Not-for-profit health system Sentara Health deployed a new artificial intelligence case management solution Tuesday, which it co-developed with clinical decision support company Regard.
Case managers can use the tool to query charts in plain language, allowing them to quickly surface key insights like patient history, status changes and more. The platform also allows case managers to view changes within the last 24 hours.
“It's incredible to think about how much time we used to spend piecing together a patient's story before they could even start discharge planning,” said Rollin Reeder, M.D., Sentara Health chief health information officer, in a statement. “Now, with Regard, I have information from the chart I could not have found on my own, sometimes critically important information that could change the course of management. This is transformational in many ways, but especially in how effectively and confidently we can move patients through the system.”
The health system is planning to expand the tool across acute care and into ambulatory care. The solution could save nearly 90,000 hours, executives say, which is equivalent to adding more than 40 full-time employees and nearly $5 million in labor costs.
Sentara Health operates 12 hospitals and more than 400 care sites in Virginia and Northeast North Carolina.
The new solution builds on Sentara Health's partnership with Regard—and reflects the clinical decision support company’s expansion into broader health system workflows.
“We’ve built an intelligence platform that physicians trust, surfacing more than 20 million diagnoses that they’ve accepted, with supporting clinical evidence,” said Eli Ben-Joseph, Regard CEO and co-founder, in a statement. “It’s a natural next step for us to extend that complete clinical picture that is reliable and credible to operational teams, giving health systems a consistent layer of support across the organization. That’s the exciting part about getting it right at the bedside. You quickly start to see other high-impact areas where the technology can make a difference.”
Sentara Health has been scaling the adoption of AI solutions across clinical care, operations and technical infrastructure. In mid-September, the system announced it would be piloting GW RhythmX’s AI precision care platform to test AI-powered clinical recommendations within clinician workflows at the point of care.