The challenge

Care coordinators working in primary care at Castell, an Intermountain Health company, were manually reviewing charts to identify patients due for preventive care services for four hours per day. Leaders at Castell noticed that tedious chart review prevented care coordinators from accomplishing higher-value tasks.

The organization

Intermountain Health is headquartered in Utah and has 33 hospitals and 385 clinics located in seven states. It includes medical groups with some 3,900 employed physicians and advanced care providers and a health plans division called Select Health. Castell is a population health management company and wholly-owned subsidiary of Intermountain. Castell was initially an internal effort to control cost of care through a value-based clinical care model, but they began offering their services externally as well in 2019. Their external services are mainly concentrated on elevating value-based care capabilities across health care industry stakeholders.

The approach

Castell used Intermountain’s existing partnership with Notable to introduce “digital assistants” powered by artificial intelligence (AI) that can perform a large part of the medical record searching that the primary care coordinators in Intermountain’s Utah Medical Group were previously doing. Instead of care coordinators manually searching medical records, the digital assistants surface provider recommendations in a central location of the EHR that the care coordinator can easily access.

The result

The digital assistants improved efficiency by reducing the time that care coordinators spent reviewing charts. This resulted in substantial cost savings and allowed Castell to expand their reach because care coordinators had more time to perform patient outreach. The digital assistants also improved care coordinator engagement by allowing them to work at top of license. Finally, the digital solution improved quality of care because it gave care coordinators more time to interact with patients and educate them on various aspects of preventive health services.