Intermountain Health Invests in AI-Powered Chart Review Technology

Intermountain Health, a major healthcare system based in Utah, has announced a strategic investment in Layer Health, a company specializing in artificial intelligence (AI) for clinical data abstraction. This partnership aims to revolutionize quality reporting and clinical registry submissions across Intermountain's network, focusing initially on stroke, surgery, and cardiovascular disease.

AI Technology to Streamline Chart Review Process

Layer Health's innovative AI platform is designed to automate the labor-intensive process of chart review. The company's large language model can analyze both structured and unstructured patient data from electronic health records, providing a comprehensive understanding of patient care and outcomes. This technology is expected to significantly reduce the estimated billion hours of manual chart review performed annually by clinicians and staff across various clinical and administrative use cases.

David Sontag, co-founder of Layer Health, emphasized the potential impact of their AI solution: "AI chart review could dramatically reduce the cost of chart review while providing comprehensive answers."

Expanding Registry Participation and Improving Efficiency

Intermountain Health currently manages over 35 active registries and has been seeking ways to expand its participation without increasing manual workload. The deployment of Layer Health's AI technology is set to occur across all 33 Intermountain locations in six states.

Phillip Wood, Intermountain Ventures partnerships executive director, highlighted the significance of this development: "Having a tool like this to automate that and make it more efficient expands the aperture of the registries and the other things that they can do."

Dr. Cara Camiolo Reddy, chief quality and safety officer at Intermountain Health, added, "Layer offers a scalable approach that allows us to support existing registries more efficiently and finally move forward with new ones."

Validation Process and Ethical Considerations

The implementation of Layer Health's AI at Intermountain will involve a two-stage validation process. The first phase will focus on retrospective validation, establishing a baseline for the system's performance compared to current manual processes. The second phase will incorporate prospective validation, where nursing staff will provide feedback on the AI's responses to clinical registry questions.

Sontag emphasized the importance of this collaborative approach: "AI is seldom used in a vacuum, in a way in which one could use a single number to quantify its performance. This is a good example of how you can go the next step beyond what you could do in a more centralized validation."

This rigorous validation process underscores Layer Health's commitment to ethical AI deployment in healthcare settings, ensuring that the technology complements rather than replaces human expertise in clinical decision-making.