Eleos, an artificial intelligence platform supporting behavioral health and other organizations, is rolling out an AI tool to support clinical documentation for group therapy.
Group therapy is particularly common when treating substance use disorder (SUD). However, it remains among the most complex care settings to document, Eleos executives say. The vast majority of the company's clients use group therapy, and many have been requesting for its flagship product, Eleos Documentation, to extend to group therapy.
“It was the No. 1 request, basically,” Alon Joffe, co-founder and CEO, told Fierce Healthcare. “[In a group setting], the administrative burden is the highest.” Joffe likened it to interviewing 15 people at once for three hours and then manually attempting to document it.
The Groups tool is HIPAA-compliant and compatible with any telehealth interface and EHR. It can analyze multispeaker sessions regardless of whether they are in person or virtual. A group session is considered to have two or more participants. Eleos Documentation completes about 80% of a provider’s notes, then providers can edit and manually add remaining items before submitting.
AI scribes are not uncommon in healthcare, but there is a much greater barrier to entry for group therapy. Joffe noted that AI being able to interpret multiple voices at once is rare. Eleos employs a multimodal large language model approach and one that is also more secure than traditional tools, Joffe said.
While scribes commonly rely on audio recordings to generate a transcript and then a summary, Eleos bypasses the middle step entirely. Instead, it analyzes audio in real time without generating a transcript. As a result, the audio is not saved or stored. Eleos said it uses a combination of external and in-house multimodal LLMs.
As such, the tool does not offer a word-for-word transcript; instead, it generates notes in the proper format. It includes the overall sentiment of a group session, plus summaries for each speaker. These elements need to be connected to each patient’s treatment plan and to what clinical techniques were used. “In behavioral health, everything is subtext,” Joffe said. “The model needs to deeply understand therapy.” The AI is also able to pick up on vocal cues, according to Joffe, such as whether a speaker was happy or sad.
Speaking in an Eleos webinar about the new feature Wednesday, Andrew Schmitt, interim vice president of operations at SUD provider Gaudenzia, highlighted the benefits of the technology.
“Clinicians truly want to help people,” Schmitt said on the call. “And AI and Eleos provide an opportunity to be more connected with the true mission of what we do.” About 85% of Gaudenzia’s services are delivered in group therapy. Eleos’ Groups tool helps standardize care and close gaps in documentation compliance, Schmitt said.
When it comes to building trust in the tool, Schmitt noted that providers are typically more hesitant than patients. Their concerns are about being assessed on a performance basis, though Gaudenzia does not use the tech for that. For the most part, patients are fine with Eleos, Schmitt said. Sometimes, patients with strong convictions about AI can influence how the rest of a group feels, he acknowledged. Some groups may choose not to use the tool.
When it comes to assessing ROI for the tool, Gaudenzia considers metrics of staff retention and productivity. Schmitt declined to share specific figures but said “we have definitively seen an improvement in employee satisfaction, retention, for the staff that are utilizing Eleos—and utilizing it on a consistent basis.”
After submitting, customers can also use Eleos’ Compliance product, another AI-driven tool that relies on Eleos' trove of behavioral health encounter data. The tech assesses providers' notes for therapeutic recommendations and points out potential billing errors that may lead to the claim being rejected by insurance.
Eleos serves more than 200 behavioral health, home health and hospice organizations today. More than 35,000 providers generate hundreds of thousands of notes per month using Eleos. Clinicians using Eleos tech are able to complete their notes in five minutes or less, submitting more than 90% of notes in 24 hours, per the company. Eleos helps cut documentation time by more than 70% at a baseline and by 80% in the group therapy setting, Joffe said.