Artera unveils AI co-pilots to ease patient communication headaches

Health tech company Artera built new artificial intelligence products to help administrative staff communicate with patients faster while also easing their workload.

Tech companies continue to roll out new AI tools to alleviate administrative drudgery for healthcare workers, and Artera is keenly focused on streamlining all those texts and emails that health systems send to patients.

One product, the Staff AI Co-Pilot, is designed using healthcare conversational data to assist administrative staff in managing patient communications faster and more accurately, the company announced Friday. The co-pilot tool includes four skills such as predictive text to improve patient communications, increase response time and reduce administrative staff burden.

To overcome language barriers, the AI tool provides real-time language translation for inbound patient messages and outbound staff responses using the patient’s preferred language.  The tool also will rewrite longer messages, optimizing the messages for brevity and clarity, and reduces the number of overall messages sent to patients.

And, it can summarize patient conversations, making it easier for staff to summarize and document conversation history, including saving in electronic medical records systems, according to the company.

“Today’s healthcare provider teams are challenged to do more with less. And with the recent surge of digital patient communication - staff are tasked with managing a high volume of patient interactions, leading to slower response times and increased stress," Artera founder and CEO Guillaume de Zwirek said. "Our Staff AI Co-Pilot steps in to change that, offering real-time tools such as improved language translations, conversation summaries and predictive text to help staff respond more efficiently and accurately. By automating repetitive tasks, we enable staff to focus on high-touch patient interactions and deliver improved customer service.”

The company also developed a second AI tool, called Insights AI Co-Pilot, that analyzes patient engagement data to provide actionable insights. Using predictive analytics, the tool can produce smart no-show reports to identify patients at risk for missing appointments so healthcare providers can reach out to those patients.

Artera plans to build on this technology in early 2025 to more easily identify patients at risk for no-shows within staff email inboxes while also automating outreach to at-risk patient appointments.

“Our mission is to enable providers to make smarter, data-driven decisions that not only improve patient outcomes but also drive organizational excellence and growth," de Zwirek said. "For years, we’ve been leveraging AI within our platform to help healthcare providers transform their patient engagement data into action; the Insights AI Co-Pilot is a natural extension of this, offering actionable recommendations based on patient behavior, including the ability to predict missed appointments.”

Health systems have made big investments in the past few years to build out "digital front doors" for patients. But, in many cases, all these "doors" lead down different hallways, resulting in a fragmented, disjointed experience for patients.

Artera developed a tech solution to solve this industrywide pain point by helping healthcare providers streamline patient communications, minimize message overload and consolidate various channels for personalized messaging. The solution, dubbed Artera Harmony, integrates disparate digital vendors to enable health systems and practices to manage communication workflows from multiple departments and prioritize messaging importance and timing, de Zwirek told Fierce Healthcare last year.

The company also unveiled key updates to its Artera Harmony solution, including a new flows feature that enables multistep conversation sequences while leveraging natural language understanding to automate patient engagement. As another update, the solution now uses machine learning models to categorize patient communications.

In early 2025, Artera will roll out an enhanced inbox UI/UX that allows staff to manage larger patient populations.