The 200-bed safety-net hospital plans to launch an AI solution in March that recognizes when patients are at risk of falling, notifying nurses.
“That’s going to alert you as it detects any mobility or attempts to get up,” Humboldt Park Health COO Daisy Rodriguez, MSN, RN, told Becker’s at the HIMSS conference in Las Vegas. “The cost savings on that alone is $300,000.”
A human staffer previously had to sit in each room for patients who were a danger to themselves. “Now these tools automatically will ping the nurse and say a patient’s trying to get up, and you can zoom right in and talk to me and say, ‘Hey, do you need to get up? I’ll be right there,'” she said. “Because usually they get up because they need to go to the bathroom.”
The hospital is also piloting Microsoft’s DAX Copilot for ambient AI-automated clinical documentation with six providers and plans to implement AI in areas such as revenue cycle. “Now you’re talking $3 million, $4 million, which for a safety-net hospital that’s another half a percent,” Ms. Rodriguez said.
With ambient AI, “our chief medical officer was training on it this past week, and it identified 10 problems where he was like, ‘I probably would have only caught four,'” Ms. Rodriguez explained. “We’re using ambient listening to help catch things within visits that providers may not catch because they’re multitasking.”
The software can reduce administrative burden for providers, increase early interventions for patients and boost coding and reimbursement, she said.
Another big opportunity for Humboldt Park Health is AI for the revenue cycle. “I’ve been exploring that here [at HIMSS] pretty much all day, looking at ensuring that you’re integrating your financial systems and your denials management systems and your coding and billing systems,” she said. “When you look at margins for safety net hospitals you’re less than half a percent. So if you’re not really tight on the revenue cycle, that’s just disastrous, in addition to Medicaid cuts that are being proposed.”
She said AI has become affordable even for safety-net hospitals, especially after factoring in return on investment and the increasing number of vendors in the space. “There are some niche companies that have a great product out there,” she said. “Sometimes going with the largest company isn’t advantageous for a safety-net hospital.”
