Can we responsibly use AI in health tech?

I’ve always believed that healthcare is a human right. Everyone deserves access to affordable, high-value and personalized healthcare. In the U.S., that may have been a dream even as little as four years ago, but government regulations around healthcare price transparency mean a movement toward equitable U.S. health insurance has really taken root. 

Price transparency data  – and how you use that carrier and provider cost information to create high-value healthcare options – is the beating heart of that movement.   

These days, you can’t talk about data, or tech, without addressing artificial intelligence and LLMs. Every organization in the world is focused on integrating AI into their business processes as quickly as possible, but in the healthcare setting, we need to really think about strategy and how we can work alongside AI to deliver better outcomes. 

The healthcare industry is very personal and very human. We work in a data-driven environment, developing technology solutions to push the industry forward, but we can’t forget the humanity, the vulnerability, of going to the doctor. AI can’t replace the connection, warmth and community that are all trademarks of successfully scaled healthcare businesses. This line of thinking goes beyond making sure AI is secure. We also need to make sure AI doesn’t make us lose sight of what healthcare data truly represents. I’m talking about the real people on the other end of the data: patients choosing providers, plan sponsors managing costs and designing benefits.

There's a lot of hype, but there is also a lot of fear and scaremongering, about how AI is using our personal information. As we continue to integrate AI into healthcare operations, we need to constantly monitor that guardrails are in place, to make sure we always have a strict control of how the data is used. The promise of AI doing onerous tasks for us is too great to ignore. With AI, we become experts who can make better decisions, who are overseeing the technology to enable us to operate at a scope and a level that we haven't been able to before.

New AI processes to help us work better

At Handl Health, we're spending a lot of time on customer-focused AI solutions. But we recently turned inward on a quest to discover where we can better use AI to streamline how we work. In our first AI Hackathon, groups from across the company took 45 minutes to establish usable AI prototypes for organizational workflows. 

To start, we asked our engineers to divide themselves among the hackathon teams to help connect the dots between internal tools and data, also serving as a helpful guide for less AI-native peers. When the timer buzzed, we heard extremely engaging proposals from all the teams. Once implemented, these hacks will increase productivity across completely different functions: improved internal communication for product roadmapping, faster mapping of customer insights to product debugging, and more effective sales prospecting tools. 

Best ROI of 45 minutes I've seen in a long time.

So how does Handl Health now view AI in our operations? AI removes high-friction, manual tasks, empowering us to operate at a much higher scope and ultimately create more value for customers. We also see AI as a resource that enables every team to execute faster by ensuring that data, tools and processes accelerate work. It’s an idea-iteration machine. It’s coding support. It’s a document analyzer. What that means is that we can spend more time actually helping people navigate a very complex healthcare system.

Broadly, AI helps the entire ecosystem bring more humanity into healthcare, enabling healthcare stakeholders to spend less time generating reports and more time truly focusing on impacting patient outcomes. Looking specifically at benefits brokers and consultants, they also can use AI to predict what is going to happen with their client’s claims experience, making decisions off that data at a layer of granularity that was simply not possible in the past. AI also gives us an incredible ability to personalize, and simplify, what we do. We can work with brokers to design health plans around the demographic needs of employer groups. It all helps us transform healthcare by shaping the pathways that offer the best coverage for the lowest price.

With AI as a collaborator, health tech companies can truly change healthcare narrative, combating rising costs and lowering quality. It’s why we serve the people who carry the responsibility of making healthcare affordable and accessible for working people and their families. We give health plans, brokers and plan sponsors the data to understand what healthcare really costs; the infrastructure to design and deploy plans that improve outcomes and reduce waste; and the tools to prove it all works.