HealthJoy, Teladoc Health Launch Virtual Primary Care

HealthJoy, a benefits navigation platform that amplifies employer benefit strategies expands its partnership with Teladoc Health to introduce virtual primary care. HealthJoy Virtual Primary Care, powered by Teladoc Health, provides a fully integrated primary care experience that supports members throughout their entire healthcare journey. The solution will further enhance HealthJoy’s comprehensive suite of virtual care offerings that already includes adult and adolescent mental health, chronic care management, dermatology, employee assistance program services, musculoskeletal therapy, nutrition, tobacco cessation, and urgent care.

Lifesum and ŌURA Partner to Connect Nutrition and Sleep

Lifesum, the leading global healthy eating platform, has unveiled a sleep tracking feature in partnership with ŌURA, the company behind the smart ring that delivers personalized health data, insights, and daily guidance, which will allow its users to understand how their dietary choices impact their sleep patterns—and vice versa. The partnership will build on their integration of Health Connect by Android to give Lifesum users another important layer of health data to track. The sleep tracker function will be offered to Lifesum Android users who opt in to the open beta, and the company will roll out the service to all Android users in the coming weeks.

Neuronic and Santa Clara University Partner to Develop Next-Gen Neurotech for Photobiomodulation

Neuronic, a multi-national company focused on light therapy technology, and Santa Clara University (SCU) in Silicon Valley announced a partnership to develop a research project to study photobiomodulation (PBM) guided by real-time brain activity, which will be led by Dr. Julia A. Scott and Dr. Sally Wood.  To address this concern, the research team plans to improve the efficacy of PBM delivery, a non-invasive therapy that uses near-infrared light to pass through the skin and activate molecules that improve blood flow, reduce inflammation, and increase cellular energy.

The researchers hope that their findings will pave the way for more conclusive evidence regarding the effectiveness of PBM for brain injury and neurodegenerative conditions. Further, they envision a future where clinicians can tailor treatments to the individual needs of each patient through the use of real-time electroencephalogram (EEG) data, thereby optimizing results. To achieve this goal, the team will conduct small-scale studies of the device on healthy adults to assess the effects of PBM on brain activity and evaluate protocol designs.

Patient Discovery Partners with AmerisourceBergen for Cancer Care Equity

Patient Discovery Solutions joins global healthcare company AmerisourceBergen’s Trusted Vendor Program. The collaboration enables community oncology practices, hospitals, and health systems nationwide access to Patient Discovery’s Equitable Care Platform, allowing care providers to proactively identify and address social determinants of health to better inform providers and help improve outcomes for cancer patients. AmerisourceBergen’s Trusted Vendor Program is comprised of a portfolio of cutting-edge operational and clinical care solutions. As a partner, Patient Discovery’s Equitable Care Platform will seamlessly integrate within a participating practice’s current systems, helping to improve information exchange for delivering equitable care across multiple sites of care.

Opus EHR Partners with Aroris to Revolutionize Behavioral Health Practices

Opus EHR, an innovative behavioral health solutions provider partners with Aroris, a contract negotiation company, to provide cutting-edge technology solutions that help behavioral health practitioners save time and money while managing payer relationships more effectively. The partnership aims to equip both current and prospective clients with all the necessary tools and features to grow and scale their practice, optimizing profitability from their business efforts.

Doceree Further Expands Global Footprint With Partnership With Hello Health Group 

Doceree, a global platform building unprecedented solutions for HCP programmatic marketing with proprietary data tools, today announced its long-term partnership with Hello Health Group, a leader in health & wellness content development that drives consumer and patient engagement. The latest collaboration will accelerate growth for both companies by combining the world-class HCP targeting and reach capabilities of Doceree with Hello Health’s leading patient and consumer reach and engagement solutions, and strong geographical presence in the South East Asian region. The partnership further establishes Doceree’s presence in eight key markets – Vietnam, Indonesia, Malaysia, Cambodia, Myanmar, Singapore, Philippines and Taiwan.  

West-Com Nurse Call Systems, Vitalchat Partner to Bring AI-Enabled Virtual Care Solutions to Healthcare Facilities Nationwide

West-Com Nurse Call Systems and Vitalchat partner to provide hospital systems and other healthcare facilities nationwide with virtual care solutions using artificial intelligence to meet the needs and demands of patients, caregivers, providers and IT leaders. Together, these solutions increase patient and caregiver safety, improve clinical collaboration, enable specialty access and provide for off-site family connection and engagement. They are available through a network of more than 70 active distributors around the country.

New Jersey-based St. Joseph’s Health partners with careMESH to significantly expand the health system’s clinical communications reach to all community physicians, including digital access to electronic medical records. Using careMESH, St. Joseph’s will focus on several key areas, including:

1. Streamlining external communications with community physicians
2. Reducing reliance on fax to share clinical information
3. Ensuring all recipients have flexible options to receive and use clinical information to support patient treatment

VHC Health Partners with Unite Us to Address Critical Community Needs with Coordinated Resources

A new partnership between Virginia Health Center, a community-based health system providing medical services to Washington, D.C., Maryland, and Virginia, and software company Unite Us aims to improve health outcomes across the region. The partnership will connect Virginians with unmet behavioral, physical, nutritional and social needs to much-needed resources and services.

Angle Health x Ideon Partner to Improve Health Benefits Enrollment Automation and Accuracy

Angle Health, the digital-first, full-stack health benefits platform brings transparency, and simplicity with Ideon, the API platform powering digital experiences in health insurance and benefits. Leveraging Ideon’s APIs, Angle Health now powers a fast, easy, and automated enrollment experience across the growing ecosystem of benefits administration platforms.

Most brokers, employers, and members now enroll and manage benefits via third-party HR and benefits software. Through Ideon, Angle Health can quickly and easily connect and exchange enrollment data with these platforms.

Conduit Health Partners Assists Federally Qualified Health Centers 

Conduit Health Partners has recently begun providing nurse triage services to four Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHC): Unity Care NW in northwest Washington; Tuolumne Me-Wuk Indian Health Center in Sonora, California; Kenosha Community Health Center in Wisconsin and Clackamas Health Centers in Oregon. With these four combined FQHCs, Conduit is a key partner in providing high-quality care that is easily accessible to people of all ages, regardless of their health insurance status and their ability to pay.

