Qventus launched a new AI operational assistant on Monday designed to increase efficiency for patients and clinicians in the operating room while reducing administrative burden for healthcare staff.
The assistant was built in conjunction with Northwestern Medicine and other health systems. Saadia Sherwani, M.D., a cardiac anesthesiologist and senior vice president of administration at Northwestern Medicine has been around Northwestern's OR for over two decades.
She explained that many processes are still manual, like scheduling a surgeon’s time in the operating room and gathering patient data before surgery.
Now, AI can do that.
Qventus’ new AI operational assistant will be able to help collect all the necessary information before a patient goes into surgery, which would traditionally be performed by case managers, care navigators, schedulers or medical assistants, Qventus CEO Mudit Garg said.
“I call these roles like the glue roles … And these roles have an understanding of how the system works, what the clinical journey is, and such. But probably 60%, 70%, 75% of their work is very logistical,” Garg said.
For example, healthcare facilities may need a patient’s clinical records from other institutions. Rather than a nurse calling to retrieve the patient’s records, the AI operational assistant can make the call and talk to the staff person on the other end.
The assistant can also make phone calls to patients and ask to receive relevant information such as which medications the patient is taking and tell them whether they need to stop taking it before surgery.
The operational assistant can also send and receive faxes, send email summaries and message with patients to find the best time for a nurse to call them for conversations that require clinical expertise.
“What we're looking to do is to really enhance that entire preoperative clinic workflow, because it is really brought with a lot of administrative work that our nurses and physicians are doing in terms of getting faxes, optimizing those and sending follow up information,” Sherwani said.
Garg told Fierce Healthcare the operational assistant has gone through an extensive testing and feedback phase. Based on feedback from nurses, the company developed the AI assistant with the capability to send and read faxes, he noted.
In fact, Garg said that most of the capabilities present in the AI operational assistant were developed because of user feedback.
“I think that this has so much potential and so many areas in our healthcare environment, you know, I'm thinking about the connectivity between the ambulatory clinics and the inpatient operating where there's a lot of administrative tasks going back and forth, exchanging communication. And so I tend to see a solution like this really helping us do better in that arena as well,” Sherwani said.
Sherwani said established surgeons are assigned set blocks of time during the week to do their surgeries. Newer surgeons must figure out how to fit their procedures around their senior colleagues, and this is normally done manually by a scheduler.
Qventus’ perioperative solution is an intelligent solution that helps find gaps in the schedule or can nudge a surgeon to remove their block from the schedule if they’re on vacation.
“It's an innovative tool that really helped leverage the unused space that exists by really advertising it strategically and help everyone utilize the fixed resources that we have,” Sherwani said.
Taken together, Qventus hopes the AI operational assistant will boost the ability of its perioperative and hospital inpatient solutions to continue solving for operational efficiency and improve patient care.