Cleveland Clinic, AKASA to Launch AI Tools for Revenue Cycle

CLEVELAND AND SAN FRANCISCO: Cleveland Clinic and AKASA have established a strategic collaboration to deploy generative AI tools to support efficient and accurate medical coding practices.

Through this partnership, Cleveland Clinic will apply multiple AKASA AI-powered tools during the mid-revenue cycle – the phase between patient care and billing, where documentation and coding occur – across its U.S. locations.

Accurately and efficiently reflecting a patient’s care can be complex and time-consuming. At Cleveland Clinic, revenue cycle staff typically review more than 100 clinical documents per case, including progress notes, discharge summaries and pathology reports. They then select codes from more than 140,000 options. The process can take up to an hour per patient encounter.

Now, coders will be able to utilize a coding AI assistant tool that supports comprehensive, efficient, and accurate coding practices. In addition, a second AI tool is being piloted by the two organizations, focused on clinical documentation integrity (CDI). Together, these tools aim to improve documentation and coding accuracy.

These AI tools are intended to speed up this process and ensure the most appropriate codes are being utilized. The AI coding assistant can read a clinical document in less than two seconds and process more than 100 documents in 1.5 minutes. In addition, the technology is designed to understand clinical context, beyond keywords, and adapt to a patient’s complexity.

“AI can be transformational for healthcare – not only in patient care – but for helping health system operations run more smoothly and efficiently,” said Rohit Chandra, PhD., Chief Digital Officer at Cleveland Clinic. “We are looking forward to sharing this technology with our revenue cycle teams and continuing to innovate in this space.”

AKASA brings a health-system specific approach that allows the AI to learn from real-world documentation practices and recognize the nuances at individual health systems. Such an approach enables the technology to analyze the most complex and challenging patient cases, like inpatient hospital encounters. This is particularly critical in an environment like Cleveland Clinic, which regularly handles some of the most advanced inpatient encounters in the world.

These AI capabilities are designed to enhance coders’ efforts to best represent a patient’s clinical course, risk, and complexity of care. Correctly reflecting quality of care has become particularly important as hospitals and providers are increasingly evaluated based on clinical quality scores, which influence benchmarks.

“Cleveland Clinic has embraced artificial intelligence to enhance the experience of patients and caregivers, and with our collaboration with AKASA we are bringing AI-powered enhancements to our mid-revenue cycle,” said Dennis Laraway, Cleveland Clinic Executive Vice-President & Chief Financial Officer. “Because we treat some of the highest acuity patients in the country, our revenue cycle activities are incredibly complex. Through autonomous coding, we aim to bring greater efficiency and accuracy to these complicated and time-consuming tasks, something that AI is ideally suited to address.”

“We chose to pilot this technology with Cleveland Clinic because we wanted to test our AI against some of the most complex patient encounters in the world,” said Malinka Walaliyadde, CEO and co-founder of AKASA. “We are proud to now be rolling it out, as well as collaborating with Cleveland Clinic’s coders and CDI specialists in developing additional products to make the revenue cycle process easier and more efficient.”

Cleveland Clinic has begun rolling out this tool and will implement it across its U.S. locations over the coming weeks. In addition, it will continue to help refine the product and contribute to developing new AI tools for healthcare.

MEDIA CONTACTS

Cleveland Clinic:

• Andrea Pacetti, 216.316.3040, [email protected]
• Joe Milicia, 330.801.1204, [email protected]

AKASA:

• Tiffany Smith,917.667.5273, [email protected]