Health systems shouldn't need to be experts in AI.

So argues Olive, a healthcare-centric AI platform provider, and in a recent interview with PYMNTS, Dr. YiDing Yu, the company’s CMO, explained that “one of the core areas where we know there is a waste in the system is on all of the administrative burden that are placed on our doctors and our nurses simply to deliver care,” which she said can be measured in the billions of dollars annually.

For example, said Yu, prior authorizations alone constitute a multi-billion dollar expense for healthcare systems, with roughly one-third of doctors’ offices having an employee focusing solely on them.

“The process is usually done through phone calls and faxes, and actually can take up to two weeks,” noted Yu, and with the manual processes involved, prior authorizations account for 92 percent of patient delays across all scheduled procedures.

To help with that process, Yu explained, Olive works to connect pieces and points of information within the continuum of care that are traditionally siloed, providing “the AI workforce that supports a hospital . . .  instead of a human having to manually fax over information, manually curated clinical documents. Olive can be trained and then be held responsible doing that faster and even more accurately.”

Moreover, the advantage of an AI-driven solution, say Yu, is that unlike traditional workflow offerings it can be trained to understand hundreds of thousands of rules and apply those rules to documentation, in real time, and then draw the necessary criteria from the insurance companies.

In short, by submitting prior authorizations on the patient's and the doctor’s behalf, Olive can cut the time that a patient has to wait for a procedure by over 80 percent.

Not surprisingly, Yu pointed to the advantages of AI in the current pandemic. Health systems needing to conduct COVID testing for their communities have had to register thousands more patients than might have previously been in their system.

Through the platform, she said “we allowed anybody who is signing up for a COVID test to — on the Tufts website, for example — to enter their information securely. And then Olive took over the registration process. We put in the insurance information, we got the appointment scheduled in their medical record. We got the test order for them. We automated the whole process.”

In addition, said Yu, AI can help improve patient care outcomes by recommending to healthcare practitioners that they start intervening with patients at different points of care. 

Comparing AI’s potential in healthcare to the Internet of Things, where devices can monitor and adjust all of a home’s core functions, Yu said, “We trying to create is the same internet of healthcare that you have in your home, the same predictive, and the same action-oriented future that we deserve.”