Pittsburgh-based Allegheny Health Network is examining how ambient AI can boost population health, its new CIO told Becker’s.
The 14-hospital system has a codevelopment deal with healthcare AI startup Abridge and can tap into its parent organization, Pittsburgh-based Highmark Health, to push patient and member insights directly into clinical workflows.
“The real opportunity, from my standpoint, is how do you leverage [ambient] to do population health and value-based care? How do you leverage it to close care gaps? How do you leverage it to ensure there’s [primary care provider] attribution and care alignment?” said Richard Medford, MD, chief digital information officer of Allegheny Health Network. “Those are the things that are really exciting in terms of exploring.”
He joined the organization in August, a month after his new boss, Highmark Health Chief Information Digital Officer Alistair Erskine, MD. Dr. Medford was excited to work at the nexus of the payer and provider worlds, with a less adversarial relationship than the average health system. About half of Allegheny Health Network patients are insured by its sister company, payer giant Highmark.
“You don’t normally see an insurance company or a health plan talking about how to make the health experience of a patient better,” he said. “That intersection was super interesting to me.”
The $5.6 billion hospital system also partners with Care.ai on smart room technology, including virtual nursing and computer vision for fall prevention. Dr. Medford hopes to incorporate the health system’s internally developed generative AI models into that platform’s edge computing system to, for instance, allow nurses to ask questions about hospital policies right into the cameras.
He envisages ambient AI going beyond just relieving clinician burnout and documentation overload to surfacing care gaps and then nudging providers when the patient is in front of them. Allegheny Health Network is live with Abridge at its ambulatory clinics and plans to expand the AI scribing technology to inpatient and emergency care in 2026.
Highmark Health already develops a lot of AI internally, so Dr. Medford is recalibrating to the system’s appetite to build more than buy (the organization also has its own health IT company, enGen).
He also wants to bolster bedrock Epic functionality and implement more of the EHR’s predictive analytics and AI capabilities. He hopes to speed up AI governance (and thus innovation), moving from a sequential to a “parallel” review process where compliance, risk, security and legal processes happen at the same time.
“The technology exists. It’s really about getting the operational ownership and the buy-in,” he said.
In addition, Allegheny Health Network is setting up a command center for transfers, capacity management and virtual care. The facility is expected to go live in the first half of next year, powered by Epic’s Grand Central module.
“There’s a nice mix of core basic things that need to be done, and things that are super exciting — and trying to balance those two,” Dr. Medford said.
