HBR: How Hospitals Are Using AI To Battle Covid-19
On Monday March 9, in an effort to address soaring patient demand in Boston, Partners HealthCare went live with a hotline for patients, clinicians, and anyone else with questions and concerns about Covid-19. The goals are to identify and reassure the people who do not need additional care (the vast majority of callers), to direct people with less serious symptoms to relevant information and virtual care options, and to direct the smaller number of high-risk and higher-acuity patients to the most appropriate resources, including testing sites, newly created respiratory illness clinics, or in certain cases, emergency departments. As the hotline became overwhelmed, the average wait time peaked at 30 minutes. Many callers gave up before they could speak with the expert team of nurses staffing the hotline. We were missing opportunities to facilitate pre-hospital triage to get the patient to the right care setting at the right time.
The Partners team, led by Lee Schwamm, Haipeng (Mark) Zhang, and Adam Landman, began considering technology options to address the growing need for patient self-triage, including interactive voice response systems and chatbots. We connected with Providence St. Joseph Health system in Seattle, which served some of the country’s first Covid-19 patients in early March. In collaboration with Microsoft, Providence built an online screening and triage tool that could rapidly differentiate between those who might really be sick with Covid-19 and those who appear to be suffering from less threatening ailments. In its first week, Providence’s tool served more than 40,000 patients, delivering care at an unprecedented scale.
Keystone Strategy’s Colleen Carroll and Marco Iansiti outline why our national health system cannot keep up with this kind of explosive demand of the coronavirus without the rapid and large-scale adoption of digital operating models.
Below is a summary from the article published in Harvard Business Review on April 3, 2020.
Summary. The spread of Covid-19 is stretching operational systems in health care and beyond. The reason is both simple: Our economy and health care systems are geared to handle linear, incremental demand, while the virus grows at an exponential rate. Our national health system cannot keep up with this kind of explosive demand without the rapid and large-scale adoption of digital operating models.While we race to dampen the virus’s spread, we can optimize our response mechanisms, digitizing as many steps as possible. Here’s how some hospitals are employing artificial intelligence to handle the surge of patients.
Read the entire article on HRB.com here.
