Salesforce launched a new healthcare AI assistant within its customer relationship management system, marking the latest tech company trying to expand its reach in the healthcare market.
As AI development rapidly accelerates, tech companies like Microsoft, Google, Amazon Web Services and Salesforce see opportunities to introduce cloud and AI technologies to help tackle administrative and operational tasks.
Salesforce's healthcare-focused AI tool, called Einstein Copilot, is a conversational AI assistant that will provide responses based on a healthcare organization's private data. Einstein Copilot allows providers and care teams to digitally capture and summarize details from different clinical and nonclinical sources, update patient and member information, and automate manual processes, according to the company.
A provider can use the AI assistant to create a patient summary, including medications, diagnoses, social determinants, assessments, clinical service requests and care gaps. A care manager can also ask Einstein Copilot to help find an in-network provider for their patient based on preferred location, specialty and plan coverage, and then auto-populate an electronic referral form using natural language prompts embedded within the flow of their work, according to the company.
The AI assistant can trigger workflows to do tasks such as end referrals, book appointments and revise care plans.
Einstein Copilot is expected to be HIPAA-compliant by summer 2024. Copilot: Health Actions will be generally available in winter 2024, the company said.
Another feature, called assessment generation, will let healthcare organizations digitize standardized health assessments and automatically input questions into the system using Salesforce Health Cloud.These can then be filled out electronically and tracked for progress.
Salesforce notes that nearly a quarter of U.S. healthcare spending is wasted on administrative costs, presenting a potential cost savings of up to $320 billion for healthcare organizations, according to McKinsey & Co.
"These new data, AI, and CRM features help reduce the administrative and operational burden for healthcare providers and care teams, leading to better outcomes for their patients. And with Salesforce’s trusted AI, healthcare organizations excited about generative AI—but nervous about clinical and security concerns—can confidently use these innovations in their everyday workflows," Amit Khanna, senior vice president and general manager for health at Salesforce, said in a statement.
Providers Baptist Health South Florida and HarmonyCares are using Salesforce to personalize patient interactions and create a unified view of each patient.
In-home healthcare provider HarmonyCares is using Salesforce's Einstein 1 Platform to scale patient scheduling and home health services. HarmonyCares provides medical services in 14 states with more than 150 primary care providers.
Since launching its original platform with Salesforce, HarmonyCares says it's seen a 50% increase in self-scheduling with a more efficient, streamlined process. The company used Salesforce's AI-based field service platform for its complete health assessment scheduling tool and it plans to leverage Salesforce Health Cloud to scale its care management and engagement center.
"We will be using a lot of the AI capabilities within that platform, and that's focused on understanding the patient needs and preferences and making sure we're customizing and truly personalizing each touch point with those patients," Kristin Darby, HarmonyCares' chief information officer, said in an interview.
"We think AI is going to exponentially increase our ability to synthesize that in a very rapid manner, but also with a higher level of accuracy and personalization to optimize the experience for the patients that we interact with," she added.
A recent survey found that 69% of individuals are uncomfortable with healthcare companies using AI to diagnose them. More than half of respondents are comfortable with AI in nonclinical use cases, such as scheduling appointments and estimating medical expenses, according to the poll of 1,400 adults.
Salesforce first launched its Health Cloud in 2015 to help providers manage patients, drawing health data from electronic medical records, devices and wearables. The company touted the platform as a “patient relationship management tool,” built to give providers a more complete view of each patient.
The San Francisco-based company announced its Customer 360 for Health offering in 2022 that connects its existing solutions on a single platform for use in healthcare. Customer 360 for Health includes real-time data from Data Cloud, Einstein AI and automation with Flow to automate manual processes like prior authorizations, intake and patient scheduling.