Leaders of health systems and large physician groups are thinking big in terms of how AI could transform care. During an April 23 panel session at the spring meeting of the National Association of ACOs, several executives discussed going beyond interjecting AI into current workflows and said they are trying to imagine new modes of care delivery and how AI could give clinicians more time with their patients. 

Tesha Simpson, D.N.P., M.S., CEO of 900-provider Millenium Physician Group in Fort Myers, Fla., said her organization initially has been focusing on point-of-care solutions because the physician group has been growing at an exponential pace. We want to ensure that we're looking at sustainability of the business, but it's also sustainability of our team,” she said. “There are areas where we can optimize, where we're not necessarily substituting humans, rather we're augmenting them. How do we figure out where we can get the most value, top of licensure, top of title, top of role? We’ve been using AI to push that over the last 12 months. We're rethinking our governance and how we're approaching AI, and it is really challenging us to think more transformatively.”

Simpson said that most clinicians go into healthcare to help patients, not to check boxes. “Unfortunately, value-based care takes that part of medicine away,” she said. “When we look at AI, we're trying to identify ways that we can actually bring back that patient-to-provider encounter, and take the computer out of the way.” 

AI has the potential to improve both the clinician experience and the patient experience, she added. “We are constantly wrestling with how we can ensure we optimize the technology that we have today, and are really focused on that, but at the same time looking at how do we truly transform the way we deliver care?

Changes at Cone Health

John Supra is chief digital health and analytics officer at North Carolina-based Cone Health, which along with Geisinger is now part of Risant Health, the nonprofit organization created by Kaiser Foundation Hospitals to expand and accelerate the adoption of value-based care in diverse, multi-payer, multi-provider, community-based health system environments.

Like Millennium Group’s Simpson, Supra put his emphasis on bigger types of transformation than revenue cycle tools or ambient scribe technology. “When we think about AI, we're talking about a whole collection of incremental improvements to how we do work today,” he said. “There’s been a lot of AI put on rev cycle, these very labor-intensive activities, but I don't think we're talking as much about how transformative AI can be to the future of healthcare delivery.”

He noted that health systems are going to incrementally improve their operations. “We’re going to be able to deliver more care, more services, because we're going to take out some of that work that technology can do more effectively, and we're probably going to get comfortable with it,” Supra said. “I want to challenge us to think about what primary care transformation looks like.”

Supra said some healthcare groups are starting to think about what an agentically driven practice would look like. “If somebody was thinking about building that from the ground up, how much of our office team and staff could be redirected to engage with our patients, either as they come in or where they are in the community? How can the responsibility of CINs and ACOs shift to be convening how care can happen throughout our community?” 

Supra said agentic AI would allow healthcare organizations to start thinking about how they deliver care in a different way. “How do we start to understand what we're spending our time and resources on and think about how AI technology can change them?” he asked. “One of our biggest concerns is that we automate a lot of really bad processes. We don't think hard enough in healthcare about why things are the way they are and what would a different workflow be if people didn't need to come into our offices, if we could deliver care where people are.” He said he is not just talking about virtual visits done in the same way, but a different experience. “I know we'll talk about some wins and absolute savings of time that we've already seen with AI. I want us to anchor on what could be fundamentally different, so that our investment in healthcare, and related social services can actually lead to better health in our communities.”

He gave one example of how Cone Health is testing some agentic activity. Its North Carolina Medicaid program contracts have patient outreach obligations. Cone Health is working with one of its partners on a voice-based agentic conversation to collect some of the initial information. “We're going to pilot that internally, probably in the next month or so. It's been a fast move, but it's where we have to be thinking across the spectrum — where can AI come in?”

Supra also spoke about changes involving AI governance. “As part of Risant, we’re looking across Geisinger, Cone Health, and the Kaiser groups. If we’re going to evaluate a vendor's AI, for example, do we need to do that across each of the systems independently or could we come together and look at some of these together and govern there? We're doing some of that because I think it's going to require that scale to get a real benefit. As we think about some of these AI investments and the governance of it, scale is going to be really important.”