Ensuring great healthcare experiences for both patients and providers is critical to addressing workforce-related challenges and driving growth.
During a recent Becker's Hospital Review podcast sponsored by NRC Health, Vinitha Ramnathan, chief product officer at NRC Health, discussed opportunities for next-level thinking in how organizations manage and deliver optimal healthcare experiences.
Three key insights were:
1. Human behavior and motivation play a key role in achieving better health outcomes. Understanding that role from a psychological perspective and implementing technologies that aid patients and providers in adopting such behaviors can help hospitals and health systems better manage patient populations and support clinical teams. Ultimately, improved health outcomes and human experiences translate into better reputational and financial outcomes for organizations.
2. NRC Health's large language model (LLM), Huey, is trustworthy and has been validated by end users. NRC Health has been working in the field of human understanding for decades. It recently developed a one-of-a-kind LLM that is exclusively trained on human understanding data. What makes Huey unique are its two core features:
- Trustworthiness: The model is built on a framework that ensures alignment with societal values and accounts for bias and potential LLM hallucinations (LLM hallucinations are commonly defined as the generation of nonsensical or inaccurate content). The model follows governance standards such as the Health Information Trust Alliance (HITRUST) security framework.
- Validation: The model is transparent about the data sources it uses and makes that information available to end users, who can indicate whether the metadata and results of the model make sense from a clinical, operational or other professional perspective.
"It is our responsibility to ensure that the LLM model not only delights, but is also extremely trustworthy," Ms. Ramnathan said. She noted NRC works closely with clients when developing applications and products, such that every new offering it brings to market has gone through an iterative process with significant input from current and potential clients.
3. Solutions that introduce efficiencies without compromising quality of care are the way forward. Healthcare organizations and workflows are notoriously complex and good outcomes often depend on positive human connections and experiences.
To stay innovative while continuing to deliver high-quality care, hospitals and health systems need to find ways to make onerous processes that create burden for providers and patients more seamless.
One way NRC supports organizations in that transformation is by providing comprehensive contextual information about patients before they show up for appointments. That way registration and clinical staff do not have to scramble for patients' medical history notes or try to figure out what exactly is needed to ensure the best experience for each patient. NRC also provides similar solutions for scheduling, discharge, and billing workflows.
"Our goal is to make technology and the systems [that technology is used in] so seamless and so second-nature that providers are not worrying about how they are doing it, but are focused on what they are doing, which is caring for the patient," Ms. Ramnathan said.