questionnaire, responses, severity levels with data sources, tasks for the team), so that they can also be read by other hospital systems. Entries are reliably delivered via the IRIS integration platform, and every step is visible in Visual Trace. The application has only the most essential permissions to access the database. The result: patients feel safer at home and receive help in good time; doctors see only the cases that require their attention, complete with an explanation of why; and the hospital retains full control over its data.