We’re excited to have Carbon Health as our featured sponsor this week. The ideas expressed, however, are shaped and written on my own.
You don’t have to look far to find doctors and patients at odds with what happens in a clinic. Repeated questions, unfriendly EHRs and poor communication add up to a miserable experience for everyone. It seems way the information moves between provider and patient is just broken. And information never seems to get put to the right use. Enter Carbon Health.
Carbon Health is a bold tech startup leveraging data to ease physician burden and improve the quality of care. A tall order, I know. So to understand how this was possible, I took a peek under the hood at Carbon Health.
What I found are 6 ways Carbon Health is reinventing the clinical encounter:
1. Machine learning in pre-visit documentation
Carbon Health optimizes the time before the patient visit to capture information. While this isn’t new, it’s how Carbon Health does it that makes this transformative. For example, they use machine learning to shape patient answers into a structured format for clinicians (this quick YouTube clip gives you an idea of what it looks like). Carbon Health’s built-in smarts puts data in its place allowing providers just-in-time information that puts the focus on patients during the encounter. As a result it gets the mundane out of the way to help providers focus on what’s important.
2. Chat bots for structured data entry
Inconsistency in triage documentation is a huge quality issue. And so Carbon Health uses AI-assisted chatbots to optimize team documentation from MAs, nurses and other triage staff. This insures fewer errors and more structured data entry, leading to efficient, smart triaging.
3. Coupling data to smarter triage
Taking the data drawn in triage to help direct patients to the proper resources is where Carbon Health shines. My clinic, for example, receives a massive number of calls, all handled by human eyes. While we are all used to humans handling that triage, intelligent systems like Carbon Health can begin to allocate those inputs to the proper places and spaces.
Smart systems offset what needs to be handled by humans and helps automate the rest. This is, in effect, the holy grail of information flow.
4. AI to shape the patient assessment
During and after the encounter Carbon Health suggests diagnoses, EM codes, medication labs, imaging and patient education materials. Beyond that, it takes structured data to the next level with prediction and a suggested plan of care. What’s remarkable about this is that it delivers a type of augmented intel experience that works with health care providers.
5. Carbon Health puts patient data into the bigger picture
Carbon Health creates a machine learning mashup of data from clinical encounters and personal diagnostic devices for the identification and management of high risk patients. It moves from structured data to prediction. As an overly simplistic example, ‘dysuria’ alone raises UTI and pyelonephritis as options. The addition of a positive UA puts UTI as a top option with consideration of pyelonephritis. Add fever and pyelonephritis rises as a top option. Bring in dozens of other bits of structured data and the capacity of the software to predict gets better.
6. Moving from episodic to real-time documentation
Traditionally health care has been marked by episodic encounters with the health care system, like clinic visits. Carbon Health gets us closer to a medical record that is a portal of real-time care rather than a collection of things that happened in the past.
Bottom line: Caring for patients starts with caring for providers
We talk about health care and the imposition of paperwork and logistics on doctors. Carbon Health gets the nonsense out of the way so that providers can focus on what they do best: working with patients, human-to-human.
I heard this mentioned by CEO Eren Bali and I can’t get it out of my mind: Caring for patients starts with caring for providers. Patient experience is everything but providers can’t deliver that experience unless we are cared for. As a result, provider experience needs attention and Carbon Health gets us closer to that important goal.
This idea of giving providers the smartest tools at just the right point is powerful and represents a key point in beginning to reshape how care is delivered. So check it out. Go over here to sign up as a provider and check it out.