Tufts Medicine Partners with meQuilibrium to Support Employee Emotional Health and Well-being

Tufts Medicine partners with meQuilibrium (meQ), to support the mental well-being of its employees within its health system, including Tufts Medical Center, Lowell General Hospital, MelroseWakefield Hospital, Lawrence Memorial Hospital of Medford, Care at Home, and its integrated physician network. Tufts Medicine health system employees can now access meQuilibrium to navigate challenges and build their adaptive capacity, resilience and agility.

MetroHealth Joins Guardian Research Network to Expand Research

Guardian Research Network®  (GRN) announced that The MetroHealth System, a multi-hospital safety-net health system serving more than 300,000 Ohio patients, has joined its nationwide healthcare research consortium. This partnership will augment MetroHealth’s efforts to become the national leader in translational innovations and discoveries that can improve the health and wealth for all members of the community. Through this strategic collaboration, GRN will continue to leverage real-world data (RWD) analytics to strengthen community health initiatives around the country.

Sony Over-the-Counter Hearing Aids Now Available on HearUSA’s Hearing Shop eCommerce Website

HearUSA announced the addition of Sony Over-the-Counter (OTC) hearing aids to its online Hearing Shop on the HearUSA website. By adding Sony OTC hearing aids to its online store, in addition to all HearUSA centers nationwide, the company is further positioned to achieve its goal to change the lives of one million more people with hearing loss by introducing them to the “Sound of the New Age.”

Solve.Care to Integrate Data from OMRON Devices Directly onto its Platform

Solve.Care, a full-stack blockchain solution built specifically to bring the healthcare industry on-chain, announced its integration partnership with OMRON Healthcare, a publicly traded healthcare device manufacturer and distributor with multi-billion dollar revenues. 

Through the integration, consumers using OMRON’s Evolv® BP7000 Blood Pressure Monitor can collect and store their measurements directly into Solve.Care’s private wallet, Care.Wallet, and most importantly, no one can access this data without the consumer’s permission. 

CareCloud Solutions Will Help Transform Healthcare Operations for Phoenix Family Medical Clinic

Phoenix Family Medical Clinic partners with CareCloud’s RCM solution, Concierge, to optimize its revenue and streamline administrative processes. By automating manual tasks like claims submission and follow-up, Concierge accelerates reimbursement and minimizes the potential for errors. In addition to Concierge, Phoenix will implement CareCloud Charts, an EHR platform that offers a comprehensive solution for managing patient data, including lab results, medication lists, and treatment plans. Charts facilitate seamless access and sharing of patient information, enhancing collaboration and coordination of care among healthcare providers. Phoenix will also use CareCloud Wellness, a suite of tools that include CCM and RPM.

Science 37 Joins Partnership in Support of White House CancerX and Cancer Moonshot

Science 37 Holdings, Inc. partners with the Digital Medicine Society (DiMe) in support of the CancerX inaugural project. Answering the call of the White House, Science 37 will join DiMe and Moffitt Cancer Center as part of CancerX, a new public-private partnership effort to rapidly accelerate the pace of cancer innovation in the U.S., alongside the Office for the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) and Office of the Assistant Secretary for Health (OASH).

What You Should Know:

• Flatiron Health announced a new partnership today with Sanofi in their pursuit to redesign the clinical trial experience for sponsors, sites, and patients in the therapeutic area of oncology. 
• The multi-study partnership between Sanofi and Flatiron will focus on improving clinical trial data acquisition, delivery, and quality through site-facing technology that digitally transfers data captured in the electronic health record (EHR) directly into the electronic data capture (EDC) system through Flatiron Health’s EHR-to-EDC product, Flatiron Clinical Pipe™.

Improving Research Quality Via EHRs

Flatiron Health is a healthtech company expanding the possibilities for point-of-care solutions in oncology and using data for good to power smarter care for every person with cancer. By focusing on the area of oncology, this partnership intends to accelerate development of new treatments and help more people with cancer. The collaboration will make it easier for sites to participate in oncology trials by reducing redundant, manual and often error-prone data entry processes, including taxing local lab management. This novel approach will be used across a portfolio of trials and a broad network of research sites – including both Academic and Community cancer centers. 

The initial Sanofi trial using Flatiron’s technology had its first automated data push earlier this month, successfully transferring over 50% of study data1 from the EHR to the EDC. Sanofi and Flatiron will collaborate on data standards and mapping to expand the volume and types of data eligible for automated transfer. Additionally, as a result of deploying Flatiron Clinical Pipe™, Flatiron expects the number of queries to decrease by roughly 50%, adding to efficiency gains for both sites and Sanofi study teams.

“Flatiron’s expansion into the clinical research space is a natural progression for us. With the FDA’s guidance on interoperable technology that allows electronic transmission of relevant EHR data to the EDC system, we knew we had an opportunity with Flatiron Clinical Pipe to unlock the potential of data captured in the EHR, reduce the burden of clinical trials and accelerate research timelines,” says Alex Deyle, General Manager, Clinical Research, Flatiron Health. “We’re incredibly excited to partner with forward-thinkers like Sanofi, who share our aspiration to leverage data and technology to transform clinical research. We look forward to working with the industry to solve a variety of challenges in the clinical research space—for the benefit of sponsors, CROs, sites and ultimately, the patients.”

What You Should Know:

• Quest Diagnostics has reached an agreement to acquire Haystack Oncology  an early-stage oncology company focused on minimal residual disease (MRD) testing to aid in the early, accurate detection of residual or recurring cancer and better inform therapy decisions
• Under the terms of the agreement, Quest will pay $300 million in cash at closing, net of cash acquired, and up to an additional $150 million on achieving future performance milestones.
• The acquisition will leverage Quest’s expertise and scale in oncology, genomics and pathology. Quest employs approximately 400 pathologists through its AmeriPath specialty pathology-diagnostics business and provides approximately 7,000 patient access points in the United States for blood and other specimen collection.

