That paradox, where technology meant to make healthcare more productive made it less so, has been the bane of IT and digital leaders for decades. Now emerging technologies like generative AI are having the intended effect.
At Allegheny Health Network, that includes a digital nursing program where on-screen nurses help with admissions, discharges and rounding. The 14-hospital system employs the Care.ai video platform that it is also exploring for such uses as pharmacy, virtual sitting and virtual ICU and has a machine vision component that can detect, for instance, whether hands are sanitized or a patient is at risk for falling.
The tool is being rolled out across the $5.3 billion system, with plans to be live at all hospitals by summer 2026.
“As we think about ambient clinical intelligence, and using voice in the inpatient setting, that platform already has the microphone systems built into it, so we can actually just put those software packages onto the hardware, and then we won’t need to have things like an iPad that a human being needs to move into a room,” said Stephen Hunter, vice president of digital strategy and innovation at Allegheny Health Network.
He noted that Care.ai was recently acquired by medical equipment company Stryker, which could incorporate the machine vision technology into its hospital beds, for instance, to boost its sensor and alert systems.
“If you can think about that ecosystem of tools, you’ve now got the sensors doing the alerting. You’ve got a machine vision component looking into the patient’s room in an ambient way. You’ve got the ability for a virtual nurse to remote in and see if there’s a problem,” he said. “All of that can happen before you have to trigger a bedside nurse to physically walk into a room.”
In the first unit where this technology was piloted, it saved staffers a total of four hours per shift, or about 20 to 30 minutes per nurse.
“At scale, the virtual nurses are taking care of anywhere between 1-to-40 and 1-to-50 on a bed-to-clinician ratio, and that’s an almost tenfold improvement from the 1-to-4, 1-to-5 assignment you see today” for in-person nurses, Mr. Hunter said.
Allegheny Health Network is also piloting three ambient listening AI platforms that draft notes for clinical visits. The health system plans to select a solution by the end of the quarter to scale across its outpatient footprint, and is measuring clinical satisfaction, ease of use, cost effectiveness and return on investment.
About 500 physicians are trying out the tools now, with plans to double that number by the end of 2025.
“You’ve got people doing same-day note closure more frequently. You’re taking minutes off the amount of time it takes for them to document per encounter,” Mr. Hunter said. “This is a tough region, geographically, if you’re on cellular, so you may not have great cell service at every one of these locations, so we need to ensure the infrastructure is actually there from our telecom for us to use some of these tools.”
Allegheny Health Network also uses the Kyruus Health data management platform to easily share information with its payer arm, Highmark (both are owned and operated by parent company Highmark Health).
“Realization and pull-through are the main factors here,” Mr. Hunter said. “You want to make sure you’re actually getting value out of this, and it’s not the productivity paradox that we saw for 20 years.”
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