Oakland, Calif.-based Kaiser Permanente has been experimenting with AI in its patient portal, increasing patient engagement and experience in the process.
The health system’s Southern California Permanente Medical Group, headquartered in Pasadena, launched the Kaiser Permanente Intelligent Navigator for its 4.9 million patients in October. The platform allows patients to chat with AI via a text box to book appointments and connect with the care they need.
“Care is local, but at the same time it’s virtual and it’s become a global commodity,” Khang Nguyen, MD, assistant executive medical director for care transformation at Southern California Permanente Medical Group and chief medical officer of care navigation for the Permanente Federation, told Becker’s. “So patients are really expecting artificial intelligence to support healthcare in a way that is supporting other industries, in the sense that people are able to describe what they want versus being given choices.”
When Southern California Permanente Medical Group members click on the appointment-booking feature on their patient portals, powered by Epic’s MyChart, they now encounter a free-text box that allows them to ask questions and receive answers through natural language processing. Typically, they would have to select from preset choices that might not include the options they need. The tool also incorporates patient attributes such as age and gender to get them to the right place.
Patients might be connected with a clinician immediately if their concern is severe — say, chest tightness or weakness in their arm — or pointed to self-directed options.
Kaiser Permanente software engineers built the tool over the course of a year with input from operational, clinical and data science leaders. The core team included about 15 to 20 staffers. The return on investment comes from patients “actually getting what they need, what they want,” Dr. Nguyen said. Developers continue to use patient feedback to improve and tweak the solution.
In a study that evaluated nearly 3 million patient encounters using the AI between October and March, the tool detected urgent medical issues with 97.7% accuracy and recommended appropriate care paths with 88.9% accuracy. Patients successfully booked appointments more than half the time, compared to the industry average of 30%. The portal’s patient satisfaction scores went up by about 9%.
“We do know that one of every two people got their needs met through this process and got matched to where they needed to go. So that was a really big win for us,” Dr. Nguyen said.
The abandonment rate — where patients leave the app without following through on their task — was just 3%, compared to 30% previously and the e-commerce average of up to 70%, according to the research published in July in npj Digital Medicine.
Dr. Nguyen called that the “biggest surprise” from the findings. “We all know with websites, if you want to bury anything on a website, just make it two clicks away, and then no one can ever find it,” he said. And when patients abandon the app because they can’t locate what they need, they typically contact the call center.
The Kaiser Permanente Intelligent Navigator may expand to other parts of the app beyond appointment booking. The patient portal app is starting to become the predominant way people interact with Kaiser Permanente, Dr. Nguyen said.
“The point is care navigation, and it’s very confusing for a lot of patients and members to know where to go,” he said. “That’s actually a big problem when I’m in clinic, is that patients come to me for care navigation, and as a clinician oftentimes I don’t know either. So that’s where we’re going to go with this next is to add more specificity into different departments, different specialties, and then different use cases. So building the content on top of the infrastructure that we have right now.”