Adding Sensitive Liquid Biopsy Technology for Improving Personalized Cancer Care to Oncology Portfolio

MRD testing is a fast-growing category of liquid biopsy tests that identify circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA) in the bloodstream of patients following surgery and treatment for cancer. Founded in 2021, Haystack has developed a ctDNA-based technology specifically for MRD detection, based on 20 years of research and development by world-renowned luminaries from Johns Hopkins University, including Drs. Bert Vogelstein, Ken Kinzler and Nick Papadopoulos. In a prospective, multi-institution study published in the New England Journal of Medicine in June 2022, an earlier version of the Haystack technology demonstrated the ability to better identify patients with residual disease for adjuvant chemotherapy after surgery for stage II colon cancer, thereby reducing chemotherapy use in the overall patient population without compromising recurrence-free survival.

Following the close of the acquisition, Quest expects to adapt the MRD test developed at Haystack as the basis for new clinical lab services available beginning in 2024. Development efforts will focus initially on MRD tests for colorectal, breast and lung cancers.

“Combining Haystack with Quest is a major step forward in translating two decades of world-class liquid biopsy research and development into clinical laboratory services that are highly reliable and broadly accessible. Like looking for a needle in a haystack, accurately detecting MRD has been very challenging to date,” said Dan Edelstein, CEO and President, Haystack. “With Quest, we expect to increase and accelerate access to important tests that will improve the quality of cancer MRD detection and recurrence monitoring for patients. Working together, we have the potential to greatly transform the patient journey and save lives.” 

What You Should Know:

• PathAI, a provider of AI-powered pathology, and ConcertAI, an AI software-as-a-service (SaaS) technology and real-world evidence (RWE) solutions for life sciences and healthcare, today announced a strategic partnership to launch a first-in-class quantitative histopathology and curated clinical real-world data (RWD) solution.
• The solution combines PathAI’s PathExplore™ tumor microenvironment panel with ConcertAI’s Patient360™ and RWD360™ products. Using these products together creates the first, large-scale clinical datasets linking pathology human interpretable features with EMR-derived clinical data, allowing direct insights into current standards of care and treatment dynamics.
• ConcertAI and PathAI will jointly offer these combined solutions to biopharma customers, including translational research and real-world data teams. The initial solutions focus on bladder cancer, colorectal cancer, prostate cancer, and melanoma.

What You Should Know:

• Biomarker testing is a necessary tool in the advancing world of precision cancer treatment. According to a new survey released by CancerCare, a leading national cancer support organization, biomarker testing helped doctors tailor therapy for nearly all the respondent patients (93%) whose cancers were tested over the past three years. Two in 10 cancer patients (20%) surveyed were able to avoid unnecessary chemotherapy and/or radiation and 10% became eligible for a clinical trial.
• Despite the significant and demonstrable benefits to surveyed patients, three out of 10 respondents (29%) who received biomarker testing did not have the test covered by their insurance. Some survey respondents reported that biomarker test coverage was originally denied and they had to fight to get it covered. Others had to find ways to pay out-of-pocket or seek financial assistance to cover the cost of the testing.

Addressing Treatment Delays in Cancer Care

Unfortunately, health insurance plans often limit cancer patients’ access to recommended biomarker testing, impose burdensome prior authorization protocols, or require unaffordable cost-sharing, which can prevent or delay cancer patients’ access to optimal treatments. Prior authorization, a significant source of roadblocks to timely testing and treatment, was required by a quarter (25%) of the cancer patients surveyed.

Biomarker testing has been proven to be extremely valuable in identifying the most effective therapy for eligible cancer patients because it helps them receive the right treatments at the right time while also saving money and leading to better outcomes. However, there are still gaps in health insurance coverage for this crucial test. Patients and physicians may be required to jump through hoops to get authorization and then, the cost sharing can be prohibitive.

“Despite the fact that biomarker testing has dramatically changed the way cancer is diagnosed and treated, many insurers do not provide adequate coverage for the test,” said Patricia J. Goldsmith, CEO of CancerCare. “Employers that don’t sufficiently cover this testing in their insurance plans create a real risk that their employees will not receive the most effective, and sometimes, lifesaving therapy.”

Eleven states have enacted or are about to enact legislation mandating that health plans cover biomarker testing for cancer patients. The good news is that 18 more states have introduced biomarker coverage legislation, with the goal of requiring that state-regulated public and private health plans provide consistent coverage for this testing.

Biomarker Testing is a Health Care Equity Issue

Biomarker testing is increasingly a health care equity issue according to data from recent studies. Research published by the American Society of Clinical Oncology shows significant gaps in the rate of biomarker testing between Black and white lung and colorectal cancer patients, which can lead to disparities in clinical trial participation and hinder access to the most effective treatments. A key way to address these barriers is to broaden insurance coverage of biomarker testing, as recommended by medical experts.

What You Should Know:

• Notable, an intelligent automation company for healthcare, launches Patient AI, a solution leveraging large language models (LLMs) and GPT (the technology powering ChatGPT) to bring personalization at scale to healthcare.
• Using GPT to scan existing clinical documentation, this tech can detect missed diagnoses, identify lapsed insurance cards, incorrect addresses, eligible clinical trials, or costly care gaps in real-time across an entire patient population. 

How Patient AI Works

Patient AI continuously reviews millions of data points across medical records and third-party data sets to develop a comprehensive clinical and social understanding of each patient. These insights are automatically translated into personalized recommendations that are surfaced to the patient before, after, and in between encounters through adaptive design without any staff involvement. The result is that patients are engaged at precisely the right moment to take action in achieving their health goals.

For example, a patient with lung cancer who frequently misses appointments due to a lack of transportation can be matched by Notable to:

• A one-click ride booking with a rideshare service
• A recommendation to learn more about a clinical trial to treat symptoms of her cancer
• An opportunity to request a refill of an expiring medication
• The option to reschedule multiple upcoming appointments into a single day

Alternatively, a patient being discharged after knee surgery can be matched with:

• A home health nurse
• A medical equipment provider for crutches
• A series of periodic questionnaires to assess patient-reported outcomes (PROs)

Notable presents all of these services to patients in an intuitively designed digital experience. 

Previously, this level of personalization required teams of professionals – including care coordinators, medical assistants, and nurses – and multiple hours of work to deeply examine a patient’s clinical history, assess social determinants of health (SDOH), and manually contact the patient. Patient AI powers this level of proactive, personalized care without any increase in staff. 

What You Should Know:

– COTA, Inc., an oncology real-world data and analytics company, today announced the appointment of Sandy Leonard as its first Chief Commercial Officer.

