Innovaccer said "Sara for Healthcare" – named for Saraswati, the Hindu goddess of knowledge and language – automates workflows, generates insights and conversationally supports decisions for healthcare leaders, clinicians, care coordinators and contact center representatives.

WHY IT MATTERS

Kanav Hasija, cofounder and chief product officer of Innovaccer, announced the suite of AI that could take "high-quality, low-cost, patient-centered care to the next level" at the company's annual online "Innovation Keynote" Tuesday.

In a related announcement, the company said that the new suite of models has been trained in the healthcare context – in the semantics and security, privacy and regulatory requirements – to improve accuracy and reduce issues common with generative AI as it accelerates digital transformation. 

"We will ensure Sara provides the AI help healthcare leaders can turn to and trust," Hasija said in a statement.

The AI assistant for healthcare, initially unveiled at HIMSS23 in April, works with Innovaccer’s platform, awarded Best in KLAS for 2023 in the data and analytics platforms category, which integrates clinical, claims and other healthcare data across electronic health records and other systems.

The company said Sara can answer questions about health system populations and clinical, financial or operational metrics, aiming to give providers the power to cut workloads, reduce drudgery, improve care quality, enhance reimbursement contract performance – such as in value-based care, fee-for-service or alternative payment models – and more.

The suite includes: 

• Sara for Insights, which can provide instant answers to plain-language questions in order to avoid the need to ask data teams for information and wait for results.
• Sara for Care Management, which can help care coordinators with documentation and care planning. It is meant to save care coordinators potentially 10 hours per week and allow them to engage with 35% more patients, the company said.
• Sara for Point of Care, which can help clinicians with EHR administrative and documentation burdens, and could cut more than 10 hours per week from clinicians’ "pajama time" spent on documentation, Innovaccer estimated.
• Sara for Experience Center, which could help contact center agents streamline workflows and enhance consumer engagement by automating tasks and optimizing processes, and could improve first-call resolution rates by 25% or more, call handling time by 20% or more, and touch 20% more patients.

THE LARGER TREND

Also at HIMSS23, EHR vendors Epic and eClinicalWorks had their GPT3 integrations with Microsoft Azure's OpenAI Service on display, while Salesforce explained how healthcare customers can use Einstein GPT in CRM.

"We are developing additional ways to incorporate generative AI across our applications, from ambulatory to inpatient to CRM to revenue cycle," Seth Hain, senior vice president of research and development for Epic, told Healthcare IT News at the global conference.

Brent Lammm, CIO at UNC Health, based in Morrisville, North Carolina, spoke with Healthcare IT News about generative AI and working with peers to test Epic's LLM's capabilities to enhance provider experiences, as well as his work with Microsoft to test LLMs for other healthcare use cases.

"While it may sound paradoxical, I would strongly encourage leaders across the industry to aggressively pursue use of this technology, but do so in a very careful and thoughtful manner," he cautioned in June. "I also believe finding proven partners who share our values related to patient-centered care and protecting data and privacy is critically important."

ON THE RECORD

"With Sara for healthcare, we’re creating, and promising to continue to invest in, developing proprietary AI technologies that ensure healthcare data quality, with the right data presented in the right setting at the right time," Hasija said in the statement.

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