K Health to "Make Health Tech Great Again" with AI virtual care

WHY K HEALTH SIGNED THE PLEDGE

Since its inception in 2016, K Health's role has evolved in the healthcare landscape. Initially, the company designed a patient-facing app that asks patients relevant questions to help them ascertain what medical needs they may have, Fischer explained.

"That was kind of the core of the company, and I think it's kind of funny looking back that we started off with this mantra of healthcare without the system," he said.

The company's platform has since evolved. It now uses AI to combine information provided by patients, like their symptoms, with EHR data to give providers a detailed view of the patient's health and how it may influence their current concerns. Alongside the technology's evolution, the company's strategy changed.

"We realized you can build and innovate a lot outside of the system, but to actually impact patients and impact care and hit that scale moment, you kind of have to figure out how do you work with the legacy players," Fischer said. "How do you work with the folks where patients are seeking care today? How do you work with the folks that cover that care?"

Today, the company is partnered with several prominent health systems, including Cedars-Sinai and Hackensack Meridian Health. 

K Health views CMS' Health Tech Ecosystem initiative as a progression of these efforts to collaborate with healthcare stakeholders.

The initiative has two overarching goals: establishing an interoperability framework to improve information sharing between patients and providers and increasing the availability of personalized tools. Fischer stated that K Health's technology and collaborations with legacy healthcare players align with these goals. 

"We see a lot of opportunity to work with CMS and with some of the other companies that are on that list of the pledges to say, 'how do we take this [technology] and really impact the beneficiaries that CMS has in a complementary way," he said.

HOW K HEALTH PLANS TO ALIGN WITH THE INITIATIVE

As part of the initiative, K Health has pledged "to build conversational AI assistants that connect to CMS Aligned Networks or personal health record apps, and with patient consent, securely access relevant health information and use this information to deliver personalized, helpful support."

Fischer noted that the company's platform includes conversational AI capabilities, making it a "natural fit" for this federal effort.

"What we've built is a pretty sophisticated system around understanding what's going on with the patient and actually creating that conversation with them so that they can tell their story," he explained. "So that, when their physician enters the room, they're able to have a really clear picture of what's going on."

To enhance its platform and further align it with the initiative, the company plans to focus on key components of the pledge, starting with patient consent.

Interoperability is imperative to expanding healthcare access and improving outcomes, especially for the most vulnerable groups. Fischer illustrated the importance of interoperability by sharing anecdotes of his grandparents living in rural Tennessee, who often have to write down their medications and blood pressure readings and drive them to their doctors in Nashville.

"As I think about patient consent and I think about the hoops that patients have to go through to actually share their information right now, it is incredible, right? It is almost asinine to see how much you have to be the steward of your own record," he said.

However, interoperability goes hand-in-hand with patient consent. Patients must understand and agree with how their data is shared and used. Conversational AI tools can help ensure patient consent by putting patients in the driver's seat, allowing them to share their information easily and on their own terms, Fischer said. K Health is also integrating its technology into EMRs and patient-facing applications, with the ability to collect consent built in.

Fischer underscored that enhancing patient consent capabilities within conversational AI tools will be critical to furthering the initiative's interoperability goals. 

"When a patient's able to consent to engaging with one of these parts of the ecosystem, they're also consenting to sharing the stuff that's appropriate, the stuff that's relevant, so that you're minimizing the risk from a security perspective," he noted. "Then you're enabling -- whether it's engaging with a conversational assistant or just seeing a new physician -- you're enabling that patient to get the best care they possibly can because you have their story really connected nicely."

Another component of the pledge is ensuring that conversational AI tools "clearly distinguish educational content from clinical guidance."

K Health plans to align with this aspect of the pledge by ensuring the final patient touchpoint is a consultation with a clinician.

"We're collecting information from a patient and we're facilitating components of education, but we are not trying to get into the automated diagnosis stage, at least right now," Fischer said. 

The company's platform offers clinicians recommendations on the patient's medical needs based on the information the patient shares and their medical history, but the clinician makes the final diagnosis and treatment decision, he underscored.

As K Health readies to uphold the pledge it signed, Fischer highlighted the potential challenges the Health Tech Ecosystem initiative may face. These include ensuring that all signatories, from traditional health systems to technology giants to digital health players, are heading toward the same end goal.

He added that CMS has done a good job dividing the signatories into groups with specific goals. However, the agency will have to continue to define the mission and weave the skill sets of the various signatories together to achieve both the goals specific to each group and the initiative's overarching goals.

"I think that there's a lot of potential for this to be kind of one plus one equals three," Fischer said. "I don't think we have it all figured out yet, but it's a very complementary approach given we're leveraging the same sort of chassis and infrastructure and capability."

Anuja Vaidya has covered the healthcare industry since 2012. She currently covers the virtual healthcare landscape, including telehealth, remote patient monitoring and digital therapeutics.