– As CCO, Sandy will drive COTA’s life sciences growth strategy, prioritizing customer success and experience. More specifically, she will lead a team that is laser-focused on ensuring that pharmaceutical partners have the data assets, analytics, services, and support they need to develop life-saving cancer drugs and research efficiently and expeditiously.

– Sandy Leonard is a digital health leader with more than 20 years of deep pharmaceutical and real-world data expertise, will lead COTA’s business expansion efforts during a period of strong, sustainable growth.

What You Should Know:

• Biostage, Inc., a cell-therapy biotechnology company with successful first-in-human experience in treating esophageal cancer and FDA approval to commence a clinical trial of the Biostage Esophageal Implant raises $6M from new and existing investors in a private placement of its shares of common stock.
• The funds will be used to accelerate the clinical development of Biostage’s lead product candidate, the Biostage Esophageal Implant, or BEI. The FDA has approved a ten-patient phase one and phase two clinical trial to study the repair of damage to the esophagus in adults caused by cancer or injury.
• Biostage is also developing other uses of its technology such as for treating cancer of the lung using the Biostage Bronchial Implant. Similar to how the BEI could be used to regenerate the esophagus, the Biostage Bronchial Implant would be used to regenerate a bronchus that has been surgically removed to treat bronchial cancer, injury or birth defects.

What You Should Know:

• A new study by Cedars-Sinai investigators describes how ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot, may help improve health outcomes for patients with cirrhosis and liver cancer by providing easy-to-understand information about basic knowledge, lifestyle and treatments for these conditions.
• The findings, published in the peer-reviewed journal Clinical and Molecular Hepatology, highlight the AI system’s potential to play a role in clinical practice.

Helping Patients of Chronic Liver Disease Via Artificial Intelligence

“Patients with cirrhosis and/or liver cancer and their caregivers often have unmet needs and insufficient knowledge about managing and preventing complications of their disease,” said Brennan Spiegel, MD, MSHS, director of Health Services Research at Cedars-Sinai and co-corresponding author of the study. “We found ChatGPT—while it has limitations—can help empower patients and improve health literacy for different populations.”

Patients diagnosed with liver cancer and cirrhosis, an end-stage liver disease that is also a major risk factor for the most common form of liver cancer, often require extensive treatment that can be complex and challenging to manage. Personalized education AI models could help increase patient knowledge and education, noted Alexander Kuo, MD medical director of Liver Transplantation Medicine at Cedars-Sinai, and co-corresponding author of the study. One of those is ChatGPT, which stands for generative pre-trained transformer. It has quickly become popular for its human-like text in chatbot conversations where users can input any prompt and it will generate a response based on the information stored in its database. It has already shown some potential for medical professionals by writing basic medical reports and correctly answering medical student examination questions. 

To verify the accuracy of the AI model in its knowledge about both cirrhosis and liver cancer, investigators presented ChatGPT with 164 frequently asked questions in five categories. The ChatGPT answers were then graded independently by two liver transplant specialists. 

Each question was posed twice to ChatGPT and was categorized as either basic knowledge, diagnosis, treatment, lifestyle or preventive medicine. 

Study results include:

1. ChatGPT answered about 77% of the questions correctly, providing high levels of accuracy in 91 questions from a variety of categories.  
2. The specialists grading the responses said 75% of the responses for basic knowledge, treatment and lifestyle were comprehensive or correct, but inadequate.
3. The proportion of responses that were “mixed with correct and incorrect data” was 22% for basic knowledge, 33% for diagnosis, 25% for treatment, 18% for lifestyle and 50% for preventive medicine. 

The AI model also provided practical and useful advice to patients and caregivers regarding the next steps adjusting to a new diagnosis. 

Still, the study left no doubt that advice from a physician was superior. 

What You Should Know:

• Genialis, a computational precision medicine company unraveling complex biology to find new ways to address disease, today announced it raised more than $13 million in Series A financing to transform the way diseases are diagnosed and treatment decisions are made.
• Taiwania Capital and Debiopharm Innovation Fund co-led the round, with participation from previous investors First Star Ventures, Redalpine Venture Partners, and Pikas. Other new investors include P5 Health Ventures and several Angels. Ita Lu of Taiwania and Hamzeh Abdul-Hadi of Debiopharm will join Genialis’ Board of Directors. 

AI/ML-enabled Platform With a Biology-First Approach

Genialis is developing next-generation patient classifiers using machine learning and high-throughput omics data to capture underlying disease biology and predict how patients will likely respond to targeted therapies. The company will use the funds from the Series A to expand its proprietary ResponderID(™) platform and build out its comprehensive collection of clinically validated biomarker models to provide pinpoint diagnoses for virtually every cancer patient. To date, Genialis has used ResponderID in collaboration with biopharma to analyze clinical trial data and inform future trial designs for numerous investigational drugs. Genialis also supports the commercialization of next-gen biomarker assays with several leading diagnostic firms.

“With ResponderID, we sought to disrupt the historical linear progression of drug discovery and development, rather aiming to close the loop between drug development, patient care and new drug discovery,” says Rafael Rosengarten, Ph.D., co-founder and CEO of Genialis. “We chose to focus initially on biomarkers that improve the efficiency of drug development, that ensure the right patient gets the right medicine, and make an impact on real people’s lives in a shorter period of time.”

ResponderID is a machine learning platform for clinical and translational research, built from years of experience working with partners across the industry and advanced internal R&D. ResponderID yields new biomarkers for drug development and discovery programs, as well as diagnostic tests. ResponderID can read the status of virtually any NGS-based biomarker, including bespoke and proprietary signatures, from a single assay. The resulting output provides clinical and translational researchers with a comprehensive molecular portrait of patient disease phenotype enabling the most informed decision-making possible.

“ResponderID, Genialis’ predictive biomarker platform, enables precision medicine by identifying patients that are most likely to respond to treatments. Its use in drug development will optimize study designs and improve chances of clinical trials success, driving much-needed productivity gains for pharma R&D and accelerating the time to market for promising new drugs,” said Hamzeh Abdul-Hadi, Investment Director at Debiopharm Innovation Fund. 

Last year, ten publications and poster presentations at major scientific conferences featured results generated with ResponderID, including AACR, ESMO, and SITC. Genialis also co-authored a paper in the Journal of Clinical Oncologydescribing OncXerna’s navicixizumab ph1b trial, including retrospective analysis with the Xerna TME Panel. 

