Many of the healthcare AI tools hitting the market in the past few years have been built to lighten the load on clinicians — with less attention being paid to what AI can do for patients themselves.
Penn Medicine is one of the health systems that is starting to test out the other side of that equation, with the organization recently partnering with K Health to integrate the startup’s AI-powered patient intake tools into its virtual primary care service. The partners are tracking whether adding an AI “team member” into the patient-provider relationship can improve outcomes.
K Health’s intake agents collect information from patients, such as current symptoms and details from their medical history, and then turn it into a structured summary that feeds directly into the clinician’s existing workflow.
The technology helps patients figure out what kind of care they actually need before a visit, and it also benefits providers because they enter appointments already informed, explained Ran Shaul, K Health’s co-founder and chief product officer.
Shaul compared the agent’s role to a medical resident. It gathers history, understands the complaint and then prepares the case — similar to how a resident presents a patient to an attending physician.
The human clinician still makes the final decision, but the AI took care of the legwork beforehand, he said.
K Health’s agents are being used within similar virtual care programs at other health systems, including Cedars-Sinai, Mayo Clinic, Mass General Brigham and Hartford Healthcare, Shaul added. The underlying AI agent technology is the same across systems, though their use cases vary. Some health systems use it to attract new patients, and others deploy the technology to better serve populations lacking primary care access.
If Penn’s deployment proves successful, the health system plans to expand its use of the intake agents into in‑person primary care offices and certain specialty clinics.
Dr. Mitchell Schnall, Penn’s senior vice president for data and technology solutions, said that the organization adopted K Health’s technology because it thought the agents could improve the experience for both patients and providers.
“We anticipate the dynamic intake process will allow the provider to start the visit with important information at hand, and not burden the visit with as much information gathering. This is anticipated to provide additional time for the providers and patients to discuss management options and for a better quality visit,” Dr. Schnall stated.
Penn also hopes the agents can help quickly identify patients who have simple needs, such as a prescription refill, that type of care can be fast-tracked, he added.
If K Health’s AI tools prove they can genuinely improve the experience, Penn is prepared to scale their use more broadly — but the health system still recognizes that different people have different preferences, Dr. Schnall pointed out.
“We do not want to force people to access an AI solution when they would prefer not to. We would always have non-AI powered options for patients that would prefer to go that route,” he noted.
Whether the technology sticks may come down to whether patients actually want to use it.
Photo: akinbostanci, Getty Images
