These thoughts precisely. I'd love to be at a point of just talking to the patient and not having the screen in my face. A better experience for both parties. I'm too caught up in other projects to pursue this right now but it is on my list.
Areas I can testify that AI made a measurable improvement in my practice:
-medical billing and collections -- superb collection rates (not terribly far from 100%). Does an amazing job organizing my accounts receivable and very easy to keep follow up on them.
-insurance benefits and eligibility -- run patient batches off the schedule and see which insurance policies need updating in which charts, and a small minority turn up uninsured -- gives you a good financial heads up to have convos and planning with patients. I'm also able to find the new policy on a database search over 70% of the time. It saves a ton of time and paid labor (trying to hunt down patients in live time and even when you get them, most don't even know their member IDs), claim gets sent sooner, you see your compensation faster. It's been great for scheduling new patients too. Nobody knows their member IDs anymore and I can usually track it down with name and DOB.
-chatbots -- gives some new patients weekly and estimated revenue from that is about 100k/yr additional brought in, so not too shabby
-patient demographic updates, my billing software mails statements (also text and email) but sometimes addresses come up as outdated and it's connected with the US Postal Service and usually pulls up the new address.
--tech has been very accurate and hugely cost savings.-- <3333. Mathematically better than any billing staff person I've ever encountered.
--tech never sleeps
My clinic gets spam calls and there's some software based means of screening those out. So that's another project on my horizon. The spam calls are sooo obnoxious. That and lots of calls from NP diploma mills looking for an MD to give clinical hours. I'd love to find a way for these calls to never reach a paid live human in my office, using precious paid time and energy so they can focus on stuff that actually matters. This would increase efficiency.
Something from an HR standpoint is that, the strongest candidates often are not interacting with job listings. They tend to be steadily employed. They may not be at their happiest, but they tend to have very steady personality profiles and are embedded in routine. There tends to be a high distress tolerance too. My best hires were found in networking and a mutual interest developed, the employment relationship started. They were not actively looking for a job at the time (if anything, they tend to be loyal to a fault to their current employer), but the fit just made itself. Statistically, the most challenging candidates were the ones that responded to the listings. Although I have some who responded to listings who were great hires. But "blind hires" (someone you never knew before they responded to the listing) are higher risk. AI recruitment is an area I'm exploring
-scrape the internet for healthcare providers
-gather data, scope each person's digital presence
-some assistance with drafting conversation starters and outreach methods
-put it in a neat chart and keeping track of outreach attempts
Before AI, I have done this the old fashioned way:
-scoping out social media (e.g. facebook, linkedin) and google in general
-starting conversations, chatting, both parties feeling each other out
-but the issue is that it was sooooooo time and energy intensive. there's no way I can keep this going and run the practice and do my billable time. I mean...I can but I'd be super burnt out and I'm already a single parent of 2. Some time saving data gathering methods would be great. In the end, it's still me, a live human reaching out to people.
Exciting stuff.
(hope this didn't offend anyone, please don't flame me)