“Genialis is leading the collision of biology and AI. Our approach is biology first, but with a deep commitment to getting the data science right. Thus, we only succeed as a team that understands both worlds,” said Miha Stajdohar, Ph.D., co-founder and CTO of Genialis. “This capital brings together a global syndicate of clinical oncology and deep tech experts and will allow us to grow our in-house capabilities in multiple disciplines.”Genialis is growing its teams in both the U.S. and Slovenia across business, operations, life science, and data science functions and expanding its advisory boards. The company is also investing in R&D collaborations with several leading cancer centers, hospital groups, and clinical academic labs. 

Enterprise-level healthcare is a massive business sector with seemingly infinite moving parts. With patients’ lives at stake, liability is huge, leaving little room for error. Yet human error is common in healthcare, and minor mistakes can cost millions in legal fees and lawsuits, not to mention risks to patient health. Healthcare enterprises are quickly embracing artificial intelligence solutions to mitigate loss, streamline operations, improve efficiency, and enhance customer service. 

Learn about the latest trends and solutions in healthcare AI, obstacles to AI adoption, and how artificial intelligence is rapidly transforming standards of patient care in 2023. 

#1 Personalized Data-Driven Healthcare 

The prevalent one-size-fits-all approach to patient diagnosis and treatment has serious flaws that can potentially do more harm than good. Every patient has a unique biological makeup influenced by unique genetic and lifestyle factors. Many have comorbidities and are being treated with multiple medications that can be incompatible with additional condition-based prescriptions. Symptoms-based diagnosis and cookie-cutter treatment solutions can be costly for both patient and healthcare provider, undermining patient health and increasing liability risks for doctors. 

Personalized integrative healthcare that treats the whole patient and not just their symptoms is perhaps the most important breakthrough trend in healthcare. Artificial Intelligence can play a critical role in collating key data that gives doctors a more in-depth and comprehensive patient profile for customized patient care. A well-trained machine learning (ML) model can do predictive diagnostics based on patient data and make recommendations for long-term treatment.

#2 Automated Document Processing and Management

The tightly regulated nature of enterprise-level healthcare demands massive documentation to remain industry-compliant and offset liability. Cloud-based record keeping has been a godsend, but processing mounds of paper documents remains a significant and growing challenge. 

Automated document processing powered by AI can be a game-changer that eliminates errors, improves efficiency, and downsizes staffing needs in multiple routine operations. AI solutions with a document processing component can be used to:

• Centralize and standardize healthcare data from different departments
• Manage patient flow
• Manage inventory and recommend predictive purchasing
• Automate medical coding and billing
• Process and analyze patient electronic health records (EHRs)
• Perform mundane data entry tasks
• Update and retrieve patient charts
• Assist in appointment scheduling
• Efficiently process insurance claims
• Automate staff scheduling and payroll
• Perform a multitude of other routine operational tasks

#3 Medical Diagnostics

Accurate diagnosis is critical to effective treatment. Artificial intelligence provides doctors with advanced image-interpreting tools for detecting anomalies that are invisible to the human eye. AI can help reduce the risk of human error by analyzing CT scans and retinal images, reading electrocardiograms, detecting cancer cells, and flagging neurodegenerative disorders in their early stages. 

Data-driven predictive diagnostics can help doctors and patients prepare long-term healthcare strategies that optimize the patient’s quality of life. AI can dramatically reduce the need for unnecessary testing and protect patients from undergoing excessive or inappropriate procedures.

# 4 Patient Data Analytics

Machine learning algorithms can process large quantities of medical data from patient EHRs, medical devices, and wearable monitors for early disease detection and alerts for rapid intervention. Predictive models can analyze patient data to identify stroke risks, cardiovascular disorders, neurodegenerative conditions, and more. AI-assisted software can analyze respiratory and cardiac acoustic data to flag irregularities and alert physicians to potential problems. 

# 5 Surgical Robotics

Robots bring AI into the operating theater to enhance precision and perform complex procedures. Surgical robots help to reduce the risk of complications and increase successful outcomes by fine-honing invasive procedures. Robotic ML models can be trained to identify and assemble surgical tools for specific procedures, and to automate equipment cleanup. Robots can even operate remotely with surgeon oversight to perform interventions in isolated regions or on the battlefield.

There are many more ways that healthcare entities can leverage artificial intelligence to improve patient care, reduce operating costs, optimize efficiency and enhance working conditions for medical staff. An experienced AI consultant can help you identify AI’s potential uses for your organization.

Obstacles to Healthcare AI Adoption

Healthcare AI is still just starting, and we expect to see a boom in innovations as more healthcare entities adopt AI solutions. But while the benefits to be reaped from healthcare AI speak for themselves, broad-scale adoption poses many challenges:

Eliciting stakeholder buy-in is a huge hurdle 

Many stakeholders are skeptical of new technologies like AI and reluctant to integrate them into existing healthcare systems. Moreover, the cost of custom solutions development, hardware and software, consultation fees, specialized staff onboarding, and ongoing system maintenance can seem prohibitive to budget-conscious administrators. Therefore, selling the concept of AI to administrators and board members may be your biggest hurdle to healthcare AI adoption.

Prioritizing AI projects takes time

AI implementation is by no means a quick fix. Identifying the areas in your organization where AI can be most impactful is essential, and prioritizing those areas according to budgetary constraints, urgency, or stakeholder support. To start, try to zero in on a single area where the benefits of AI will be most apparent. Conspicuous success in one area will pave the way for the adoption of future AI projects. 

Integration with existing systems is complicated

The compatibility of AI solutions and ML models with existing systems varies from one system to the next. This is where early consulting with experienced AI professionals pays off. Getting a realistic picture of the feasibility and cost of AI integration will streamline the adoption process and eliminate unexpected costs down the road. 

System failures can be devastating

“If you fail to plan, plan to fail” is an appropriate adage for implementing AI. Here again, working with a professional AI consultancy is key. An experienced AI team will ensure you tick all the boxes, from employee training to system maintenance and upgrades. 

Adequate tech support is crucial

Developing and implementing your AI solution is just the tip of the iceberg. Like other new technologies, AI is rapidly evolving, and you will need ongoing maintenance to fix unexpected bugs, make frequent upgrades, and evaluate model performance. You can onboard an in-house AI team or partner with an established AI company to keep your systems up-to-speed and humming along.

