As administrative burdens, regulatory complexities and financial pressures have increased, we’ve somehow lost sight of the human side of healthcare.
At Altera Digital Health, we strive to restore the personal moments between providers, patients and those who serve them with artificial intelligence (AI). Our goal is not to replace people, but to minimize the distractions consuming their time, resources and energy.
While this philosophy underpins our development efforts, we are also investing heavily in internal AI training and usage so we can bring new capabilities to our clients faster and be more effective, trusted advisors. Here’s a peek at four powerful ways we’re leveraging AI from the inside.
- Predicting and preventing performance issues
One of AI’s strengths is pattern recognition, an invaluable capability for Altera’s hosting services as systems—and threats—grow increasingly complex. After establishing a baseline of normal system performance, predictive AI can detect subtle anomalies that signal a future problem might occur. The AI alerts our team to potential issues, isolates the likely cause and reduces alert noise from temporary spikes.
Trading more traditional, reactive monitoring for preventative maintenance means our teams can identify and resolve potential system issues before they impact clients. Using this approach, we are now preventing an average of 13 “proactive major incidents” per month. This directly translates to higher uptime and greater stability so our clients can trust the systems they use every day—while avoiding unnecessary frustrations, care delays, lost revenue and reduced quality of care.
- Expediting engineering
The handoff from user experience design to front-end development is often a source of delay and inconsistency. Manually translating visual designs into functional, high-quality code is a repetitive task that consumes thousands of valuable engineering hours.
To accelerate this phase of the development process, we are piloting an AI-driven pipeline that automates this translation. The AI analyzes designs and automatically generates tokenized, accessible, web-component–packaged UI code, removing the manual coding step for user interfaces (UIs). As a result, we can improve UI consistency and free our developers to focus on solving more complex challenges. In fact, this initiative is projected to save thousands of engineering hours per year across our scrum teams—time that can be reinvested into more research and development to our clients’ benefit.
Similarly, we are also using AI to perform testing and quality assurance at a previously impossible rate. This has been particularly powerful for unstructured inputs, which will only become more common as we scale solutions like ambient listening for TouchWorks® EHR, Paragon® Denali and Sunrise™.
The speed and precision AI enables means we can produce even more reliable, higher quality software—and get new tools and features in the hands of users more quickly.
- Reducing regulatory analysis burdens
Keeping up with regulatory changes is a constant, time-intensive challenge. Running a gap analysis on new regulatory requirements against existing product documentation typically requires weeks of painstaking manual work by highly skilled analysts.
Instead of following the traditional approach, our Paragon team leveraged a combination of AI tools to ingest, analyze and compare the vast documents. The AI could instantly cross-reference thousands of pages, identifying discrepancies and potential gaps with incredible speed and accuracy. The team saved an estimated six weeks of analyst effort, which provided a head start on development and compliance efforts, accelerated our time-to-market and helped reduce risk.
- Reimagining client service
Ensuring consistent, high-quality communication across thousands of client support interactions is a major operational challenge. Manually reviewing support cases for tone, clarity and effectiveness is slow, subjective and doesn’t scale.
To better address client needs, we developed an AI agent that acts as a specialized communications analyst. The agent ingests customer support case notes and evaluates them against key criteria like clarity and problem-solving. Next, the agent provides a detailed, objective report, complete with scores and direct quotes, identifying strengths and areas for improvement.
The review process time per case has now been reduced by 96%. What previously took over 60 hours of manual work per month can now be done in under eight hours. This has freed up our staff members to focus on proactive service improvements and has created a scalable, consistent way to elevate our service quality across the entire organization.
Getting better every day
AI in healthcare was once seen as a pipedream. Now that it’s finally here, we must not lose sight of what matters most: real people, real connections and real impact. Learn more about how Altera is leveraging AI to bring the human side of healthcare even closer here.
