While AI has been getting a lot of attention for its potential to help manage the COVID-19 pandemic, there’s no shortage of possibilities, as well, on what might be called the less dramatic side of healthcare.
For example, Intermountain Health recently announced a partnership with Notable Health, a health IT provider that focuses on the administrative side of healthcare, “to reimagine the manual, repetitive administrative aspects of patient intake and post-visit follow-up into a fully automated, intuitive digital experience.”
Specifically, the Utah-based provider aims to transform ambulatory check-ins through mobile registration and virtual clinical intake for both in-person and telemedicine appointments.
“Creating a more seamless and empowered consumer experience is critical to meeting evolving patient expectations. This starts with digitally transforming the complex process of accessing and registering for care,” said Kevan Mabbutt, senior vice president and chief consumer officer at Intermountain. “By engaging patients to provide information through My Health+ about their health before their visit, we can better address what type of care our patients need, and where and when they can receive it across the care delivery continuum.”
With the Notable platform, Intermountain aims to extend the capabilities of its My Health+ health app to automate administrative workflows for staff, streamline the check-in experience for patients, and simplify follow-up for providers. Specifically with the goal of reducing the number of patients in waiting rooms and offering virtual visit options when appropriate, both desirable outcomes in the age of COVID-19, Intermountain’s new platform will allow patients to benefit from a digital intake process that, among other things, verifies insurance eligibility and prompts patients to enter symptoms and medications directly from their smartphone through dynamic questionnaires customized for an individual’s medical history.
“COVID-19 has introduced both a challenge and an opening to rethink how healthcare is delivered. Innovative health systems like Intermountain are investing in the digital patient experience to meet evolving expectations for safe, touchless care,” said Ezekiel J. Emanuel, MD, PhD, vice provost of global initiatives at the University of Pennsylvania, special advisor to the director-general of the World Health Organization, and a Notable Health advisor. “As we usher in this new era of care delivery, efficiency is solvency and automation is the entryway.”
To that end, the Notable platform inputs patient-provided data into structured EHR fields, and uses AI-enabled digital assistants to automate the creation of clinical documentation. In an initial deployment, the platform has reduced charting time for Intermountain medical assistants by over 30 minutes per day.