Getting Started with AI for Healthcare

Careful planning and informed decision-making are key to launching any AI solution. After getting the green light from stakeholders, your first step should be to consult with an experienced AI team with a proven track record in developing healthcare AI models. Given the relative newness of AI, you may have to dig deep to find a reputable company with enough experience and expertise to assess your specific needs and build customized solutions to meet them. 

AI transformation is a process, not a one-off event. Once you identify the key areas where you want to implement AI, choose one or two small projects to get the ball rolling. Starting small allows you to experiment and troubleshoot, exposing your staff to new concepts without overwhelming them. Small projects also lay the groundwork for ongoing collaboration with your AI providers, allowing them to showcase their expertise in building AI solutions that meet and exceed your expectations. 

AI solutions in healthcare may still be in their infancy, but your biggest competitors are already adopting AI and reaping its rewards. So, if you want to remain competitive and scale your healthcare enterprise, it’s never too early to join the AI revolution in healthcare. 

About Dmitrii Evstiukhin

Dmitrii Evstiukhin is the Director of Managed Services at Provectus. He leads a decorated team of experts who deliver cloud-based solutions to Provectus’ clients and partners. Before joining the Managed Services team, he held a Senior Solutions Architect position and was responsible for designing, building, and implementing advanced solutions in the cloud. Dmitrii is passionate about leveraging the latest technologies, encompassing cloud, data, AI/ML, and analytics, to help businesses achieve their goals.

Staffing levels continue to plague health systems across all of the clinical and administrative areas, with no real signs of easing in the next several years. Employee retention efforts have never been more critical and leaders are looking to technology to help their staff work smarter. While AI promises to be everything to everyone, the use cases where it is successful are actually quite narrow. However, there has been great progress in automating administrative tasks, particularly in revenue cycle operations, that are producing meaningful productivity improvements and easing the workers’ burden. Collecting every dollar counts and these improvements are making a real difference for revenue cycle teams.

Burnout among providers is at an all-time high causing many to leave the workforce and a healthcare staffing crisis. Despite the promise of technology, to date technology has been more of a contributor to provider burnout than an aid. We must adopt health IT solutions with our providers in mind – implementing technologies that automate and augment repetitive provider tasks, freeing up valuable time for our workforce.

A powerful Master Patient Index (MPI) allows organizations to safely and accurately manage data with fewer resources. Many organizations employ a few to dozens of data stewards to eliminate duplications and resolve record overlays. The number of data stewards required can be reduced drastically through a powerful MPI and referential matching combined with machine learning capabilities.

Health IT is a misnomer. Very little of the health IT industry is focused on improving health; instead it is however focused on collecting codes, rather than innovating workflows that enhance patient care and support providers. The burden that the current state of healthcare IT places on providers directly leads to physician burnout and a reduced capacity to deliver quality patient care.

Imagine if a health system could partner with a tech-enabled virtual care team to offload routine and commoditized tasks. This would open up virtual care capacity for mild urgent and chronic issues, while also freeing up office-based providers to focus on more complex patients. This strategy would also improve clinician burnout by making the primary provider the head of a team that could manage a greater number of people, meaning they could increase their own revenue while ensuring better access for their patients.

Leading hospitals and health systems in North America are using virtual care technology that supports an augmented care environment where a virtual team doesn’t replace, but rather, provides support to the bedside team, enabling health systems to reduce labor costs while liberating their bedside nurses to provide elevated, hands-on patient care. For example, telesitting technology allows health operations staff to raise their patient management abilities from one patient per staff member to up to 16 with virtual monitoring. The solution also enables new Virtual Nursing models which provide health systems with a tool to help address clinician burnout and staffing shortages by efficiently leveraging their most experienced nurses to support bedside care teams and enable more efficient clinical workflows. At Trinity Health, falls declined from as many as 62 in the second quarter of 2020 to as few as 28 in the third quarter of 2021. Not only was patient safety better protected through virtual monitoring, but Trinity Health was also able to reduce its costs by $23M by avoiding non-reimbursed services for those injuries.

Hospitals face the challenge of increasing surgical revenue without adding OR staff or facilities. AI-powered automation in perioperative and inpatient settings, coupled with machine learning and behavioral science, allows systems to more efficiently schedule surgeries and reduce the length of stay. This drives OR growth and relieves overburdened staff of manual tasks.

Burnout threatens clinicians’ effectiveness, which ultimately can harm patients and contribute to costly readmissions. Health IT and intelligent automation that safely reduce the cognitive burden that repetitive and menial tasks place on already overloaded clinicians has never been more needed than it is right now. It also helps ensure certain processes are followed consistently and accurately since growing staff shortages force some hospitals to staff entire units or shifts with temporary or traveling clinicians. Technology can give time back to clinicians so they can focus on their patients – going beyond relieving burnout to reintroducing some of the joy in patient care that has been depleted for so many providers over the last several years.

Whether in a clinical hospital setting or a college campus counseling center, provider burnout is a massive problem touching every corner of care delivery. Fostering wellness in healthcare workers is key to addressing burnout, promoting well-being, and building resiliency among providers. A recent survey by CUPA-HR focusing on employee retention finds that supervisors’ top challenges on campuses are filling empty positions and maintaining staff morale, with almost two-thirds (63%) of supervisors indicating they find filling positions very challenging and over half (54%) facing low staff morale. The integration of medical and behavioral health technology for healthcare providers on college campuses can help relieve many issues, including fatigue and burnout, playing a critical role in fusing healthcare and technology that addresses these critical staffing shortages.

With clinician shortages and an overburdened workforce, healthcare organizations are turning towards digital health strategies to help streamline clinical workflows, boost efficiency, and reduce administrative burdens. Solutions such as remote patient monitoring (RPM) can enable providers to remotely manage patients’ health conditions outside the clinical setting, freeing up vital resources. RPM also allows for improvements in medication adherence, streamlining billing and reimbursement while enabling clinicians to spend more time on patient-facing and revenue-generating opportunities. Although there is no perfect solution for all the growing staffing challenges, digital health technology can help healthcare organizations reduce the burden of routine, manual tasks on clinical staff and deliver greater insights that allow them to focus more on patient care and enhanced outcomes.

