While new technologies continue to transform the healthcare industry in unprecedented ways, administrative functions still burden the healthcare industry with 1 in every 3 dollars spent on administration. Olive, the company that introduced healthcare’s first digital employee, has joined forces with Clinc, another trailblazer in Artificial Intelligence (AI), to free up time and resources by adding conversational AI capabilities to its existing technology. The combined offering allows Olive’s digital healthcare employee to bring hospitals and health systems broader applications across revenue cycle, supply chain and other financial and operational departments.
This union expands the versatility of Olive by unlocking a broader range of capabilities like, vocal cognition to further help organizations eliminate bottlenecks, simplify administration, keep costs in check and ultimately improve the experience for patients.
Olive’s existing technology has put the digital healthcare employee to work on back-office functions spanning repetitive, time-consuming, and error-prone administrative tasks like claims processing, prior authorization statusing, and extracting patient data from EHRs. Working with Clinc, Olive will add vocal cognition to her current skill set to deliver a balanced mix of AI capabilities including RPA, CV, ML, and NLP/U to propel new opportunities for optimization and end-to-end automation for the AI-powered digital employee. This represents a pivotal milestone in the advancement of human and machine interaction in healthcare.
With these amplified capabilities, Olive is poised to create major improvements in healthcare, for example:
- Comprehensive automations – Adding conversational AI to Olive’s skill set means that Olive can trigger and complete additional actions and connect steps in the information process that would have required human intervention before. For example, when a diagnosis code is incorrect or missing information on a claim, Olive will find the right data through a dialogue with patients, physicians and nurses.
- Customer services in call centers – Clinc brings its ability to take on high call volumes, understand freeform speech, maintain context, and simultaneously parse out inquiries and commands. This will be a breakthrough in areas like patient scheduling.
“This added technology helps us expand our breadth of AI by adding cognitive conversation to Olive’s capabilities,” said Sean Lane, CEO of Olive. “I envision Olive seamlessly interacting with patients and employees and bringing elevated comprehension into data analysis. We’re excited to be entering a new chapter in building a faster, more efficient, more effective healthcare system — the possibilities are endless.”
Today’s announcement comes on the heels of Clinc’s record $52M in its Series B funding round led by investors from Insights Partners, DFJ Growth, Drive Capital and Hyde Park Venture Partners. Drive Capital has also led previous funding rounds for Olive, and made their first investment in the organization in 2013. To date, Clinc has applied natural language understanding technology to a myriad of industries, including the financial, automotive, and food service sectors, but its latest round of funding is earmarked for expanding to new markets including healthcare.
“Healthcare impacts everyone in life-changing ways, and it is also a sector uniquely positioned to benefit from advances in efficiency and interoperability, enabled by AI,” said Jason Mars, CEO of Clinc. “We are advancing a powerful combination of task automation and voice-enabled interaction services that will help healthcare employees and patients to better understand, access and navigate the healthcare experience.”
“By bringing together two complementary, AI based technologies, the Clinc and Olive collaboration is poised to supercharge our digital workforce’s automation capabilities and shift the paradigm for how administrative work in healthcare is done,” added Lane.
