In April, health data analytics company Innovaccer unveiled Sara, a conversational AI assistant designed to help executives at health systems and payers make better use of their data. On Tuesday, Innovaccer announced that it has expanded its Sara tool into a whole new suite of health AI products. 

The “Sara for Healthcare” AI suite comprises four different solutions — one for answering healthcare executives’ questions, one for automating care planning and documentation, one for generating clinical visit summaries, and one for streamlining workflows at contact centers.

The AI product that Innovaccer announced earlier this year is now referred to as “Sara for Insights.” The tool is designed so that executives can ask complex questions about their organization’s patients or members and get immediate answers on clinical, financial or operational metrics.

For example, a health system executive might ask the chatbot to show them how cost of care is trending over time at their organization. Once the tool presents them with the data, they can feed it follow-up questions, such as asking it to break down the data by payer mix or only show data for diabetic patients.

With this tool, executives can get as specific as they like with their information requests, which can help them pinpoint operational challenges and population health insights quickly, explained Kanav Hasija, Innovaccer’s chief product officer. Through a simple, minute-long conversation, an executive can get the tool to produce easy-to-digest data on how high-risk diabetic patients’ cost of care is changing at their health system — and have this data split by different hospitals and patient demographics. 

The next solution in Innovaccer’s new AI suite is “Sara for Care Management,” which seeks to assist care coordinators with visit planning and documentation. The tool listens to conversations between care coordinators and patients to summarize the discussion, generate documentation and produce potential care plans, Hasija explained.

Innovaccer’s AI suite also includes “Sara for Point of Care” — a product designed to alleviate clinicians’ documentation burden through automation. The tool has the same aim as the clinical documentation solutions sold by Nuance, Abridge and Suki: to give clinicians more time to spend with their patients and reduce the excessive amount of time they spend on documentation outside of work hours.

“Nuance DAX is an amazing product. Before our AI, it was the most comprehensive product out there, but it was too pricey — anywhere between $1,600 to $2,000 per provider per month. That is because they still have more humans in the loop to collect the documentation as compared to what the AI can generate. Our solution is being trained on healthcare concepts and healthcare terminology. It’s more accurate in what it spits out in the first moment, so there’s fewer humans in the loop,” Hasija declared.

Innovaccer is still determining the price point for its clinical documentation solution but it will be “at least half” the price of Nuance’s tool, Hasija said. It’s likely that most inpatient providers will continue using Nuance’s tool, given it has been deeply integrated into Epic’s EHR, but Innovaccer’s product could be attractive to ambulatory and outpatient providers that can’t pay as much, he added.

The final product in Innovaccer’s AI suite is “Sara for Experience Center,” which automates tasks and processes for healthcare’s contact center agents. The tool promises to give agents advice on how to answer patients’ inquiries while they’re on calls, as well as provide them with seamless access to daily workflows and their organization’s appointment scheduling system, Hasija said.

“None of us have had a good experience calling a hospital call center and getting our questions answered. It’s not a problem of call center agents — it’s a problem of how much data they have at their fingertips while on the calls,” he explained.

Hasija acknowledged that AI is an incredibly hot area for innovation in the digital health world right now, but he contended that Innovaccer’s new product suite differentiates itself from other companies launching their automation tools onto the market. 

His company’s technology is unique because it aims to be affordable and was trained extensively on healthcare concepts, he declared. All of the solutions in Innovaccer’s new AI suite have been trained on millions of data points having to do with healthcare terminologies workflows, Hasija added.

Photo: ipopba, Getty Images