CareMessage, the largest patient activation platform in the United States for underserved populations, has officially announced the launch of its brand-new AI Assistant, who will be a part of the company’s market-leading innovative Health Equity Engine™.
According to certain reports, the stated AI Assistant happens to have a design suitable for interpreting and parsing patient responses into structured data, thus helping users more efficiently find responses that surface patient needs, such as food insecurity or transportation barriers.
All in all, CareMessage’s AI tools will try and save their customers up to $5M annually in recaptured appointments, savings they can then reroute towards improving patient care and health outcomes.
To understand the significance of such a development, we must acknowledge that, in the context of healthcare, transportation, work conflicts, and financial constraints, low socioeconomic and minority populations are almost disproportionally affected,keeping them from enjoying a seamless appointment experience. In fact, if we go by the studies, no-show rates can be as high as 33-40% in these groups,something that eventually contributes to fragmented care and worsening health outcomes.
In response, CareMessage’s AI Assistant brings forth a tailored solution which can be a safety-net fororganizations. Making this technology all the more impressive is how, to ensure safe and ethical development of AI-backed tools, CareMessage also conducted rigorous testing on multiple large language models (LLMs). After much deliberation, it ultimately selected Google Gemini due to its accuracy and ease of use.
In case that wasn’t enough, the company even co-developed and tested their AI Assistant with select key customers, a phase where it focused on the specific needs of those organizations, addressing biases, implementing robust validation, and ensuring safety while centering patient impact.
“We saw patients trying to have conversations with their providers critical to addressing health inequities, and facing barriers with stricter response logic that could not interpret their intent. Through this approach, CareMessage is driving a paradigm shift in patient engagement and healthcare delivery, particularly for underserved populations,” said Cecilia Corral, CareMessage Co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer. “We’re bringing technology to safety net organizations that is designed to work alongside their team, and with safeguards in place to protect patient safety. The healthcare organization remains in control of the parsing logic that drives critical decisions,”
Markedly enough, the new solution in question actually builds upon the company’s already extensive patient engagement success, You see, thus far, CareMessage has served more than 20M patients and 400+ safety-net organizations, For these users, the company has triggered dramatic improvements in appointment adherence, as it achieved a reduction of around 45-50% in no-show rates.
Beyond that, at a Wisconsin Health Center using CareMessage’s solutions, 27% of all patients were able to complete cervical cancer screenings in no more than 90 days after receiving CareMessage reminders. A health center also went to see an estimated 20% response rate from previously inactive patients, resulting in 515 new scheduled appointments.
The new AI Assistant has also displayed similarly successful outcomes during the early pilot run. An example relaying the same would be how one clinic in Maple City, Indiana, 81% of responses, classified by the AI, were patients who have not been attending their appointment. Hence, identifying these potential no-shows allowed the clinic to reschedule appointments and provide care to patients who would have otherwise fallen through the cracks.
“Identifying patients who will miss their appointment is critical. Automatically classifying patients who won’t attend their appointment via CareMessage’s AI Assistant allows our staff to quickly fill open appointment spots while also identifying and rescheduling patients to ensure they don’t slip through the cracks. We’re now able to do this without increasing the time needed to manually review patient responses,” said Paul Shetler Fast, Maple City Executive Director. “Pairing CareMessage and Maple City’s efforts across multiple features, we’ve been able to reduce our no-show rates by 27.7% since the beginning of the year, getting them down to 9.9%.“
