This week and in the days ahead, technology companies, including Infinitus, Ambience Healthcare and Anthropic, are releasing new artificial intelligence tools that could bolster trust and ease of use for patients, physicians and revenue cycle managers. Hallucination-free AI for engagement By limiting AI agent responses, Infinitus hopes to ensure trust and compliance with the first hallucination-free voice AI agents specifically for patient engagement, the company said in its announcement Thursday. New agents on the Infinitus voice AI platform can give patients round-the-clock access to provider expertise and keep providers informed and payer reimbursements seamless.
The AI agents could improve patients' healthcare literacy, support medication adherence and escalate reported side effects to care teams. “As a patient, the most important questions come after hours, when care teams are off duty or asleep," Ankit Jain, CEO and cofounder of Infinitus, said in a statement. For providers, the new agents also provide automated calls to simplify care coordination and clinical documentation submission to prevent care delays.
The company's proprietary approach, called Discrete Action Space, limits the responses the AI agents can provide. AI responses are based on a vetted set of phrases to align with clinical and regulatory standards, making them free from risks of hallucination common to traditional AI systems, according to the company. The HIPAA- and SOC 2-compliant AI agents also validate information in real time based on data sources specific to payer plans, treatment area, patient history and information provided by during the interactions.
To reduce errors, the agents monitor themselves for anomalies, contradictions and gaps and will create alerts for human oversight. Evaluating conversation outputs is a critical level of oversight that may be impossible to achieve manually, Infinitus said. Autonomous self-evaluation is critical for building trust and accountability in AI technology, Jain said.
"We believe we are the first to deliver on the trust you should expect in healthcare at every level of our platform." The company's AI tools have supported 100 million minutes of healthcare conversations for the care of more than a million patients, Infinitus said. Ambience is now on Azure Ambience Healthcare's AI platform for health systems is now available in Microsoft Azure Marketplace to streamline deployment, the company said Wednesday.
The platform integrates with electronic health records and provides ambient listening across more than 100 specialties; analyzes conversations to surface precise ICD-10 codes, CPT codes and full audit trails to streamline revenue cycle management; and generates patient summaries and referral letters. "Azure Marketplace and trusted partners like Ambience Healthcare help customers do more with less by increasing efficiency, buying confidently and spending smarter," said Jake Zborowski, general manager of the Microsoft Azure Platform at Microsoft. Claude AI to get voice mode Anthropic, a firm that focuses on the safe and secure advancement of AI, is getting ready to drop voice mode in Claude, an AI agent rival of OpenAI's ChatGPT, according to Bloomberg.
Users may be able to talk to the once text-only tool before the end of the month, according to the story. The new modality might make the large language model (LLM) more interesting to healthcare innovators and users. In January, Stanford Medicine announced that Claude was helping Stanford Healthcare physicians to inform patients about their test results.
The provider built an in-house tool that leveraged Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet LLM to generate more readable test result descriptions for patients and thereby reduce the amount of time it takes physicians to explain test results. A pilot test involved 10 primary care physicians using the tool for one month, and once their feedback was incorporated, a second cohort of 24 physicians tested the tool for an additional two months. "As a clinician, I love that I don’t have to start with a blank page and the draft is in language that’s understandable for patients," Dr. Christopher Sharp, Stanford Medicine's chief medical information officer, said in a statement.
"I’ve had patients say to me, ‘Dr. Sharp, you always write a comment on my result, and it makes me feel so much better.’ It takes effort and time to create those notes in a clear and empathic way, and I think this tool will make it easier and more efficient to provide those interpretations, which are so important to our patients.” Andrea Fox is senior editor of Healthcare IT News. Email: afox@himss.org Healthcare IT News is a HIMSS Media publication.