In a recent survey, 30% of RNs and LPNs said that making a difference in people’s lives is the most rewarding aspect of the job. Yet, we continue to pile more tedious work on their plates, causing more burnout that results in more clinicians leaving the profession. It’s time to ask nurses to do less. By automating routine and mundane tasks, we can free up nurses to deliver more individualized care, spend time with those patients who need it most, conserve human resources, and reduce costs. Thoughtful automation that lets nurses work at the top of their licenses can have a lasting, material impact on attracting and retaining nursing staff.

With nationwide staffing shortages, budget crunches, patient surges, and the heavy burden upon nurses, physicians, and other healthcare workers during the pandemic era, health systems must make smart, well-informed decisions about staffing, resource use, and system capacity. Like evidence-based clinical decision-making, healthcare operations decision-making needs to be driven by innovative use of hard data and intelligent analytics. Healthcare IT tools, processes, and organizational models like the MDClone ADAMS Center help health systems use their human and physical resources wisely to optimize the care they can deliver to their communities while maximizing the support they give to their professional staff and preventing clinician burnout.

Persistent staffing shortages continue to exacerbate clinician burnout as stress and demands on their time mount. Medical NLP is one technology that holds promise to relieve some of that pressure by improving EHRs for their end-users. By turning the unstructured text in patient documents into succinct, searchable summaries, caregivers can have easier, faster access to the relevant information to patient care and spend less time searching for the ‘needle in the haystack’, reducing their screen time and improving the end-user experience.

Clinician burnout, ‘the great resignation,’ and pandemic-induced capacity issues have turned a glaring spotlight on some fundamental issues plaguing our healthcare system. It’s not a matter of ‘working smarter’ or throwing bodies at the problem, but of empowering our clinicians at the point of care. All too often, technology is a hindrance rather than an enabler. Physicians need immediate access to timely, detailed, and accurate information about a patient to inform therapy options. EHRs alone are not the answer, as they are heavily siloed and built for billing. To make deliberate, informed treatment decisions, clinicians need tools that unify and present relevant clinical data in a way that illuminates trends in real-time.

Most people who go into healthcare or behavioral health services are service-oriented, compassionate people. They’re focused on wanting to use their skills to serve people. Anything getting in the way of that happening creates dissatisfaction. Unfortunately, EMRs can increase burnout by forcing clinicians to spend excessive amounts of time navigating their screens and conducting data entry and administrative work. Telehealth is one of the keys to better work-life balance for providers because the setting gives them more control. It can also mitigate burnout by offering clinicians greater flexibility in how they work, enabling them to work on top of their license, and freeing up time to see more patients, all of which leads to improved job satisfaction.

Angie Franks, CEO of ABOUT Healthcare Inc., which provides access center solutions that enable hospitals and health systems to more effectively manage all aspects of patient transfers and optimize access center operations

The application of technology shouldn’t be limited to one health system or system of care. In fact, its impact can be much more profound when it extends to multiple systems under different ownership. The pandemic is a prime example. With it, we saw an exceptional surge in healthcare demand in a compressed timeframe. Moreover, many of these spikes were tied to geography. Information technology can help health systems load balance capacity across extended regional networks to ensure patient demands for care are met. When the boundaries to care are no longer limited to a specific hospital or health system, healthcare becomes more ubiquitous, and providers can ensure prompt access to care at every stage of the patient journey. And compressing the time to care promotes optimal patient outcomes, which is the ultimate objective.

Prior authorization remains a massive administrative burden for payers and providers, despite ongoing improvement efforts. Patients are frustrated by the care delays that result. Clinicians are experiencing burnout due to the extensive amount of paperwork associated with documenting and conforming to health plan policies. CMS aims to improve prior authorization with a recently proposed rule. It’s a step forward to ease some of the daily administrative workloads. As the conversation continues about reducing health worker burnout, more health plans will start by adopting new technologies to comply with upcoming regulations. Still, many will begin to think bigger and use AI and machine learning in real-time to automate prior authorization decisions – resulting in up to a 60% reduction in administrative work.

What You Should Know:

– Vivante Health, a provider of digital digestive health solutions for employers and health plans, is expanding its GIThrive platform with enhanced technology that optimizes triage, telemedicine appointments with physicians in every state when needed, and more

– GIThrive’s virtual care model will now be powered by enhanced technology that facilitates triage, including access to all existing GIThrive features plus GI-related test ordering, prescriptions and telemedicine appointments with physicians in every state for members needing such support. 

– Users will now receive AI-driven, personalized care plans guided by an expert team of coordinated care providers including gastroenterologists, internal medicine specialists, dietitians and health coaches, helping increase the speed to diagnosis and treatment in an area where delays can have serious medical and cost consequences. 

GIThrive’s New Capabilities

GIThrive’s new capabilities extend its ability to help members improve their gut health as well as reduce unnecessary medical spend for both members and health plan sponsors. The platform now offers: 

• Individualized care plans that dynamically adjust to reflect updates to members’ symptoms, clinical findings and preferences 
• Accelerated identification of symptom triggers through enhanced data collection 
• Access to a nationwide network of internists and gastroenterologists for diagnosis, treatment, lab test orders and prescriptions
• Test ordering direct from the GIThrive interface when recommended in the member’s care plan
• Colorectal cancer screening kits shipped to eligible users without doctor interaction
• Triage to ensure that members with high acuity issues receive priority for virtual physician visits 
• Referral of members needing in-person care to in-network, brick-and-mortar settings 
• The ability to manage the member’s digestive health care holistically rather than fragmented across different care plans and providers

What You Should Know:

– A recent study published in JAMA found that conventional genomic tests commonly used for breast cancer tumors can be less accurate for Black women. This news comes at a time when Black women with breast cancer are experiencing mortality rates that are 41% higher than white women.

– Dr. Nathalie Johnson, MD FACS and President of The American Society of Breast Cancer Surgeons is among numerous doctors who advocate for Agendia and its tests which look beyond race, ethnicity, age, or menopausal status, to provide information based solely on biology. This precise information allows women and their care teams to be empowered to select the best treatment option based on their unique cancer.

