wA.I.ne (patent pending)

We had an all company get together last week. We did a fun little exercise, broke into small teams and attempted to design a company that will put Bluetree out of business. The main goal was to let folks from different teams that never see each other in person to work together for an hour. But there was a pretty dominant theme across the board.

Care to guess?

Yep, you got it, AI + Machine Learning + data. Ahh who doesn’t love a good buzzword salad.

How?

We do a ton of Epic build and workflow optimization. Can you imagine a world where the system optimizes itself? Learning from all the users and figuring out the best navigators and orders and all that fun stuff to display in a clinical setting.

What about a world where you simply talk to the EHR? Let’s call that virtual assistant wA.I.ne

Hey Waine, order a refill for Pavel’s Nexium. Or will you even need to say that as it listens in and automatically takes all the notes and files all the orders while the doc asks and listens to all your issues. The voice to text technology is there, the NLP not quite.  

What about all the analytics work? While our focus has been on data engineering and creating robust architecture for our clients. We still do a ton of work just generating reports and extracting data.

How far are we from a world where you can simply say –

Hey Waine, show me my denials for Aetna broken out by remark code.

Hey Waine, what docs aren’t meeting their visit goals, show me their templated time for the past 3 months.

Couple of takeaways.

I think voice is super powerful and a Siri/Alexa/Ok Google for healthcare is inevitable. An EHR that users can interact through voice entirely, both clinical and back office, will be awesome. And once it does that, why not put a little instance of it in your home. Feeling sick, just say Hey Waine, I have a cough and it’ll take it from there. I am not saying it’ll replace the doctor, but it’ll connect you with a live on call doc that will help diagnose.

We need lots of people working together to build the data foundation to make this possible and the likes of Amazon/Google/Facebook to throw their billions at it.

Am I living in a jetsons flying car world dream or is this going to be our inevitable reality? I honestly don’t know. My gut is this will happen but will it happen in my lifetime, your guess is as good as mine.

Regardless, I’d rather build the technology that disrupts then be the one it disrupts.

For now, while wA.I.ne is just a figment of my imagination, we’ll have to rely on the old school Wayne to help us get to a better healthcare IT world.

Thoughts?