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Artificial intelligence and automation efforts are advancing across healthcare, as IT developers push to use AI for an array of clinical and operational use cases.
Developing AI agency
Axonius, a cybersecurity asset intelligence vendor, announced a new AI automation for healthcare exposure management. Axonius AI coincided with the launch of Axonius for Healthcare and enhancements to the company's asset cloud, all aimed at reducing health system security alert volumes.
The new AI operational engine delivers a single, authoritative view of every asset provided by the Axonius platform, according to Dean Sysman, the company's cofounder and CEO.
The platform is the first major product expansion following Axonius’s acquisition of medical device security vendor Cynerio in July, and the company said it offers complete medical device visibility with the ability to isolate a compromised device from the network and avoid disrupting patient care, the company said on Oct. 22.
Leveraging natural language processing, operators can query complex IT questions while an AI-driven risk engine correlates asset criticality, business context, security control gaps, vulnerability data and threat intelligence to surface the most significant risks. The platform can also initiate multi-step workflows with auditable, human-in-the-loop governance, Axonius said.
"Unifying asset intelligence across devices, identity, software, SaaS and infrastructure has become a strategic imperative for modern exposure management," Aqsa Taylor, chief research officer at Software Analyst Cyber Research, said in a statement.
The new AI-driven security platform "addresses what has become cybersecurity’s critical bottleneck: the actionability gap between identifying threats and neutralizing them," added Sysman.
Infinitus, an agentic healthcare communications platform, is working with Cisco Outshift to provide interoperable multi-agent coordination across complex healthcare workflows in an effort to ensure data accuracy, safety and trust, the company said in an announcement on Oct. 10.
Specifically, the company's agents target labor-intensive, time-consuming tasks like patient follow-ups, prior authorizations and insurance verifications – including faxes, calls and voicemails. For administrative tasks that typically take 24-48 hours, the agents shrink their completion time anywhere from a few seconds to about two hours.
Infinitus said its agents are built on open protocols like Model Context Protocol and Agent-to-Agent and establish trust and security within the multi-agent systems, like Cisco's orchestration environment.
"Together we can build an infrastructure that dramatically improves the consumer experience, particularly in a sector as important as healthcare," Papi Menon, Outshift by Cisco's chief product officer and vice president of product management, said in a statement.
"With this partnership, we can help accelerate that future for healthcare and lay foundational standards for open, interoperable and responsible AI infrastructure," added Ankit Jain, Infinitus CEO and cofounder.
Of note, Infinitus contributed to an open-source framework under the Linux Foundation dedicated to advancing interoperability for the Internet of Agents, called AGNTCY, to help establish shared standards, promote agent discoverability and build trust for secure and coordinated multi-agent workflows in mission-critical environments, the company noted.
Duke Health announced on Sept. 30 that it is working with tech company Trase Systems to create AI agents that can make choices and act on their own to reach administrative goals.
The health system's heart staff will co-develop and test agentic AI that optimizes the allocation of resources and enhances clinical functions like patient scheduling, care coordination and access to clinical studies.
"AI has the potential to help our doctors, nurses and researchers maximize the use of information to personalize cardiovascular care for our patients," said Dr. Manesh Patel, Duke University School of Medicine's Division of Cardiology chief, in a statement.
Virtual care innovations
TytoCare said on Oct. 15 that it is building on the world’s largest repository of multi-modal primary care data – with data from more than seven million exams – with a new Smart Clinic Companion that can be used by patients to conduct clinical-grade remote exams.
By integrating the dataset with the company's advanced AI algorithms (cleared by the U.S. Food & Drug Administration) and foundational large language models, the company said patients will receive validated medical information relevant to their current needs and be guided on whether to seek further medical attention or manage their condition at home.
A crisis in primary care access demands "a bold, intelligent response," according to Dedi Gilad, the company's CEO and cofounder. "We’ve built the largest and most clinically annotated dataset in the world, and that’s what powers our AI to deliver real results in primary care," he said.
The company said it designed the Smart Clinic Companion with safeguards and that it meets regulatory requirements for responsible AI, HIPAA, GDPR, HITRUST and SOC 2.
Also, OnMed LLC, a care station creator, and Berto Acquisition, a publicly traded special purpose acquisition company, are combining to scale and deploy OnMed's Clinic-in-a-Box care station to address gaps in telemedicine and the availability of inpatient clinics.
The care stations feature advanced diagnostic tools, real-time scans and vital sign monitoring, and host a live clinician on a 65-inch screen that enables more comprehensive patient examinations than traditional telehealth can provide, the companies said in a joint statement on Oct. 29.
Care-in-a-Box can be up and running in 30 days and can quickly improve the quality of life in the communities where they are deployed, according to Karthik Ganesh, CEO of OnMed, who will lead the combined company.
"With care stations having fully diagnosed 85% of patients without a specialist referral and supported the 50% of patients who said they would otherwise have gone to the [emergency room] or urgent care, we are proving that this model works," he said in a statement.
DocGo, a mobile health and transportation company, said on Oct. 20 that it has purchased SteadyMD's nationwide virtual care platform to increase its reach.
"By combining SteadyMD's nationwide virtual care platform with our mobile health services and infrastructure, we can provide our enviable roster of customers with an even more comprehensive platform of last-mile care, and help realize our goal of providing patients with healthcare at any address," said Lee Bienstock, CEO of DocGo.
UnitedHealthcare has tapped Aeroflow Health to offer commercial and Medicare patients a virtual medical nutritional therapy program. Patients meet with qualified dietitians on Aeroflow’s platform and discuss medical and nutrition history, sleep patterns, weight fluctuations and goals, stress management, hydration and physical activity, the companies said early last month.
Workflow data automations
Datavant and athenahealth announced on Oct. 28 that they will automate medical record requests in the electronic health record vendor's cloud-based athenaOne product with integrated AI-enabled quality assurance controls that connect to more than 70 EHRs.
Through athenahealth's marketplace, hundreds of customers already use Datavant services, the company said, but customers will have the option to use the fully integrated clinical data access technology and managed release of information services to digitize medical record requests.
The goal of the companies' expanded partnership is to simplify and reduce administrative burdens in healthcare and increase customer compliance, according to Michael Palantoni, athenahealth's chief strategy and corporate development officer.
"By including Datavant's ROI technology in our solution, we expect to remove operational barriers and enable providers to focus on delivering excellent care," he said in a statement.
EHR provider Greenway Health and interoperability vendor Moxe Health also plan to automate clinical data exchange. The integration will enable ambulatory practices to securely share clinical data with payers without extra portals, faxing or manual exchange.
By streamlining payer-provider collaboration with a payer-trusted data bridge, customers will be able to reduce delays, errors and administrative burdens, Greenway said on Oct. 22.
"Interoperability requires connecting the right data with the right requestor at the right time," Mike Coyne, Moxe Health CEO, said in a statement.
Ascension announced on Oct. 15 that it is saving clinicians time with software company Wellsheet and is summarizing patient information in one view and coordinating workflows across care teams.
"Since incorporating Wellsheet into my daily routine, I have noticed a significant shift in my approach to practicing medicine," Dr. Max Solano, a hospitalist at Ascension St. Vincent’s Riverside in Jacksonville, Florida, said in a statement sent to Healthcare IT News. "The platform’s ability to streamline data retrieval, organize communication, and summarize clinical information has given me back something invaluable – time."
Andrea Fox is senior editor of Healthcare IT News.
Email: afox@himss.org
Healthcare IT News is a HIMSS Media publication.
