Building on a successful pilot, Regard, an AI tool that helps clinicians diagnose conditions, is expanding an enterprise partnership with Banner Health.
The nonprofit health system will roll out Regard’s tool in a phased approach to all 33 acute-care hospitals in its system across six states in 2024. The technology is an opportunity to increase face time between providers and patients, the partners say.
Regard aims to enable clinicians to take full advantage of all the data hidden in an EHR by analyzing patient data and generating diagnoses. Last year, the company teamed up with OpenAI to develop new chatbot functionalities. The co-pilot tool is reportedly integrated with Epic and Cerner and used by more than 100 hospitals. Regard claims the tool ultimately enhances provider communication and optimizes for eventual reimbursement.
“Electronic medical records are all-encompassing, and there are good things to that and there are some challenges to that,” Susan Lee, D.O., Banner’s physician executive, told Fierce Healthcare. “Sometimes, pieces of data that clinicians need are difficult to find and could be old.”
As an “elegant search tool,” Lee said Regard recognizes words clinicians use to pull the relevant data from all existing Banner Health records for a particular patient. It can pull out tests, lab data and imaging reports “far, far faster than a human can ever do it.”
The existing pilot with a Banner hospital in Arizona revealed “very promising” results, per Lee. She has heard the tool can save up to 10 minutes per patient per day. “We want the clinicians to feel like their time is well spent,” Lee said.
Throughout implementation to date, starting in Arizona, Regard has provided Banner with the in-person resources to train clinicians on the tool, per Lee. Clinicians can practice seeing patients and using the tool in a test environment. The tool, while embedded in the EHR, is always optional to use.
Regard has internal ways of tracking the accuracy of its tool and Banner doctors can provide real-time feedback to the Regard team. That combination helps Banner feel confident in the tool.
“They've worked hard to make the rollout efficient and effective for us at Banner Health,” Lee said.