Like many independent practices, Olympia Orthopaedic Associates faces administrative bottlenecks with front-office staff handling manual, time-consuming tasks like managing referrals.
It's not the type of work that practice staff love to do, and manual processes can be inefficient with the potential for errors.
"We have 14 people in our registration department, and it's a very high turnover area. It's a lot of monotonous tasks. Some of these referrals are 15, 20 or 30 pages long and there's a couple of sentences in there that are relevant," Gregory Byrd, M.D., a practicing surgeon and managing partner at Olympia Orthopaedic Associates, told Fierce Healthcare.
The practice, referred to as OlyOrtho, saw opportunities to use artificial intelligence to rethink the referral intake and scheduling process.
OlyOrtho has been working with healthcare AI company Innovaccer to implement its Comet solution into its operations and put its AI agents to work to automate referral intake and appointment scheduling.
"We've always been the tip of the spear when it comes to technology and we try to utilize technology to help with our efficiency, reduce overhead and really make it a good work environment. Seeing the wave coming, we were looking for potential partners," Byrd said.
OlyOrtho was looking for an AI technology vendor to be a reliable partner with a proven track record to ensure long-term success.
Byrd serves on the board of directors at Physicians of Southwest Washington, known as PSW, and was familiar with the independent physician association's work with Innovaccer.
"PSW and Innovaccer had a long working relationship. They were a known commodity through that organization and had a trusted track record in terms of HIPAA compliance and integrated into [electronic medical records (EMRs)]," Byrd said ."That was one of the concerns you're seeing with ambient scribes. We've seen a lot of companies pop up and disappear. There's some concern that if you're going to really integrate somebody and take that effort, you want to make sure they're sticking around and you want to know that your data is going to be safe and secure."
He added, "We also wanted a solution that could be an entire platform to help us across the entire organization and not just have three or four different solutions that are piecemeal together."
Innovaccer, founded in 2014, built software solutions that aggregate patient data across care settings and systems. Its data infrastructure connects more than 80 electronic health records.
Earlier this year, Innovaccer unveiled Gravity, a healthcare intelligence platform to help scale AI adoption. In July, it launched Comet, an AI-powered access center, to offer healthcare organizations access to copilots and AI agents to automate referral management and scheduling.
Early implementations of Comet at healthcare providers have already shown encouraging signs of measurable impact, including a more than 30% increase in appointment and referral conversions, 70% automation of routine interactions and a 38% boost in staff performance, according to Abhinav Shashank, Innovaccer co-founder and CEO.
As an independent practice with more than 50 providers and seven clinic locations across southwest Washington, OlyOrtho’s relative size allowed for easy and fast adoption of Innovaccer's Comet solution from the point of sale, Shashank said.
"The AI agent for referral management has been very beneficial because what it takes all these referrals that are coming in with the different formats and different EMRs and pulls it all out and makes it a standardized format, which makes it a lot easier for our staff to be able to sift through a lot of this data. We've had about a 4x increase in efficiency per referral coordinator. What used to take six to eight minutes to do is now taking one to two minutes to do, and that's really helped with the flow," Byrd noted.
The AI agents also enhanced patient scheduling by automating tasks and handling high-demand times. As a multispecialty provider, OlyOrtho has different playbooks for appointment scheduling to ensure patients see the right specialist for their particular condition.
"Having an algorithm for that scheduling that's automated has been very helpful," Byrd said.
The AI agents can help reduce referral processing times significantly, improve referral-to-appointment conversion rates, decrease errors and save valuable time for front-office and support teams, Shashank said.
"There's a lot of concern and fear among staff around, 'Is this going to replace me?' We have found that it makes people more efficient. I think what we will see is potentially not replacing people when they phase out, but I think still having some humans to be involved with that is important," Byrd said.
The use of AI agents also can help address staffing shortages and operational costs, he added.
Byrd also sees opportunities to use AI agents to tackle prior authorization and patient navigation. AI automation helps simplify workflows and enables OlyOrtho to operate more efficiently without additional labor, Byrd noted. These efficiency gains are critical as the practice continues to grow its footprint and patient base.
"Big picture with AI, and at least in the orthopedic space, and I think in healthcare in general, it's going to allow the practitioners and providers to focus on the patient care and hopefully take care of a lot of the paperwork and the monotony that has become part of that. That, hopefully, decreases the burnout or moral injury, increases the satisfaction, and also helps reduce the overhead expenses associated with private practice," Byrd said.
Private medical practices are feeling the pinch with increased cost of operations and decreasing reimbursements. There is the potential for AI tools to help reduce those operational costs to help private practices survive, Byrd added.
"If you can increase the productivity by 4x and look at potential long-term reductions in FTEs [full-time equivalents] and even tackle other areas like overtime. Even the ability to turn this on and help in those instances whether its after-hours or surges, these tools can be turned on or turned off so it's very scalable," he noted. "I think all the companies are going to work with these practices to help make it work because it's in their best interest to help keep them alive and practicing and self-sustainable. The pricing has to be competitive to say to these practices, 'This is going to make sense to maintain your viability and not be more expensive than what you're currently doing'."
The future of independent practice will be defined by how well they can simplify complexity for patients and providers, Shashank said.
AI-powered solutions can address longstanding operational inefficiencies in patient access including long wait times, staff overload, high cost per interaction and missed revenue opportunities, he said.
Shashank told Fierce Healthcare back in January that the company has a keen focus on becoming a “one-stop shop” for healthcare AI solutions and will continue to rapidly develop new copilots and agents.
"Our goal for the next year to year and a half is we're going to have 25 or 30 agents on top of our platform. We are going to be the largest AI agent family that will exist for an enterprise to put into motion," he said in an interview.