Health data analytics company Innovaccer unveiled six new solutions on Monday during the HIMSS conference in Chicago. Among these announcements, the standout product was Sara, a conversational AI assistant designed to help executives at health systems and payers make better use of their data.
Sara didn’t get its name just because it’s an easy two-syllable word for healthcare executives to call out when they need a question answered. The AI assistant was named after the Hindu goddess Saraswati — who Innovaccer Chief Product Officer Kanav Hasija referred to as “the goddess of knowledge who brings order out of chaos,” during a recent interview.
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Hasija pointed out that “there’s a firewall between lean data and good knowledge” in healthcare. In the past two decades, healthcare executives have gained access to a wealth of digitized information about their organizations and the patients they serve, but they still struggle to extract knowledge from that data, he explained.
Sara seeks to hasten the process of gleaning knowledge from data. The tool was designed so that executives can ask complex questions about their organization’s patients or members and get immediate answers on clinical, financial or operational metrics.
For example, a health system executive might ask Sara to show them how cost of care is trending over time at their organization. Once Sara presents them with the data, they can feed the tool follow-up questions, such as asking it to break down the data by payer mix or only show data for diabetic patients.
With Sara, executives can get as specific as they like with their information requests, which can help them pinpoint operational challenges and population health insights quickly, Hasija pointed out. Through a simple, minute-long conversation, an executive can get the tool to produce easy-to-digest data on how high-risk diabetic patients’ cost of care is changing at their health system — and have this data split by different hospitals and patient demographics.
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The tool’s speed means that executives don’t have to wait months for data teams to build dashboards when they want a question answered, Hasija said.
“The response to each question and answer is a few seconds, not a few months, and that’s the big, disruptive change,” he declared.
Sara is designed for healthcare executives and administrators, but Hasija said Innovaccer is also working on a Sara-type assistant for nurses and doctors. That tool, which he said could be launched later this year, would allow clinicians to ask questions about a patient’s chart and get rapid answers, Hasija explained.
The other five solutions Innovaccer announced Monday are also data-powered tools designed to help providers improve their clinical, financial and operational performance metrics. These include a customer relationship management product, a health equity analytics tool, software to improve discharge care planning, a tool that visualizes market dynamics and software to enhance coding accuracy.
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