The New Frontier of Healthcare: How AI and NLP are Fueling the Journey

Shani Gershtein

Today, limited resources and time constraints are stressing the healthcare system like never before. Care managers face a daunting challenge: balancing the burgeoning demands of large caseloads with the equally critical need to provide personalized attention and care. This precarious trade-off has become a focal point in an industry where the human touch is indispensable yet increasingly difficult to maintain. Enter AI—a transformative force poised to revolutionize this dynamic.

By leveraging AI within their workflows, care managers can accelerate beyond the administrative burden that’s been bogging them down. With real-time insights they can quickly steer conversations in the right direction and focus on individual needs.

Laguna’s combination of conversational intelligence and identification of individual determinants of health is not just a beacon of efficiency; it's a catalyst for enhancing the efficacy and impact of care. We call this “Conversational Care Intelligence”.

With the advent of AI, we stand on the cusp of a new era where technology doesn't just support healthcare—it elevates it to unprecedented levels of personalization and attention.

AI and NLP: New Pathways to Administrative Efficiency in Healthcare

The integration of AI into care management is akin to the leap from paper maps to GPS navigation. In the era before GPS, travelers faced the cumbersome task of deciphering maps, traffic, and weather reports to chart an optimal route—much like care managers juggling multiple systems, conversations, and benefits to piece together an effective care plan.

With AI automation and real-time insights, care managers can speed past the time consuming tasks that once slowed them down.

1. Clinical Documentation Automation: Using speech recognition algorithms trained on medical terminology, it’s now possible to transcribe and distill conversations into essential information that’s seamlessly integrated into medical records—much like a GPS capturing and suggesting the most efficient routes.
2. Intelligent Summaries: Text summarization techniques enable us to filter through the dense forest of clinical data (conversations, documents, etc.) to deliver concise summaries. This capability mirrors a GPS summarizing the best possible path, giving healthcare providers clear and actionable directions for better care.
3. Streamlining Personalization: AI models can incorporate your organization's established care pathways to ensure that treatment suggestions are finely tuned to each individual—mirroring the adaptability of a GPS system in optimizing routes based on live data. Moreover, by highlighting an individual member’s health plan benefits in real-time, care managers can offer solutions and maximize the value of each individual’s plan.
4. Asynchronous Communication: Virtual assistants use natural language understanding (NLU) to interpret member queries and respond appropriately—freeing up care managers for more complex tasks and seamlessly passing historical information across channels and people. They function as an in-car navigation system, providing assistance without taking the driver's focus away from the road.
5. Analyzing Care Manager Interactions: Sentiment analysis and language modeling techniques can evaluate conversations between care managers and members to offer insights into communication effectiveness, emotional tone, and compliance with best practices. They offer suggestions for improvement in a way that mirrors a GPS analyzing past trips to optimize future journeys.
6. Performance Monitoring and Insights: Advanced algorithms can detect patterns and anomalies that may indicate areas for improvement or highlight particularly successful interactions, giving supervisors a high-level view of team performance.

Through a combination of automation, personalized support, and operational oversight, Laguna is able to provide a powerful mix of efficiency drivers that add up to a huge 29% gain overall.

Applying these efficiencies every time, to every encounter, amplifies their effect, energizing your team and ultimately, improving member outcomes.

By embracing the sophisticated guidance of AI and NLP, care managers can smoothly transition from the byroads of administrative burden and cruise along the highway of enhanced care delivery and user engagement.

Shani Gershtein is VP of AI at Laguna. She’s not only an expert at applying the power of AI in Conversational Care Intelligence, but she’s also a leader and mentor in the community. In 2020, she founded NLP IL, the Israeli community for Natural Language Processing. She continues to play a leadership role in Baot, Israel's largest community of women in senior R&D positions.