Nashville Business Journal: Shearwater Health picks Laguna AI as new partner
Todd Silmon, Shearwater Health’s president of operations, was given a demo of a new artificial intelligence tool six months ago.
Now, the health care company has partnered with Laguna AI for its first foray into conversational AI.
“We’ve talked about it for some time, we've looked at a number of solutions, we didn't see anything … that was as advanced as what Laguna had to offer,” Silmon told the Business Journal.
Shearwater, formerly known as HCCA International, was spun out of Nashville-based HCA Healthcare Inc. in 1989. The company provides nurses and clinicians performing administrative duties remotely from the Philippines, allowing nurses in the U.S. to spend more time caring for patients. The company also provides bedside nurses inside U.S. hospitals, who are recruited from around the world, including Jamaica, Kenya, Nigeria and India.
Even though Nashville is known as “health care city” it’s not immune to the industry’s workforce struggles. Over the next 15 years, the National Center for Health Workforce Analysis predicts shortages in allied health, behavioral health, long-term services and support, nursing, oral health, physicians, primary care and women’s health.
“Health care as an industry is struggling from both finding quality talent … and the cost pressures to deliver outcomes is so significant,” Clay Heinz, Laguna’s chief revenue officer, told the Business Journal. “When you take the ability that Shearwater has to find really the best talent in the world for delivering clinical outcomes at a lower cost and then you combine that with AI that delivers the reduction in administration … you've got like a one-two punch toward the cost equation that is really unique in the marketplace.”
Laguna’s AI products are aimed to help fill some of those gaps, according to Heinz. Essentially, the product Shearwater will be using is an AI assistant that will document the visit for the health care provider, a similar system that other health care companies and hospital operators across Nashville are slowly adding to their arsenal.
“We want them [providers] to really focus on true patient engagement. A big part of an interaction that you have with the patient is, of course, the documentation,” Silmon said. “Laguna comes in with their tool and that software and that AI and they capture that conversation, so you're not spending minutes after having that conversation with the patient documenting; it's there for you.”
For companies using Laguna technology, the company said there’s a 29% efficiency gain for care managers, a 14% cost reduction across 30 days and a 35% lower readmission rate, according to data provided by Laguna.
“The overall goal is to drive an amazing patient, member experience to where they feel like they've been listened to, that they matter, that their life context matters,” Heinz said. “All of that drives better outcomes and therefore we're driving cost out of the operation and we're driving cost out of medical spend through this partnership.”
The use of AI for Shearwater won’t just stop with conversational AI.
“Conversational AI is simply one component of AI that we could leverage,” Silmon said. “There's so many different workflows that we support.”
