New Hyde Park, N.Y.-based Northwell Health is turning to artificial intelligence to help fix one of its long-standing problems: incomplete tracking of high-cost surgical supplies.
The health system has rolled out AssistIQ, an AI-powered computer vision platform at North Shore University Hospital and the Dorothy & Alvin Schwartz Ambulatory Surgery Center in Manhasset, N.Y., according to a May 28 news release from the health system.
“Our goal is to globally monitor the usage and movement of high-end clinical products across all procedural areas in the health system,” Phyllis McCready, senior vice president and chief procurement officer at Northwell, said in the release.
Becker’s spoke to Will Corrigan, vice president of hospital operations at Northwell, and Vikas Balani, deputy chief procurement officer, about the shift to this AI platform.
“We’ve been trying to solve this problem for 20 years,” Mr. Corrigan said. “Our manual documentation process wasn’t capturing everything. It was capturing what we needed to protect our patients and run the business, but it wasn’t capturing enough to give us the insights we need.”
AssistIQ captures supply usage during surgeries, addressing the error inherent in traditional barcode, RFID, EHR and paper-based tracking, the release said. The result is reduced waste and better data for supply chain decisions and an optimized billing process.
“At its core, the technology is based on computer vision,” Mr. Balani said. “When the product is very expensive and there is an expiration date tied to it, it becomes critical to be able to track where those supplies are going. Without capture of where the product is in its physical journey throughout the health system, it is very difficult to maintain a good control of the supply chain and associated costs.”
The rollout is currently focused on the Manhasset campus, with plans to expand after integration with Northwell’s new Epic EHR system, which the health system is currently transitioning to.
“We are focused on deploying at North Shore and measuring return on investment,” said Mr. Corrigan. “Once that’s done, we’re focusing on Epic integration to take advantage of that AssistIQ functionality, because we can’t scale this technology within Northwell without EHR integration. It makes sense to proceed with a non-integrated solution at North Shore because of the scale and size of our operation, but it doesn’t make sense for future deployments.
Mr. Corrigan and Mr. Balani also emphasized that the long-term goal for the health system is to create a supply chain that operates seamlessly.
“We don’t want [clinicians] to feel the supply chain,” Mr. Balani said. “It is there, but they don’t even feel it, that’s the future we want to achieve.”
