Increased adoption of AI in healthcare has the potential to reduce the administrative burden, improve workflows and personalize the patient experience at scale. But achieving these goals requires improving the integration of siloed technologies and data sources.
These were the major themes in an executive roundtable sponsored by RevSpring at Becker’s 10th Annual Health IT + Digital Health + RCM Meeting. The roundtable, which involved about two dozen technology leaders from across the country, was led by Nick Nunez, VP of strategy and solutions engineer at RevSpring.
Five key takeaways were:
- Use of AI is growing throughout healthcare. Initial adoption of AI in healthcare has primarily been in clinical areas, with many health systems using ambient AI scribes to decrease the documentation burden on clinicians. Now, healthcare leaders are looking at other ways to use AI to improve operations and the patient experience.
For example, according to RevSpring data, 85% of healthcare executives expect AI and generative AI to produce efficiency gains when used in revenue cycle management. Roundtable participants described using AI to assist patients with appointment scheduling, customer service, bill payment and other common patient-facing applications.
- AI provides benefits for both patients and organizations. Roundtable participants pointed out that many patients prefer to perform certain tasks without having to speak to a person. This might include scheduling an appointment, getting an answer to a medical or administrative question or paying a bill. If technology, such as generative AI, can make this task faster and easier, while ensuring accuracy and personalizing the experience, many patients would prefer a tech-enabled path. Also, technology can allow patients to perform these tasks any time they want — not just during normal working hours — and would eliminate the need for patients to wait on hold until a call center rep was available.
However,because some patients are not tech savvy or may have unique questions, health systems must offer “optionality” to always give patients the option to interact with a human if they want. “It’s about meeting each patient where they are at,” said the chief revenue cycle officer from a health system in the Midwest.
Benefits to organizations of adopting AI and other technologies include eliminating time spent on manual, repetitive tasks, increasing operational efficiency and decreasing workforce burnout. In many areas of healthcare, such as RCM and customer service, AI could handle common situations, freeing people up for more intensive, complex, non-routine matters where their skills are most valuable. Use of AI in areas such as RCM is becoming increasingly important as organizations struggle with hiring and retaining people.
- Implementing AI requires a strong, integrated data foundation. AI learns from data. This means data must be high quality. However, healthcare leaders have concerns about the quality and cleanliness of their data. RevSpring has found that 74% of leaders are concerned about duplication of data, 22% have doubts about their data and 46% worry that their analytics tools are too weak. Also, organizations face challenges of disparate data sources, including data in EHRs, billing systems and various engagement tools.
Generating value from AI must start witha foundation of data integrity — with accurate, timely and consistent data — and data integration, along with good data governance.
- IT leaders want partners. IT leaders are overwhelmed with the number of AI vendors. “I’m challenged because there are so many players,” a chief revenue cycle officer said. “I want to make the right decision and don’t want to swing and miss.”
In deciding which players to work with, IT leaders want to find technology experts that can help them solve specific problems and can customize solutions, if necessary. They want to see experience, pilots or proofs of concept and evidence of results. “There has to be measurable improvement in value [from implementing AI],” a director of innovation said.
Several participants expressed interest in AI companies that are willing to guarantee results or go “at risk” financially. “If a vendor is willing to take a risk and make a guarantee . . . that is going to put them higher on our list,” a VP of revenue cycle operations said.
After choosing a vendor, IT leaders want solutions to integrate seamlessly with their existing systems and want to work together as aligned partners. “The way we structure our contracts is . . . we are partners. We’re going to solve this problem together, we have quarterly or half-year metrics, we hold each other accountable and we reassess along the way.”
- While the big EHR incumbents have announced ‘AI is coming,’ there is still a place for best-of-breed solutions. The biggest EHR players (Epic and Oracle) have announced that AI features are on the way. Some healthcare leaders prefer to wait for these new features to be embedded into their EHR. However, most roundtable participants believe it could take years for these AI features to become available. In the meantime, many see immediate bottom-line value in adopting and integrating existing AI solutions into their operational workflows.
