Olive Builds the Internet of Healthcare and an AI Workforce on AWS

Guest post by Patrick Jones, EVP Partnerships|Ventures|Builds, Olive

Our first days, last days, and so many days in between are spent as a patient in a healthcare system. For some, even more of their lives are spent as healthcare workers.  Health is so important, yet chances are you know just how disconnected the care experience has become – long wait times, overcrowded emergency rooms, soaring costs, rushed appointments, impossible claims processes and reimbursement, even the inability to get necessary treatment. As patients, this is frustrating, futile, and even life threatening. Many of these challenges are symptoms of healthcare’s larger, more systemic problem: the industry is built on fragmented, outdated technology. Olive is connecting these legacy systems with the Internet of Healthcare (IoH) and deploying an AI workforce to help get healthcare back on track.  Our goal is to make humans happier and healthier while reducing the costs and burdens of the healthcare system.

The challenge with Healthcare Technology

Today, the healthcare industry is flooded with software. Any given hospital has an EMR, billing software, different portals for every insurance partner, and individual medical tools each with their own interfaces, just to name a few. None of these systems work together, and the downstream effects dehumanizes the care experience. In effect, healthcare has used people as routers, forcing workers to toggle between numerous systems. They copy, they paste,  and they endlessly toggle between software interfaces, becoming data entry, data transfer, and data interpretation robots. Doctors spend almost six hours on data entry during a typical workday. You can digitally trade stocks, transfer money, buy any product, sign a lease, and more instantly. Yet, patients are expected to constantly “log in” by filling out forms, regurgitating medical histories, showing paper cards, faxing claims and scheduling appointments over the phone with long wait times.  Healthcare is essentially operating on dialup, and it’s negatively affecting all parties involved.

Regulatory requirements and siloed systems have forced our healthcare workers and patients to do all of the manual work. In fact, caregivers today spend more time in front of screens than they do patients. It’s one of the leading reasons that one out of every three dollars spent in the industry is spent on administrative costs – and it’s a $1 trillion dollar problem that AI can solve. Olive is designed to create those connections, shining a new light on old processes, connecting providers delivering care and payers reimbursing that care to ultimately drive a better patient experience.

The Goal: Build the IoH to Return a Trillion dollars and Improve the Healthcare Experience

“When I was at my hometown hospital, one thing became abundantly clear: healthcare didn’t have the Internet,” said Sean Lane, CEO of Olive. “Patient experiences I’ve witnessed for myself and my family opened my eyes to how many processes could be done better in healthcare, and there was one true solution: build the Internet of Healthcare. Connect all of healthcare’s disparate technology to fix a broken system. That’s the idea that started Olive and is core to our vision of revealing life-changing outcomes.”

Similar to the Internet of Things (IoT), our products create the IoH. In the literal sense, the IoH means connecting networks – health systems, payers, software, data, patient information, and history. Essentially, we’re transforming healthcare from a series of antiquated “fax machines” and human routers, to an advanced, secure internet connected by artificial intelligence. The result? Our autonomous interoperability platform enables humans to refocus on patients and care. The platform’s workforce is a network, a brain. Each brain, or Olive, works 24/7, shares best practices and gets better at doing her job and helping her human counterparts every day.

To help create this, we partnered with AWS to leverage a HIPAA-compliant environment where we could get to work streamlining healthcare tasks and building the IoH. This is game-changing in healthcare, because no other industry is as crippled by a deluge of difficult-to-use – yet business critical – software programs like healthcare. Olive’s AWS HIPAA-compliant environment enables leading health systems across the country the easiest path to connectivity and automation.

The how: Olive’s IoH and AI Workforce Built on AWS

So, how does it all work? To complete her tasks, Olive accesses several applications – both web and desktop – and HIPAA/HITRUST compliant AWS services to do her work. It comes equipped with proactive, real-time monitoring via our engineering support team, an insights dashboard and automatic updates.

Olive started her life inside AWS using basic Amazon EC2 instances to do her work. As AWS started to grow and offer more features we started to use them to grow what she can do and how fast. Today, Olive uses various technologies inside AWS including but not limited to AWS EKS, Amazon SageMaker, data lakes, AWS Lambda, AWS Lambda Step Functions, Amazon Redshift, and many more services to do her job. All of the services work together in a microservices-based deployment method. Olive doesn’t use standalone APIs and HL7 feeds. Instead, Olive uses capabilities, including computer vision and AI, to directly utilize the system’s user interfaces (UIs) and make thoughtful, individualized decisions and actions.  Even today ,we are working on how to grow her skill sets and use new technologies like Redshift lake house architecture to enhance her abilities.

Olive seamlessly adapts to existing data sources, learning, responding to and bringing efficiency to dozens of data-driven administrative tasks. And our AWS environment allows our team of engineers to best scale and support health systems’ ongoing automation initiatives, which have become even more critical on the tailwinds of COVID-19.

“We use AWS because it makes everything easier for us, our customers and ultimately, millions of patients in the healthcare system today. Our infrastructure with AWS offers the security, durability, scalability and availability to enable Olive to do her game-changing work,” says Vivek Desai, VP of Cloud Infrastructure at Olive.

We’ve already seen the impact as automation continues to remove work humans were once tasked with handling and AI lives next to them, making them even more efficient. As Olive works for you and alongside you, she is giving humans the chance to handle tasks that require empathy, creativity and more of a human touch – all reasons people choose careers in healthcare in the first place.

Olive’s Vision: Now & Future

To date, Olive is connecting over 675 hospitals across the U.S., automating high-volume tasks to make healthcare more efficient, affordable, and effective. Olive has positively impacted over 60 million patients last year and drove over $100 million perpetual savings, revenue increases, and efficiencies for the industry. By partnering with AWS, the data-driven possibilities of what we’ll be able to engineer for healthcare are endless. Imagine patients having their full medical chart and data with them, wherever they go. Or pharmaceutical companies having unprecedented access to cohorts, changing how we treat some of the most dire medical complications facing humanity today. Imagine health systems having greater access to big data statistical analysis, data that could be used for tracking and following outbreaks of the flu, finding commonalities between outbreaks of rare diseases, and so much more. Imagine happy doctors and caregivers who can spend all of their time and attention focused on delivering exceptional patient experiences.

This is the holy grail of healthcare – complete interoperability between all systems and information shared between each and every silo of a health system, effortlessly powered by AI. The IoH is the next big innovation the industry needs. Together, Olive and AWS are having an incredible impact on human lives.

Curious about the AI workforce and the IoH that’s driving real change for healthcare workers and their patients? Visit oliveai.com to learn more.

About the Author

Patrick Jones serves as EVP of Partnerships|Ventures|Builds at Olive.  Patrick joins after 13 years of successfully navigating the ad-tech industry, where he sought out opportunities in high-growth environments at software and data companies. He’s played a role in three major acquisitions and is excited to bring his enthusiasm for expansion to Olive. Patrick has run the gambit professionally, building and running client services, data operations, partnerships and direct sales organizations. Most recently, he sat on the Oracle Data Cloud executive team, bringing together the strategy, product lines and teams from the 7 acquisitions that created the Data Cloud. Outside of work Patrick loves being on the road with his best friend, a Swiss Mountain dog, Ōkī.