Show Notes
At many health centers, plain old telephone service (POTS) is still one of the primary forms of interaction with patients outside of office visits. In a recent interview with Tracy Causey, CEO of Capital Area Health Network, he shares how their three sites, servicing about 17,000 patients, used AI to streamline patient interactions. As an eClinicalWorks site, the health system decided to try healow Genie to handle calls. It was a simple integration, and worked "out of the box." Now healow Genie handles about 80% of all calls with no staff interaction, answering the phone within 14 seconds. The approximate 400 calls they get each day are spread out, as patients take advantage of 24/7 availability. And when a call does require staff, healow Genie gets a live agent person on the phone within a minute and 20 seconds. Learn more about Capital Area Health Network: https://cahealthnet.org/ Learn more about eCW: https://www.eclinicalworks.com/ Healthcare IT Community: https://www.healthcareittoday.com/
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Hundreds of companies are offering AI for clinical and other healthcare related uses. Kenny Wong, Chief Product Officer at xCures, offers two criteria for judging the value of a solution: first whether the outcome is repeatable and shows the work that was done transparently, and second whether it is generating a desired result such as saving you time. In our recent interview at the Civitas conference, Wong reviews his background in genetics, the history of xCures, and the state of data today. He estimates that 80% of healthcare data is "messy," meaning it exists in unstructured formats such as PDFs and JPEGs. xCures can extract the information needed for patient care from these sources—what Wong calls a "clinical clarity engine." Learn more about xCures: https://xcures.com/ Healthcare IT Community: https://www.healthcareittoday.com/
Innovar Healthcare is known for data movement and integration in healthcare: any data in any format, between any set of customers. One major trait that distinguishes Innovar from nearly all services in health care today is that it offers and supports open source tools, which is common in other industries. In our recent interview at the Civitas conference, CEO and Founder Loyd Bittle talks about security, administrative convenience, and use cases for his company's integrations. The first part of our interview is devoted to security incidents. Bittle points out that while open source code (and nowadays AI) makes it easier for malicious intruders to attack, it also makes it easier for researchers to uncover bugs, and for Innovar to provide patches. This actually happened recently when researchers discovered a security issue with the open source Mirth Connect project which Innovar Healthcare and the community forked to create BridgeLink. Once Innovar and the BridgeLink community learned about the security issues, they were able to address them quickly. Bittle notes that it's now unsafe to continue using the insecure open source Mirth Connect project. Learn more about Innovar Healthcare: https://www.innovarhealthcare.com/ Learn more about BridgeLink: https://www.bridgelink.net/ Healthcare IT Community: https://www.healthcareittoday.com/
After 30 years of orchestrating workflows and connecting systems across providers and IT vendors, PerfectServe continues to expand what it offers provider organizations, including a new AI layer called ConnectiveIQ that will underpin all of its AI-native products moving forward. The first ConnectiveIQ-infused product, Intelligent Answering, offers AI call handling and launched in August. CEO Guillaume Castel shares in our recent interview that ConnectiveIQ allows much higher benefits for the data they have been handling all this time. Castel's goal for PerfectServe is to "get the right information to the right person at the right time using the most appropriate channel, no matter where." He says that, thanks to their deployment of an AI agent, PerfectServe is finding more ways to relieve busy clinicians and staff of tasks that don’t need their attention to be resolved. More and more, patients who call in to a provider can get answers through AI, with an operator or clinician picking up the phone only if a person is really needed. Learn more about PerfectServe: https://www.perfectserve.com/ Healthcare IT Community: https://www.healthcareittoday.com/
CSIRO’s Smart Health Checks is Bringing Conversations Back to Care Healthcare interoperability is seen as a back-office challenge and it is rarely spoken about as a benefit to clinicians. But what if it was? Could it help accelerate initiatives? An initiative in Australia is doing just that - improving data exchange to reduce screen time so that clinicians can focus more on conversations with patients. Healthcare IT Today sat down with Kirsty Maunder, Senior Business Analyst at CSIRO’s Australian e-Health Research Centre. She explains how their Smart Health Checks initiative uses Smart on FHIR technology to pre-populate clinical forms and return providers to natural conversations with patients. You will discover how bidirectional data write-back stops transcription errors and why building from frontline clinical frustrations drives genuine technology adoption. 🔔 Subscribe for more great interviews with Health IT leaders. Learn more about CSIRO's Australian e-Health Research Centre at https://aehrc.csiro.au/ Find more great health IT content at https://www.healthcareittoday.com/
Epic Agent Factory, a tool for Epic users to build their own AI agents, was announced this past January. Now, according to Derek De Young, Software Developer at Epic, the tool is moving into a new stage where Epic will quickly put it into the hands of their customers. Agent Factory provides a platform to leverage 129 of the AI features in Epic. De Young describes three stages in its use. First, he expects organizations to shape existing AI features to the organization's policies, guidelines, data, and workflows. Next, they will build new agentic features for revenue cycle management, clinical decision making, patient engagement, etc. In the future, Epic will expand the scope of Agent Factory to use external connectors and run on partner platforms outside Epic, including Care Everywhere. Learn more about Epic: https://www.epic.com/ Healthcare IT Community: https://www.healthcareittoday.com/