3 Tech Partnerships That Could Streamline Health Care

As October draws to a close, we’ve seen a flurry of activity in technology partnerships designed to streamline administrative processes, advance value-based care models and other tools to improve operations.

Although these collaborative efforts are still in their early stages, they illustrate how providers, payers and tech giants like Google Cloud and GE HealthCare are coming together to tackle some long-standing challenges for hospitals and health systems.

Here’s a quick rundown on several moves and how they may impact the field.

1 | New Data Exchange Model Could Boost Value-based Care

On Oct. 20, Renton, Washington-based Providence health system and Humana Inc. announced a collaboration aimed at streamlining and securing data exchange between providers and payers to improve interoperability to support value-based care.

The 51-hospital system and Humana were slated to go live this month with automated member attribution for Humana Medicare Advantage (MA) members before expanding into other data exchange functions that would reduce administrative burden and elevate clinical decision-making. The initiative will serve as a model for providers and payers across the country, the parties say.

“The health care [field] is overwhelmed by fragmented, inconsistent data formats that make care coordination costly and slow,” Michael Westover, vice president of population health informatics at Providence, said in a statement. “Because we want to be successful in value-based care contracts, Humana and Providence are building a shared foundation of administrative, financial and clinical data using national standards and modern technology.”

The initiative’s first phase — automated member attribution for Humana MA members — is designed to ensure that providers can identify quickly and accurately which patients are under their care, eliminating manual processes and improving care coordination. Future phases will expand data exchange capabilities to further reduce administrative burden and enhance clinical decision-making. Both organizations anticipate that their framework easily will be replicable, serving as a scalable model that can transform care across the field.

2 | Using AI to Optimize Operations, Equipment Usage and Staffing Capacity

Tech giant GE HealthCare is working with Durham, North Carolina-based Duke Health and The Queen’s Health Systems in Honolulu to develop a hospital operations AI software solution set to release next year. The solution will use AI and predictive analytics to help hospitals manage bed demand and staffing capacity while reducing equipment downtime.

The Queen’s Health Systems, comprising four hospitals, has begun to pilot GE’s artificial intelligence (AI) Command Center software. The system was facing issues with patients boarding in the emergency department (ED), said Ashley Shearer, vice president of care coordination, patient flow, geriatrics and inpatient rehab at Queen’s Medical Center. Some patients were waiting as many as three days for an inpatient bed to open, she told Modern Healthcare.

Queen’s early results in using GE HealthCare’s AI software have been positive, Shearer said, having increased its ability to accept transfer patients by 22%. Other results include:

• A 41.2% decrease in ED length of stay, while the average daily volume of ED admissions remained steady, enabling more patients to receive timely treatment.
• A 1.07 day overall decrease in patient length of stay in just 10 months.
• $20 million estimated savings through reduced length of stay in the first year.

GE HealthCare also stated that it is working with Boston-based Mass General Brigham and the University of Wisconsin–Madison to develop an AI research model trained on more than 200,000 MRI images. This model will be used across various clinical and operational use cases.

3 | AI Agent Pilot Programs Roll Out to Improve Efficiency

Google Cloud, meanwhile, recently detailed several AI partnerships it is undertaking with health care organizations, including projects that summarize clinical notes and automate prior authorizations.

The partnerships come as more health care and life science firms are deploying AI agents, or advanced tools that can more autonomously plan and perform tasks, according to a recent Google Cloud survey of 605 leaders. Forty-four percent of executives said their organizations were actively using agents, with 34% reporting that they use 10 or more agents.

For example, Hackensack Meridian Health built multiple AI agents using Google’s generative AI technology, including a tool that recaps patients’ medical records for doctors.

The health system’s note summarization agent has helped more than 1,200 clinicians generate more than 17,000 summaries since it went live in June, according to a press release.

The health system also is rolling out two other agents — an assistant for nurses in neonatal intensive care units that provides information on best practices and policies and a tool that summarizes lab results, enabling primary care providers to more quickly draft notes to patients.