Health tech companies see big opportunities to put agentic artificial intelligence agents to work.
In healthcare, there are a lot of repetitive, low-value administrative tasks, like scheduling appointments and collecting information, and AI can automate that work, freeing up time for clinicians and office staff.
Innovaccer rolled out this week a suite of pretrained AI agents that are voice-activated and can communicate with patients for appointment scheduling, protocol intake, managing referrals and answering routine patient inquiries. The suite of eight AI agents also tackles tasks like prior authorization, care gap closure, hierarchical condition category coding and transitional care management.
The agents will support multiple care teams, including clinicians, care managers, risk coders, patient navigators and call center agents.
Clinicians spend nearly 28 hours per week on administrative tasks, while medical office staff and claims staff spend 34 and 36 hours, respectively, according to a survey conducted by Google and the Harris Poll. At the same time, there is a growing shortage of healthcare labor. It's projected that there will be a deficit of 100,000 healthcare workers by 2028, according to a Mercer report.
Demos available on Innovaccer's website feature a discharge planning agent checking in on a patient after their hospital visit and scheduling follow-up care. The agent converses with the patient clearly in a natural, humanlike voice and can respond to details and questions.
Innovaccer is rolling out the suite to its existing customers with general availability planned later this year.
The new AI agents follow Innovaccer's recent series F funding round, in which it raised $275 million backed by B Capital Group, Banner Health, Danaher Ventures, Generation IM, Kaiser Permanente and M12.
Abhinav Shashank, co-founder and CEO of Innovaccer, told Fierce Healthcare back in January that the company has a keen focus on becoming a “one-stop shop” for healthcare AI solutions and planned to introduce multiple copilots and agents to its offerings.
The company, founded in 2014, built software solutions that aggregate patient data across care settings and systems. Its data infrastructure connects more than 80 electronic health records.
"Healthcare needs more than fragmented, point solutions. It needs a unified, intelligent orchestration of AI capabilities,” Shashank said in a statement. “With Agents of Care, we’re redefining what AI can do for healthcare - delivering human-like efficiency while allowing care teams to focus on what truly matters: their patients.”
The AI agents have access to a 360-degree view of patient information, drawn from unified clinical and claims data. This enables deep healthcare context for tasks such as scheduling, follow-ups, and care coordination, minimizing errors and redundancies, according to the company.
The AI tools are engineered to meet the highest security and compliance standards, including NIST CSF, HIPAA, HITRUST, SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001, the company said.
The company has been building out its AI capabilities. It first unveiled an AI assistant, Sara, and other products at HIMSS 2023. That tool generates complex analytic insights about population health data via humanlike responses. It is powered by Innovaccer’s Data Activation Platform, which unifies patient data between disparate EHRs and across care settings to give providers access to the tools they need at the point of care.
Last month, Innovaccer acquired Humbi AI, an actuarial software, services and analytics company used by providers, payers and life sciences companies. The Humbi AI acquisition will help build out Innovaccer’s data analytics capabilities, executives said, with plans to launch its own actuarial copilot.
Innovaccer has raised a total of $675 million from leading venture capital firms and strategic investors.
There is a growing list of health tech companies using AI and voice agents to tackle routine, tedious healthcare tasks.
VoiceCare AI recently launched to automate the back-office conversations between providers and payers and ease the administrative burdens for healthcare staff.
Infinitus Systems, a five-year-old company backed by Andreessen Horowitz and GV, offers an AI platform specifically built to automate manual healthcare phone calls. The company picked up a $51.5 million series C last year and has raised $102.9 million to date.
Startup Hello Patient built generative AI call agents to do the work of traditional support staff, freeing them up for more valuable, patient-facing work. SuperDial provides voice AI solutions for healthcare, and, last year, it acquired MajorBoost to enhance its AI-powered phone automation.
Healthcare automation solutions company Medsender launched an AI-powered voice agent for patient communication.
Hyro AI, a healthcare-specific no-code platform for AI-powered call centers, brought in $35 million in an extension of its series B round in December.
Hippocratic AI is a newer startup that built a staffing marketplace to enable health systems, payers and others to “hire” gen-AI-powered agents to conduct low-risk, non-diagnostic, patient-facing services.