Dive Brief:
- Universal Health Services and Hippocratic AI are releasing an AI agent to help clinicians make follow-up phone calls to patients post-discharge, the companies said in a press release on Monday.
- The companies hope the generative AI agents will better help clinicians monitor patients’ well-being after they leave the hospital by quickly detecting changes in their conditions and fielding questions.
- UHS launched the program at two subsidiaries earlier this year, but plans to expand the pilot after receiving positive feedback from patients, according to the release.
Dive Insight:
As hype continues to grow around AI, health systems are increasingly piloting solutions, like Hippocratic’s agentic AI tool, in hopes the technology will help them streamline clinicians’ tasks and lessen burnout.
Agentic AI, which can act autonomously to make decisions with little human oversight, is becoming more popular in healthcare, with tech companies like Notable, Google Cloud and Salesforce all offering agentic tools they say can reduce administrative burden for workers.
Hippocratic’s tool acts as a first point of contact for patients post-discharge. The company said the tool calls patients to review medication instructions, probe for signs of new or worsening symptoms and answer patient questions.
Patients also have the option of connecting with a human nurse: UHS said clinicians can call patients back after the initial AI-led call.
UHS first launched the AI agents at its Las Vegas-based Summerlin Hospital Medical Center and Denison, Texas-based Texoma Medical Center. The health system said patients gave the tool an average rating of 9 out of 10.
The health system plans to roll out the technology to more than 10 additional U.S. hospitals within the next few months due to the positive reception, a spokesperson said. Following that, UHS plans to launch the technology at all of its 29 acute care hospitals.
“We have been quite pleased to see the reaction of patients in the overall engagement with the GenAI agent. To date, we have experienced a high degree of success, and we are looking forward to continuing to expand the sample size,” said UHS President and CEO Marc Miller.
UHS said the agents should allow nurses to be more efficient. However, some experts have expressed concern that health systems may not pass time savings from AI onto clinicians as intended.
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