This week, artificial intelligence applications continue to make inroads into healthcare, with new use cases and deployments coming in all shapes and sizes. AI is streamlining documentation at Federally Qualified Health Centers, helping expand access to effective mental health services, and ensuring digital transformations are safe by design, to name just three examples.
FHQC, CHC use voice AI
According to an announcement Thursday from Suki, the AI voice assistant for healthcare, Navajo Utah Health System, CenterPlace Health, Access Health Louisiana and PrimeCare Health are cutting the burden of clinical and operational documentation using ambient note-taking, coding, dictation and more.
The company says more than 250 health systems and clinics in the United States have reduced paperwork time by an average of 72 percent and shortened pajama time by nearly six hours.
“Suki is a game changer; for my personal sanity,” Dr. Leslie McNaughtan, a family medicine specialist at Utah-based UNHS, a designated Community Health Center that provides medical, dental and behavioral health care on the Navajo Nation and southeastern Utah, said in a statement provided by the provider.
Suki also said the solution can deliver a nine-fold return on investment in one year and is a significant advantage for federally qualified health centers and CHCs with limited resources.
McNaughtan said she has complex patients and many of them arrive late, which impacts her workflow and often shifts focus away from the patient to the nearest computer terminal.
“Suki has helped me reduce the administrative burden to the point where I feel I can continue practicing medicine,” she said.
Last month, Suki also announced that its self-updating ambient voice recording software can be integrated into a variety of electronic health records including Epic, Oracle Cerner, athenahealth, Meditech, and others, and can now be deployed via an API by pasting in code.
NLP for mental health
Mpathic, a provider of actionable conversational analytics that claims to improve healthcare behavior, has announced that it has received a National Institutes of Health Small Business Innovation Research Project to test AI and natural language processing to analyze doctor-patient appointment transcripts in Wave’s AI model.
By leveraging AI and NLP to analyze Wave conversational data from 300 half-hour health consultations, the company said in a July 11 statement it aims to improve cultural congruence in provider-patient interactions.
According to mpathic’s project brief, minority communities are also less likely to seek treatment, less likely to find or access high-quality care, and less likely to complete treatment.
With its project “Empathy for People: Artificial Intelligence to Improve Cultural Match Between Patients and Providers in Real Time,” the Bellevue, Washington-based company says it aims to use AI to:
- Facilitate cultural understanding between mental health providers and patients.
- Closing the gap in mental health care for underserved racial and ethnic groups.
- Improve treatment outcomes and patient satisfaction.
“Our partnership with mpathic on this project is about more than just technological innovation; it’s about moving toward real access to mental health care that recognizes and accommodates the diversity of human cultures,” said Dr. Sarah Adler, founder and CEO of Wave, in the funding announcement.
“The goal is to create tools that allow us to see each patient more holistically and respond to their needs, with respect, humility and understanding.”
According to the NIH website, mpathic will receive $219,212 in funding from the National Institute of Mental Health to conduct the research.
Safety by design certificate
TruCare, a value-based care platform for payers, providers, and public health organizations that leverages AI in its population health management tools, announced on July 9 that it has achieved HITRUST Risk-Based Certification, 2 years. The company has also achieved SOC 2 compliance.
Last week, 1upHealth announced that its native Fast Health Interoperability Resources data aggregation platform has received a one-year HITRUST certification for managing data protection and mitigating cybersecurity threats.
While open standards-based data formats and technologies can be leveraged in the cloud, they are “often hampered by an uncertain environment due to intense merger and acquisition activity,” Pieter De Leenheer, the company’s chief technology officer, commented in a company blog post about HIMSS24.
To combat cybersecurity threats in the healthcare sector, federal agencies and healthcare data security consultants are urging underprepared vendors to beef up the security of their IT infrastructure and ensure their business partners are up to standard.
“1upHealth’s HITRUST i1 certification is proof that they are at the forefront of industry best practices in information risk management and cybersecurity,” Jeremy Huval, HITRUST’s chief innovation officer, said in a statement on July 11.
Additionally, symplr, which provides enterprise healthcare operations software and is partnering with Amazon Web Services to develop machine learning capabilities, said it has achieved SOC 2 for 29 of its products, validating HIPAA security and privacy risk requirements.
“While we acknowledge the inherent risks, we are taking proactive measures to help strengthen our security protocols and continually improve,” Saeed Valian, symplr’s chief information security officer, said in a July 11 statement.
The company also said its CEO, BJ Schaknowski, has also signed onto the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency’s Secure Design commitment initiative.
“The Security by Design commitment, SOC 2 certification, and HITRUST recertification of symplr solutions underscore our dedication to preventing and defending against future threats by protecting sensitive data, while recognizing that healthcare systems cannot afford disruption,” Valian added.
Along with a commitment to transparent development, CISA’s awareness campaign includes monitoring AI software development activities in a series of educational alerts designed to push the industry to develop safer products.
Andrea Fox is senior editor of Healthcare IT News.
Email: [email protected]
Healthcare IT News is a publication of HIMSS Media.
The HIMSS Healthcare AI Forum is scheduled for September 5-6 in Boston. Learn more and register.
The HIMSS Healthcare AI Forum is scheduled for September 5-6 in Boston. Learn more and register.
