Ted Talks AI Transformation

Insights from Ted Alexander, VP, Partnerships and Clinical Innovation, Amplify Care

I had the opportunity to hear from Digital Health leaders across public and private sectors and across Canada in recent weeks. It has led me to confirm a few assumptions on the importance of our approach to AI:

Amplify Care’s logic in evaluating innovation is needed

When Amplify Care evaluated AI scribes in Ontario and British Columbia, our reasoning identified that documentation is a major factor leading to clinician burnout. Historically, groups have used (human) medical scribes to ease burdens in practice, helping not only with encounter notes but other documentation tasks. We put these ideas together and included the automation of additional tasks in our evaluations and investigations. Since our initial work, vendors like Tali.Ai have presented at the AFHTO conference about where their product is going to automate additional tasks for clinicians. Mapping out value in automating and redesigning workflow is an important part of the story.

Workflow redesign is a part of AI leadership, and it is not new

The need to include imagination and discovery in AI innovations was supported by a talk given by Dr. Avi Goldfarb and hosted by AMS Healthcare. Dr. Goldfarb’s message equated adding AI innovations into healthcare processes with adding electricity into factories before the twentieth century. He made a point that initially, adopters achieved a 10%-15% efficiency improvement before they realized the power of not needing to design processes around a central power source on the factory floor. The eventual result was a redesigned workflow and the assembly line.

Amplifying AI redesign across several projects

AI capabilities are needed to support foundations, functions and development of the Patient Medical Home/Neighbourhood.

Amplify Care is actively involved in several projects with primary care leaders to support clinical workflow developments.

1. Practical AI Framework. Amplify presented a framework we have in peer review focused on supporting primary care clinics make decisions in an environment when products will expand to offer multiple offerings that may or may not match with workflows.
2. Data standards for quality improvement: Amplify Care presented alongside the Canadian Institute for Health Information at Ontario’s Ministry for Economic Development Job Creation and Trade Digital Health Cluster and at HIMSS on our collaboration supporting the Connected Care Standards and the Pan-Canadian Health Data Content Framework (more about this on our blog next week). We have established a foundation that can support safe progress towards better primary care data that can be matched with accredited practice facilitators to lead quality improvements.
3. Front Desk AI Triage: Supported by the Canada Health Infoway Connected Care Innovation Grant, we are working with clinician practices to learn and optimize the use of Front Desk AI solutions to ensure medical homes are optimizing the use of staff to help better team-based care.