How AI Can Unlock the Full Potential of Clinical, Administrative Data

March 14, 2022 - The phrase artificial intelligence in healthcare conjures up images of smart machines revealing patterns of disease and treatment, but today its applications will most profoundly impact the healthcare industry by removing administrative burden on providers and making data more usable in clinical decision-making.

A 2021 survey on the state of healthcare AI found that the industry is most keen to invest in natural language processing (36%), data integration (45%), and business intelligence (33%) as a means of unlocking the full potential of their data, both structured and unstructured. Much of that latent power is expected to come from the latter, which makes up 80 percent of all medical data.

Today, forms of artificial intelligence can be brought to bear on unstructured data — a sizeable amount of which remains on paper and exchanged via traditional fax — and remove obstacles in the way of information becoming actionable for clinicians and care managers.

Role of AI in structuring data

According to the fourth annual Optum Survey on Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Health Care, executives increasingly believe in the power of artificial intelligence to help improve patient outcomes, support cost savings in the health system, and promote health equity. Doing so will come from applying mature forms of artificial intelligence to information bottlenecks to speed the flow of data between providers, patients, and payers.

“The responsible use of AI continues to provide important opportunities for health care leaders to streamline administrative processes and provide more effective patient care with enhanced experiences for both patients and providers,” said Steve Griffiths, senior vice president, data and analytics, Optum Labs, the research and development arm of UnitedHealth Group. “These leaders are not just users of AI, but they have an opportunity to be looked to as role models across industries in their commitment to using AI responsibly.”

For healthcare AI to fulfill the promises of innovators moving forward, the onus is on healthcare organizations to manage unstructured data and provide intelligent systems with high-quality data to improve the accuracy and reliability of their learnings. By giving structure to data, artificial intelligence/NLP transforms data sets into actionable information for providers to use at the point of care. It also lays the foundation for future insight as part of a “continuous cycle of learning.”

Many are eager to see where AI provides the most benefit. Clinicians are certainly ready to implement AI to improve the quality and accessibility of data. According to Accenture, a sizeable majority (80%) see the role of AI expanding beyond managing administrative use cases (e.g., transcribing notes) to more sophisticated clinical uses.

But these secondary and tertiary use cases will remain out of reach unless a strong data foundation is first put into place. Healthcare leaders must demonstrate AI’s utility and reliability with more basic tasks to earn and maintain provider trust in the technology — efficient access to high-quality data serving as a secure building block.

Why timely, accurate data matters to care delivery, management

The healthcare industry has a data problem that is getting in the way of providing personalized care to patients. Unstructured data is not being leveraged to create a complete picture of an individual’s health and well-being. With partial knowledge, care decisions can easily prove ineffective, leading to poor outcomes and avoidable costs.

Providers are joined by payers in facing data-related obstacles to enable high-quality care delivery and management. Like providers, payers have also recognized the need to leverage AI and intelligent technologies to free up their workforce to focus more closely on the healthcare needs of their members. In particular, payers want to free up their care coordinators to enable members to have better access to information and support resources, simplify their care experiences, and promote prevention over more costly sick care.

AI is the key to unlocking access to timely and accurate data and providing clinicians and care managers with the information necessary for achieving positive patient outcomes. The main takeaway from a physician survey by The Harris Poll and Google Cloud was their desire for “a 360-degree view of the patient, across all provider encounters, leads to faster, more accurate diagnosis, and better outcomes.”

Physicians recognize the power of high-quality data. Case in point: 96% believe easier access to critical information will help save a patient’s life; 95% believe increased data interoperability will ultimately help improve patient outcomes, and 86% believe improved health data exchange will significantly cut time to diagnosis.

However, physicians face a different reality today. Nearly two-thirds (62%) are responsible for entering the same patient into multiple systems while a larger percentage (68%) have to navigate multiple systems of record (i.e., EHR systems) to find information. The use of inefficient EHR technology is proving especially burdensome to physicians, negatively impacting their ability to deliver quality. Simply reducing the time spent finding and updating data would lead to improvements in personalized care.

In healthcare, increased efficiency and productivity represent the most sought-after improvements across organizations. With advancements in artificial intelligence such as NLP having reached a production-ready state, healthcare organizations must leverage the technology to ensure that their providers are making clinical decisions based on only the most pertinent and reliable information.

A failure to invest in a solution that makes high-quality data available to clinicians will limit the applications of AI in healthcare for years to come. Through machine learning, intelligent systems can use NLP to identify and extract key data elements that speed clinical decision-making and reduce time to care. Imagine unstructured data becoming structure intelligence efficiently and securely. That’s the vision that clinicians and care managers have for healthcare, and technology is now capable of making the vision a reality.

With investments in AI set to increase over the next five years, these technologies must base their analytical insights on a secure foundation of accurate, complete, and consistent data. That begins with turning unstructured data into actionable information. Healthcare organizations will then be ready to leverage future innovations in AI that truly transform patient care.

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About Consensus Cloud Solutions, Inc.

Consensus Cloud Solutions, Inc. (NASDAQ: CCSI) is a global leader of digital technology for secure information transport. The company leverages its technology heritage to provide secure solutions that transform simple digital documents into actionable information, including advanced healthcare standards HL7 and FHIR for secure data exchange. Consensus offers eFax Corporate, a leading global cloud faxing solution; Consensus Signal for automatic real-time healthcare communications; Consensus Clarity, a Natural Language Processing and Artificial Intelligence solution; Consensus Unite and Consensus Harmony interoperability solutions; and jSign for secure digital signatures built on blockchain. For more information about Consensus, visit consensus.com and follow @ConsensusCS on Twitter.

To learn more, visit go.consensus.com/clarity