New partnership uses automation to reach patients, as CipherHealth announces AI collaboration with Google Cloud.
Published in Healthcare Finance News by Susan Morse
Advocate Health has announced that Brad Clark has been promoted to executive vice president and chief financial officer, effective Friday, December 1.
Clark will oversee revenue cycle management, financial planning, supply chain management, financial reporting, accounting, treasury and managed health resources.
Clark, who was named interim CFO in August and previously led Advocate Health’s treasury and financial and planning analytics division, brings more than two decades of experience in healthcare financial management to his new role, the health system said.
Clark previously served as senior vice president of financial planning and treasurer of Atrium Health.
He will join Advocate Health’s executive leadership team and report directly to CEOs Eugene A. Woods and Jim Skogsbergh.
Woods is CEO of Advocate Health and is the former CEO and president of Atrium Health. Jim Skogsbergh, former president and CEO of Advocate Aurora Health, is serving alongside Woods as CEO until his retirement, the systems announced last December when they completing their merger.
Advocate Health is a health system of 67 hospitals, bringing together Advocate Aurora’ s 27 hospitals and Atrium Health’s 40-hospital system.
Other Matters
Advocate Health recently announced a partnership with patient-engagement provider CipherHealth for the automation of patient outreach.
The Care Gaps Program schedules patients for an annual comprehensive visit in which high-risk patients are given a health exam, scheduled for preventive screenings, provided point of care tests in the home setting, offered immunizations and have their medications reviewed, Advocate said.
Before working with CipherHealth, Advocate conducted phone outreach manually. Automating these calls has resulted in reaching a larger volume of patients while patching patients through to live help to get patients scheduled, and integrating SMS messaging.
In the first 10 months of 2023, Advocate almost tripled the number of patients they contacted in 2022, going from 19,015 in 2022 to over 57,000 patients. The number of scheduled appointments also tripled, from 873 to 2,632. These visits led to 851 chronic conditions reevaluated, 974 new chronic conditions identified, 1,654 orders placed, and 874 patients reconnected to their primary care provider, Advocate said.
Advocate’s Medicare Wellness Visit identifies patients who are due/overdue for their wellness visits. Prior to working with CipherHealth, Advocate Health had a completion/scheduled rate of 44% in May of 2022 with a 10% live transfer rate. Advocate Heath’s Medicare Wellness Visit completion/scheduled rate rose to 80% in September, with a reach rate of 83% through interactive voice responses/texts.
The Larger Trend: AI
Also, CipherHealth recently announced that, as 32% of hospital CIOs say AI and ML are their top health IT priorities this year, a significant jump from last year’s 6%, it has collaborated with Google Cloud to integrate AI technologies.
Using Google Cloud’s Vertex AI platform, CipherHealth is building, training, deploying and managing ML and AI models across products, integrating AI-driven insights and predictive modeling into healthcare workflows. Ultimately, CipherHealth said it plans to use AI to create personalized care pathways for patients at all stages of care.
CipherHealth is already leveraging natural language processing to conduct sentiment analysis to better inform patient interactions and identify key areas of strength and opportunity for the health system.