Understanding and Addressing Racial Disparities in Breast Cancer Care

Racial disparities in medical care continue to pervasively affect the most vulnerable communities. Understanding such disparities within the context of racial inequities and societal institutions allows for systemic discrimination to be addressed. Such discrimination is not the aberrant behavior of a few but is often supported at an institutional level, propagated additionally by implicit biases and negative stereotypes. Stark disparities in breast cancer care have been brought to light recently by a stream of research papers highlighting a glaring issue: Black women disproportionately suffer negative outcomes in breast cancer care, as opposed to their White counterparts.

A recent cohort study shows that Black women in the United States were more likely to have a high-risk recurrence score and to die of axillary node-negative breast cancer compared with non-Hispanic White women with comparable recurrence scores. This shows that the Oncotype DX Breast Recurrence Score test, which is used to analyze the activity of a group of genes that can affect how an early-stage breast cancer tumor is likely to respond to treatment, has lower prognostic accuracy in Black women. This, in turn, suggests that genomic assays used to identify candidates for adjuvant chemotherapy may require model calibration in populations with greater racial/ethnic diversity.

Dr. Johnson is currently the President of The American Society of Breast Cancer Surgeons, as well as the Medical Director of the Legacy Health System Cancer Institute and the Legacy Breast Health Center in Portland, Oregon. She is considered to be one of the world’s leading authorities in breast cancer, not only because of her impeccable reputation as a distinguished surgeon, but also because of the fact that having survived breast cancer herself allows her to empathize with her patients, and understand breast cancer in an unparalleled manner. 

To learn more about racial disparities in breast cancer care, we spoke with Dr. Johnson for her insights: 

When talking about breast cancer, you often bring up the notion of “every woman having her own unique cancer”. What does this mean, and how can more widespread understanding and acceptance of this notion empower Black women and other marginalized communities?

Dr. Johnson, MD FACS and President of The American Society of Breast Cancer Surgeons: The notion of ‘every woman having her own unique cancer’ is, to me, the true definition of personalized medicine. Understanding each patient, what they bring to the disease and where they come from helps one understand the things that would make them most comfortable with the treatment. It also gives one an insight into why certain options feel good, and why some don’t. This also allows us to take the time and explain to the patient certain things that they might not be too happy to have, for instance – chemotherapy. Nobody is happy to have chemotherapy, but by understanding the patient, one is able to teach them about why they need these treatments for their specific tumor. This is one of the reasons why I am a strong advocate of neoadjuvant therapy because it has allowed us to treat people who we initially thought were not going to get better.

For Black women in particular, there are different options. I am trying to educate people about recurrence scores and the genomics of cancer. We have begun to realize that the widely used genomic test ‘Oncotype DX’ does not represent the biology of African American women as well as another genomic score might. This puts Black women with estrogen-positive breast cancer at a disproportionate disadvantage. Trying to understand tumor biology specific to the patient also allows one to consider pre-surgical endocrine therapy, which can provide evidence as to whether the tumor is endocrine-sensitive in the way you might have imagined. 

How would starting the conversation around ‘ethnically representative tumor biology’ address the racial disparities we see in breast cancer?

Dr. Johnson: Because we see Black women with the same Oncotype recurrence score as their white counterparts having a much higher mortality rate, we can extend that logic and apply it to other ethnically marginalized communities as well. Everyone benefits from this conversation. For each ethnic group, we want to do the best that we can, and ultimately help each and every patient that walks through our door, we want to fully understand the biology of their tumor and what nuances there may be. The same principle exists for genomic testing as well. When we do studies, we often don’t have enough representation from under-represented minorities, and this really highlights the need for having representative samples in clinical trials, otherwise, we may not do as good a job as we could of understanding their particular set of genes.

What are some barriers that discourage more Black women to take part in clinical trials, and how can we overcome these barriers?

Dr. Johnson: We can definitely do a better job at having everybody – Black women and all, included in studies. One of the major issues is trust. Being able to sit down and explain the aims and objectives of the study to the patients in detail allows for better trust-building. In some ways, there may be some implicit bias that goes into enrolling patients into trials, which could manifest in ways like not thinking that some patients may not understand the study objectives when in reality they would if you took the time to explain. In some of the recent genomic trials, like the ‘RxPONDER Trial’, there was some concern that Black women were not as compliant with therapy as white women. However, it turned out that Black women were the most compliant group in that entire trial. For other groups, one thing we can do is to ensure that consent forms are in languages spoken and understood by those communities. Having consent forms in different languages is one of the things that The American Society of Breast Cancer Surgeons wants to work on, so we can enroll diverse participants.

What prognostic and predictive value do advanced gene expression profiling solutions such as Agendia provide to Black women?

Dr. Johnson: As an advocate of MammaPrint, I try to educate people about these advanced gene expression profiling solutions. Based on many studies, Agendia’s MammaPrint appears to be a more representative genomic score for Black women in particular. MammaPrint’s prognostic value is far greater than the genomic scores we use today because it accurately classifies African American women as ‘high risk’ which impacts the treatments we give them and also improves their outcomes. Additionally, with MammaPrint, the number of genes tested is greater, which allows you to comprehensively evaluate the impact of other genes on the patient. For instance, obesity has been found to impact the outcomes of breast cancer patients. Therefore, by using MammaPrint you can look at the genes that are differentially expressed, and understand the tumor in a much better way. Using MammaPrint and BluePrint allows you to look at 150 genes, whereas Oncotype DX just accounts for 21 genes, so there is definitely a stark difference in the depth of gene expression change that can be picked up with MammaPrint. The interplay of differential expression amongst genes is something that can and will be further explored in the future across populations, but for now, advanced genomic testing is definitely allowing us to understand and treat breast cancer better.

About Agendia

Agendia’s testing platform provides physicians the ability to comprehensively analyze the biology behind an early-stage breast cancer patient’s tumor, providing unique genomic insights that empower precise treatment decisions. Agendia’s unique, innovative tests include:

• MammaPrint®, its 70-gene prognostic test, determines a specific patient’s breast cancer recurrence risk, and can predict a patient’s response to both chemo and endocrine therapy.
• The 80-gene molecular subtyping test, BluePrint®, identifies the underlying biology of an individual’s breast cancer to provide information about its behavior, long-term prognosis, and potential response to systemic therapy.
• When combined, the two tests capture the underlying biology of a tumor, to holistically inform the most effective treatment approaches for a patient’s unique cancer, regardless of age, menopausal status, race, ethnicity and other clinical factors, enabling physicians to objectively select the best treatment plan.