This week, artificial intelligence applications continue to be involved in healthcare, with new use cases and deployments of all shapes and sizes. AI is streamlining documentation at Federally Qualified Health Centers, helping expand access to effective mental health services and assuring secure-by-design digital transformation, to name just three.

FHQCs, CHCs using voice AI

The Utah Navajo Health System, CenterPlace Health, Access Health Louisiana and PrimeCare Health are slashing their clinical and operational documentation burdens with ambient note-taking, coding, dictation and more, according to an announcement Thursday from Suki, a voice AI assistant for healthcare. 

The company said that more than 250 U.S. health systems and clinics averaged documentation reductions of 72%, and cut down pajama time by nearly six hours. 

"Suki is a game changer; for my personal sanity," said Dr. Leslie McNaughtan, a family medicine specialist at Utah-based UNHS, a designated Community Health Center that provides medical, dental and behavioral healthcare in the Navajo Nation and southeastern Utah, in a statement supplied by the vendor.

Suki also said it can deliver nine times on ROI in one year and is a significant advantage for resource-limited Federally Qualified Health Centers and CHCs.

McNaughtan said she has complex patients and many patients who arrive late for their appointments, impacting her workflows and often shifting focus away from patients and toward the nearest computer terminal.

"Suki has alleviated my administrative burden to the point where I feel like I can continue practicing medicine," she said. 

This past month, Suki also announced that its self-updating ambient voice documentation software that can be integrated into numerous electronic health records including Epic, Oracle Cerner, athenahealth, Meditech and others, can now be implemented through APIs by pasting code. 

NLP for mental health

Mpathic, an actionable conversation analytics vendor that says it can improve healthcare behaviors, announced that it received a National Institutes of Health Small Business Innovation Research to test AI and natural language processing to analyze provider-patient appointment transcripts in Wave's AI model. 

By leveraging AI and NLP to analyze Wave conversational data from 300 half-hour health coaching sessions to improve cultural attunement in provider-patient interactions, the company said in a July 11 statement.

According to mpathic's project abstract, marginalized communities are also less likely to seek treatment, less likely to find or access high-quality care and less likely to finish treatment. 

With the project, "Empathy for Everyone: Generative AI that Improves Patient-Provider Cultural Attunement in Real Time," the Bellevue, Washington-based company said it is aiming to use AI to:

• Facilitate cultural attunement between mental health providers and patients.
• Bridge the gap in mental healthcare for underserved racial and ethnic populations.
• Improve therapeutic outcomes and patient satisfaction.

"Our collaboration with mpathic on this project is not just about technological innovation; it's a step towards true access to mental health care that recognizes and adapts to the diversity of human culture," Dr. Sarah Adler, founder and CEO of Wave, said in the grant announcement.

"It's about creating tools that enable us to see each patient more fully and meet them where they are, with respect, humility and understanding."

According to the NIH website, mpathic will receive $219,212 in funding from the National Institute of Mental Health to conduct the research.

Secure-by-design certs

TruCare, a value-based care platform for payers, providers and public health organizations that leverages generative AI in population health-management tools, announced on July 9 that it achieved the HITRUST Risk-Based, two-year Certification. The company has also obtained SOC 2 compliance.

Last week, 1upHealth announced that its native Fast Health Interoperability Resources data aggregation platform received HITRUST one-year certification validation to manage data protection and mitigate cybersecurity threats.

While open standards-based data formats and technologies can be leveraged in the cloud, they are "often hampered by a volatile environment mired by intense merger-and-acquisition activity," Pieter De Leenheer, the company's chief technology officer, remarked in a company blog post about HIMSS24.

To defend against healthcare's onslaught of cybersecurity threats, federal agencies and healthcare data security consultants are urging underprepared providers to shore up the security of their IT infrastructure and ensure that their business associates are up to standards.

"1upHealth’s HITRUST i1 Certification is the evidence that they are at the forefront of industry best practices for information risk management and cybersecurity," Jeremy Huval, HITRUST chief innovation officer, said in a statement on July 11.

Also, symplr, which offers enterprise healthcare operations software and is collaborating with Amazon Web Services to develop machine learning capabilities, said it has effectively obtained SOC 2 for 29 of its products, validating its HIPAA Security and Privacy Risk requirements.

"While recognizing there are inherent risks, we take proactive measures to help strengthen our security protocols and continually improve," Saeed Valian, symplr chief information security officer, said in a July 11 statement.

The company also said its CEO, BJ Schaknowski, also signed the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency Secure by Design pledge initiative.

"Our Secure by Design pledge, SOC 2 attestations and HITRUST recertification for symplr solutions underscore our dedication to preventing and protecting against future threats by safeguarding sensitive data, recognizing that healthcare systems cannot afford disruptions," Valian added.

Along with the pledge for development with transparency, CISA's awareness campaign includes surveillance of AI software development practices in an educational alert series designed to push the industry to develop safer products.

Andrea Fox is senior editor of Healthcare IT News.
Email: afox@himss.org
Healthcare IT News is a HIMSS Media publication.

The HIMSS AI in Healthcare Forum is scheduled to take place September 5-6 in Boston. Learn more and register.

The HIMSS AI in Healthcare Forum is scheduled to take place September 5-6 in Boston. Learn more and register.