AITRICS Signs Hong Kong MOU to Validate VitalCare AI in Hospitals

Korean medical AI company AITRICS has signed memoranda of understanding with the University of Hong Kong's Centre for Health AI Research and Translation (CHART) and Gleneagles Hospital Hong Kong. The goal is to validate its patient-deterioration prediction software, AITRICS-VC (VitalCare), in local clinical settings and bring it into hospital use.

What VitalCare does

VitalCare monitors inpatients' electronic medical record data in real time and flags early signs that a patient's condition is worsening. In general wards, it classifies the risk of acute severe events within six hours (death, cardiac arrest or transfer to intensive care), sepsis within four hours, and cardiac arrest within 24 hours. In intensive care units, it predicts the risk of death within six hours. The aim is to help clinicians quickly identify high-risk patients and intervene in time.

Two agreements, two studies

The collaboration is split into two separate agreements covering technical validation and hospital deployment. AITRICS and HKU's CHART will first run a retrospective study using historical records from local patients to test the accuracy of VitalCare's predictions.

Under a parallel three-party agreement, Gleneagles Hospital Hong Kong will deploy VitalCare in an actual ward and assess its clinical value, while CHART carries out a prospective clinical study that tracks effectiveness in patients treated there.

CEO Kwang-joon Kim said the company is moving into a stage where it verifies performance with local clinicians in real care environments, building on clinical references accumulated at large hospitals in South Korea. He said evidence from Gleneagles, a leading private teaching hospital in Hong Kong, together with the retrospective and prospective data, will support expansion into Hong Kong's public hospitals and across Asia.

What comes next

AITRICS obtained formal product approval for VitalCare from Hong Kong's Medical Device Division last year and set up a local subsidiary in May. Once the clinical validation is complete, the company plans to use the resulting references to bid for public hospital tenders in Hong Kong and to target neighboring markets such as Southeast Asia.