Eleos Health announced a new offering utilizing AI to decrease the administrative burden of note taking for field-based care providers dubbed Eleos Outreach.
The platform uses augmented intelligence to streamline the documentation work of case managers and community outreach providers by incorporating click-to-text functionality. Eleos Outreach is electronic health record agnostic to allow for users to take notes on the road that will be fully integrated into systems back at the office, according to the company.
Eleos CEO and co-founder Alon Joffe told Fierce Healthcare that the company is being strategic and purposeful with the use of AI for medical documentation.
“We always say our goal is to help clinicians provide more care and less operations,” Joffe said. “It will never be all care and zero operations. As much as we all want this, it’s just not going to happen. There will always be some level of operational stuff you need to do as a clinician, but if we can shift that a bit and allow you to focus more on care itself, I think that's a win for all employees.”
By being prompted with questions informed by past notes from a provider’s organization, Eleos Outreach translates responses into clinical language that populates EHR fields. In this manner, 80% of notation is completed. The remaining 20% is generated by the clinician.
Joffe said clinicians are also required to review and edit AI-generated text to ensure that nuances of well-informed care are not lost.
Eleos claims the new tool decreases documentation time by 80% and enables note completion 64% faster. The company also claims to help decrease revenue lost to undocumented billable activities.
Private not-for-profit behavioral healthcare organization Trilogy is the first organization to deploy the tool. The Chicago-based organization assists children and adults living with mental illness through programs that help people experiencing an urgent mental health crisis, in addiction recovery or who are transitioning out of homelessness.
“The day-to-day schedule of these case managers is that they go from one home to the next, from one street to the next,” Joffe said. “They have to document sometimes when they're in their car before they're leaving to meet their next member, so they just don't have time. Otherwise, they need to sit at the end of the day at the computer talking to the EHR, and that takes them hours.”
Eleos also offers Scribe and Replay to increase documentation efficiency. Scribe claims to support behavioral health providers by populating 70% of progress notes and can reduce documentation time by 50%, the company said. Replay can be used for training and development programs.
Eleos Outreach is only the most recent AI offering billed as reducing burnout. Joffe said the company is careful to ensure that the AI it deploys is designed to have trickle-down effects on patients and providers at scale. He worries that while AI buzz abounds, new tech often takes years to reach the patients who need it the most.
He foresees many companies moving further into the documentation space as generative AI transitions from a pipe dream to a lived reality in physicians’ offices and field-based care providers across the country. But where he sees some companies standing apart is in workflow integration. Without being embedded into EHRs, a point solution will not even be touched, he noted.
“If you're really closely embedded within the workflow, that's where clinicians are going to use you; if not, it doesn’t matter if you have 5% more accuracy on your models,” Joffe said. “How do you put your tool into telehealth? Do you support face-to-face group sessions? Do you provide that to a case manager? That's the real next set of questions that we will need to ask ourselves if we want to really provide this at scale.”
The ethical placement of AI in behavioral health is still being determined, but research has shown that with the right framework, clinicians' time can be freed up to provide care that technology cannot offer. A paper from Frontiers in Psychiatry offers such a framework, focusing on documentation as a primary venue where pragmatic AI can be deployed with generative results.