IoHC: What is Olive Doing Differently with AI?
In spite of the reservations around AI and the fear that these systems will take over the human workforce, industry experts have testified to the impeccable efficiency of the technology. For the healthcare sector, however, the story is quite different. Aside from being a threat to human jobs, health technology companies were not even building AI systems that could impact healthcare in a way that would be felt.
Just five years ago only a miserly 20–30% of hospitals had an AI strategy but that number took a leap to 90% in 2020. Heightened by the effect of the global pandemic, the need to adopt AI in hospitals and healthcare processes has become even more obvious this past year. Experts have said that these AI systems won’t replace the human workforce or jobs, instead, they will replace certain tasks.
The healthcare sector had been lagging behind in technological innovations and while other sectors had long moved into a major tech-powered era, it wasn’t until the pandemic that an overwhelmed health care sector opened its arms wide to fully embrace technology.
There are many health technology companies building systems that will improve healthcare processes and increase patient output. While some of these innovations are redundant and not specific to any particular needs or challenges in the sector, there are companies that are changing how we deliver healthcare.
One of such companies is Olive.
In his letter published in Olive Quarterly, Sean Lane, CEO of Olive, expressed the need for health technology companies to not just develop or build products to sell but to grow and be willing to put more resources into solving hard industry-related problems like every other industry is doing.
Olive AI
Founded in 2018, Olive’s main focus is Artificial Intelligence in healthcare and one can say they have taken AI to another level in creating a unified system that solves some of health care’s most crucial challenges which include poor patient outcomes, cybersecurity, payment processing and healthcare staffing shortages.
Olive’s AI solution serves as the intelligent router between systems and data by automating repetitive high-volume tasks and workflows which provides thorough interoperability.
Popularly known for creating the Internet of Healthcare Things, Olive has built a platform that automates the process of business analysis letting healthcare companies make informed decisions.
“Make sure that whatever technology is out there is not a substitute for the human connection. Those technologies are used to augment, to enhance that human connection. It’s not a substitute.” Raphael J. Grossman, MD, FACS, The Health Channel’s Own Your Health Segment.
What is Olive doing differently?
1. Clinical Data Analysis
In 2012, Olive in partnership with Intermountain Healthcare (a Utah-based nonprofit system of 22 hospitals and a medical group of more than 1,600 physicians and advanced practice clinicians at 180 clinics) discovered a unique approach to analyzing cost and clinical data that presented results in a more meaningful way and made more sense to surgeons: they called it “cohorts”.
Simply put, these cohorts compared ‘apples to apples’ and eliminated the variabilities based on more complete information.
In order to make the work of gathering the data, reviewing and grouping all that would make up these cohorts efficient and easy and in turn save more funds, Olive designed an artificial intelligence-driven platform that featured natural language processing (NLP) technology with 98% accuracy to capture thousands of data points from a variety of sources, including clinician notes.
The result?
Today, there are over 300 cohorts for surgical procedures and most importantly the project far exceeded Intermountain’s target of $60 million saved, totalling $90 million saved over a period of just four years. In orthopaedics, the average savings was $1,500 per case. In urology, it resulted in savings of $600 per case, and paediatrics saved $470 per case.
“[This] changed the way our surgical teams think about and deliver care. By catalyzing a cultural shift from experience-based to evidence-based medicine, we can now deliver cost & quality improvements in a way that both clinicians and health system administrators trust and use.” Mark Ott, Medical Director Surgical Services Clinical Program at Intermountain Healthcare.
Through this idea, Olive is changing how healthcare is delivered. As more meaningful cohorts are built and more variations within these cohorts are assessed, healthcare systems will be able to reduce more costs without diminishing the quality of care and in turn better outcomes.
2. The Internet of Healthcare
In an article I published in July, I mentioned that the internet of healthcare makes healthcare delivery more effective through interoperability, machine to machine connectivity and data sharing. Healthcare providers will never deliver their best if they are always left in the dark and this will, in turn, affect patient outcomes.
If doctors, administrators and patients aren’t sharing their data over a common network, then there are bound to be loopholes and disconnections in treatment and decision making. Doctors spend almost six hours during a workday in front of computers and caregivers are made to joggle between systems and vast data looking for one information or the other.
Regulations and a siloed system have forced our health workers and patients to do the administrative work. Little wonder that one out of every three dollars in healthcare is spent on administrative costs; a problem AI could easily solve.
Olive identified this major challenge in healthcare and began building what many are referring to as the Internet of Healthcare.
“When I was at my hometown hospital, one thing became abundantly clear: healthcare didn’t have the Internet. Patient experiences I’ve witnessed for myself and my family opened my eyes to how many processes could be done better in healthcare, and there was one true solution: build the Internet of Healthcare. Connect all of healthcare’s disparate technology to fix a broken system. That’s the idea that started Olive and is core to our vision of revealing life-changing outcomes.” said Sean Lane, CEO of Olive.
The Internet of Healthcare, like the IoT, means connecting networks — health systems, software, patient data and history and payers. Olive is modifying healthcare from a series of outdated fax machines and human routers to an advanced secure network powered by AI. To help build the IoH, Olive partnered with AWS to leverage a HIPAA-compliant environment.
By creating the IoH, healthcare workers can concentrate on delivering care to their patients while Olive AI joggles the work of acquiring data, processing it and sharing it across required systems.
3. AI Library in Healthcare
To make a difference, one has to stand out. This is what Olive has done; create a system that stands out and makes efficient healthcare delivery a walk in the park.
To further improve workers output and patient outcomes, Olive designed an AI sidekick called Olive Helps. Olive Helps is a desktop application that whispers real-time information to healthcare workers and takes them straight to the task-specific intelligence they need. What does this mean? It simply means that Olive Helps gives workers prompts and leads to the exact info they are looking for while they are looking for it as long as it is somewhere on a system connected to the hospital network.
How does Olive Helps do this?
Healthcare workers get the information they need from Olive Helps via Loops in the Loop Library; imagine apps in an app store. All information ranging from patient access to revenue cycle to training and education are available on the loop with more partners creating Loops every day.
This dimension from which Olive has applied AI to healthcare will minimize errors and mitigate risks, improve the speed, quality and impact of work as well as improve the decisions and actions of human workers.
Therrie’s Thoughts
To be honest, I was among those who were sceptical about the application of AI to work processes, especially in healthcare. We were dealing with a rise in unemployment, now these bots wanted to take what was left of human jobs.
I was absolutely wrong, we all were.
Fast forward to 2020 when the pandemic struck the world, I really wished hospitals had better AI strategies and applied them to solving healthcare problems soon enough.
Now, experts and enthusiasts can hardly keep up with the trends and innovations in healthcare technology. Companies are discovering new and better ways to deliver quality healthcare and improve the work standards of healthcare providers while managing costs.
AI is an oil well waiting to be tapped as it holds so much potential for the healthcare industry. It goes beyond building systems and products, it is about applying these systems to healthcare so that it impacts how healthcare is delivered. Other industries are breaking ground with AI and it is time the healthcare industry did the same.
“From this point forward, healthcare will lead other industries in innovation and technology rather than lag. Other industries will borrow our technology. Together we will be the pioneers. We will provide examples that others will model themselves after. ‘Ten years behind healthcare’ will be the new broken record”. Sean Lane in A letter from Olive CEO Sean Lane
