Care management platform DexCare is applying artificial intelligencein an innovative way to fix health care access issues. Its AI-driven platform helps health systems overcome rising costs, limited capacity, and fragmented digital infrastructure. As Americans face worsening health outcomes and soaring costs, DexCare Co-founder Derek Streat sees opportunity in the crisis and is leading a push to apply AI and machine learningto health care’s toughest operational challenges — from overcrowded emergency rooms to disconnected digital systems. No stranger to using AI to solve health care issues, Streat is guiding DexCare as it leverages AI and ML to confront the industry’s most persistent pain points: spiraling costs, resource constraints, and the impossible task of doing more with less. Its platform helps liberate data silos to orchestrate care better and deliver a “shoppable” experience. The combination unlocks patient access to care and optimizes health care resources. DexCare enables health systems to see 40% more patients with existing clinical resources. Streat readily admits that some advanced companies use AI to enhance clinical and medical research. However, advanced AI tools such as conversational generative AI are less common in the health care access space. DexCare addresses that service gap. “Access is broken, and our fundamental belief is that there haven’t been enough solutions to balance patient, provider, and health system needs and objectives,” he told TechNewsWorld. Improving Patient Access With Predictive AI Achieving that balance depends on the underlying information drawn from health care providers’ neural networks, ML models, classification systems, and advancements in generative AI. These elements build on one another. Derek Streat, Co-founder of DexCare With the goal of a better customer experience, DexCare’s platform helps care providers optimize the algorithm so everyone benefits. The focus is on ensuring patients get what matches their intent and motivations while respecting the providers’ capacity and needs, explained Streat. He describes the platform’s technology as a foundational pyramid based on data that AI optimizes and manages. Those components ensure high-fidelity outcome predictions for recommended care options. “It could be a doctor in a clinic or a nurse in a virtual care system,” he suggested. “I’m not talking about clinical outcomes. I’m talking about what you’re looking for.” Ultimately, that managed balance will not burn out all your providers. It will make this a sustainable business line for the health system. From Providence Prototype to Scalable Solution Streat defined DexCare as an access optimization company. He shared that the platform originated from a ground-floor build within the Providence Health System. After four years of development and validation, he launched the technology for broader use across the health care industry. “It’s well tested and very effective in what it does. That allowed us to have something scalable across organizations as well. Our expansion makes health care more discoverable to consumers and patients and more sustainable for medical providers and the health systems we serve,” he said. Digital Marquee for Consumers, Service Management for Providers DexCare’s AI works on multiple levels. It provides health care system or medical facility services as a contact center. That part attracts and curates audiences, consumers, and patients. Its digital assets could be websites, landing pages, or screening kiosks. Another part of the platform intelligently navigates patients to the safest and best care option. This process engages the accumulated data and automatically allocates the health system’s resources. “It manages schedules and available staff and facilities and automatically allocates them when and where they can be most productively employed,” explained Streat. The platform excels at load balancing. It uses AI to rationalize all those components. The decision engine uses AI to ensure that the selected resources and needed services match so the medical treatment can be done most efficiently and effectively to accommodate the patient and the organization. How DexCare Integrates With CRM Platforms According to Streat, DexCare is not customer relationship management software. Instead, the platform is a tie-in that infuses its AI tools and data services that blend with other platforms such as Salesforce and Oracle. “We make it as flexible as we can. It is pretty scalable to the point where now we can touch about 20% of the U.S. population through our health system partners,” he offered. Patients do not realize they are interacting with the DexCare-powered experience console under the brands Kaiser, Providence, and SSM Health, some of the DexCare platform’s health systems users. The platform is flexible and adapts to the needs of various health agencies. For instance, fulfillment technologies book appointments and supply synchronous virtual solutions. “Whatever the modality or setting is, we can either connect with whatever you’re using as a health system, or you can use your own underlying pieces as well,” said Streat. He noted that the intelligent data acquisition built into the DexCare platform accesses the electronic medical record, which includes patients’ demographics, medical history, diagnoses, medications, allergies, immunization records, lab results, and treatment plans. “The application programming interfacegives us real-time availability, allows us to predict a certain provider’s capacity, and maintains EMR as a source of truth,” said Streat. AI’s Long-Term Role in Health Care Access Health care management by conversational generative AI provides insights into where organizations struggle, need to adjust their operations, or reassign staff to manage patient flow. That all takes place on the platform’s back end. According to Streat, the front-end value proposition is pretty simple. It helps get 20% to 30% more patients into the health system. Organizations generate nine times the initial visit value in downstream revenue for additional services, Streat said. He assured that the other part of the value proposition is a lower marginal cost of delivering each visit. That results from matching resources with patients in a way that allows balancing the load across the organization’s network. “That depends on the specific use case, but we find up to a 40% additional capacity within the health system without hiring additional resources,” he said. How? That is where the underlying AI data comes into play. It helps practitioners make more informed decisions about which patients should be matched with which providers. “Not everybody needs to see an expensive doctor in a clinic,” Streat contended. “Sometimes, a nurse in a virtual visit or educational information will be just fine.” Despite all the financial metrics, patients want medical treatment and to move on, which is really what the game is here, he surmised. Why Generative AI Lags in Health Care Streat lamented the rapidly developing sophistication of generative AI, which includes conversational interfaces, analytical capability, and predictive mastery. These technologies are being applied throughout other industries and businesses, but are not yet widely adopted in health care systems. He indicated that part of that lag is that health care access needs are different and not as suited for conversational AI solutions hastily layered onto legacy systems. Ultimately, changing health care requires delivering things at scale. “Within a health system, its infrastructure, and the plumbing required to respect the systems of records, it’s just a different world,” he said. Streat sees AI making it possible for us to move away from searching through a long list of doctors online to booking through a robot operator with a pleasant accent. “We will focus on the back-end intelligence and continue to apply it to these lower-friction ways for people to interact with the health system. That’s incredibly exciting to me,” he concluded. #dexcare #platform #tackles #health #care