The pace of innovation is picking up as health IT vendors seek to integrate artificial intelligence into their offerings for provider operations, medical testing, patient engagement and other use cases.

Aspira Women's Health, Belong.life and Outbound AI are just three companies that have announced new AI-driven technologies, supporting advanced discovery of ovarian cancer, oncology patient engagement and billing administration, respectively..

AI virtual agents for billing

The Seattle-based Outbound AI, founded in 2021, announced Tuesday it has expanded its cloud-powered PayerVA Console with generative AI that "augments human talent" while reducing billing specialist burden.

The company says that its mission is to remove the burdens of administrative work across the healthcare revenue cycle and create tools that lower administrative costs, improve productivity and elevate "the daily job experience."

"The amount of time medical billing teams spend on the phone with payers is truly staggering, Stead Burwell, founder and CEO of Outbound AI, said in the announcement.

"It can easily be two-thirds of their day. This is not only counterproductive, but it's degrading to job satisfaction and performance," he said.

PayerVA's virtual agents navigate payer interactive voice response systems, wait on hold and speak to human representatives, according to Outbound AI. They take "comprehensive notes" and by leveraging GPT, produce narrative call and transaction summaries.

"Our AI virtual agents are specially trained to handle routine phone-based tasks so human talent can be more strategic and get more done," Burwell said.

The generative AI agents simulate how experienced billing team members create narratives and are held to the same standards, explained Jonathan Wiggs, cofounder and CTO of the start-up incubated at Madrona Venture Labs.

"We're not only capitalizing on the capabilities of GPT, we're doing so in a highly secure, HIPAA-compliant manner through Microsoft Azure," he added.

"This is crucial for any company that serves the healthcare industry, especially considering the business associate agreement mandated under HIPAA is not available if using GPT directly through OpenAI."

Since launching its claims platform, a series of new capabilities, including prior authorizations and denials management, has been added.

miRNA-based cancer diagnostics

Ovarian cancer is highly lethal in part because of how difficult it has historically been to diagnose.

Aspira Women's Health's has signed an exclusive licensing agreement with Boston-based Dana-Farber Cancer Institute for the design and development of a noninvasive miRNA-based test that will utilize circulating microRNAs – either alone or in conjunction with proteins or other factors – to identify ovarian cancer in women with adnexal masses.

"Adding this new non-invasive, molecular-based risk assessment tool to our portfolio will be another significant step forward in arming physicians with information to determine an appropriate treatment pathway," said Nicole Sandford, president and CEO, in Thursday's announcement.

According to the company, the new test will be part of the company's ovarian cancer risk assessment portfolio, which combines noninvasive blood-based tests for use in the initial clinical assessment of ovarian cancer risk in women with benign or indeterminate adnexal masses with the use of FDA-cleared products that detect the risk of ovarian malignancies planned for surgery.

Dipanjan Chowdhury, codeveloper and chief of the Division of Radiation and Genome Stability at DFCI added, "This technique may help address a significant unmet diagnostic need in ovarian cancer with a non-invasive, easy, fast and affordable diagnostic."

Customizable AI oncology mentor

According to Belong.Life, a provider of patient engagement and community platforms, Dave brings a new level of support to cancer patients and their families.

"Belong's AI oncology mentor, Dave, marks a significant milestone in our journey to revolutionize the health industry," said Eliran Malki, cofounder and CEO, in Wednesday's announcement.

"Dave provides smart, personalized and accessible information instantaneously, which can greatly improve the quality of care and life for millions of patients worldwide."

Dave is a large language model that also uses natural language processing trained on patient-physician and patient-to-patient interaction data aggregated from Belong's Beating Cancer Together app and tested by more than 10,000 cancer patients.

It can provide oncology-specific, comprehensive and empathetic answers to cancer patients' challenges. Dave also retains a long-term memory of previous correspondence, allowing continuous communication across multiple chat sessions, according to the company. 

It's available free to users on Belong's Beating Cancer Together app and also available as a customizable SaaS solution for hospitals, providers and patient support programs. Providers can include in-house clinical guidelines for their optimal and exclusive use.

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