Dr. Kamal Golla, Vice President of Clinical Technologies and Performance at Evolent, highlights the complexities of cancer care and the need for care navigation to address medical, emotional, financial, and logistical challenges. This comprehensive approach leads to improved treatment adherence and patient satisfaction while reducing emergency room visits and hospitalization. The care team serves as an extension of the medical decision-makers, helping to manage care across multiple specialists, advising on overcoming side effects, and reducing logistical hurdles to ease the burden on physicians and caregivers, ultimately improving patient outcomes.

Kamal explains, "Cancer care navigation is really about creating a roadmap for patients. It's making sure they're not left alone to piece together appointments, interpret side effects, or figure out how to pay for medications. The role of a navigator here is really to guide them through the whole journey. That includes the medical components that many folks are familiar with, but also the emotional, financial, and logistical components that come with a cancer diagnosis. The evidence is really clear, given that more than half of emergency department visits and nearly a quarter of hospitalizations related to cancer care are actually avoidable, that responding rapidly to these situations is key."

"In our navigation program, we are rooted in patient-centric navigation, meaning we ask them what the transportation difficulties are that they might face. Who is your caregiver and their support? What do you do for work? What are your cultural and religious beliefs? All of those play a big part in dealing with the new diagnosis of cancer. We want all of that information to be able to provide a very personalized journey."

#Evolent #Oncology #CancerCare #CareNavigation #HealthcareInnovation #DigitalHealth #PersonalizedCare #PatientCenteredCare #Evolent #Careology

Evolent.com

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Bill Snyder, CEO and Founder of Cylinder, is addressing the high prevalence of digestive health issues using a virtual care model to provide access to a coordinated care team, including dieticians and health coaches, to offer personalized care plans. GI conditions are complex and involve a combination of genetic predisposition, environmental factors, and dietary influences. There are strong correlations between the gut and brain, as well as digestive health and various physical and mental conditions. Cylinder fills a gap in traditional GI care, where physicians often lack extensive nutritional training.

Bill explains, "First and foremost, we think about the patients that we serve, and the patients that we serve come to us from across the country. We serve patients in every state across the US, and they suffer from a variety of GI-related conditions. That's things like ulcerative colitis, Crohn's disease, irritable bowel syndrome, and GERD. It's also a large population who don't have a formal diagnosis, but are symptomatic of GI conditions. So they may have chronic bloating, chronic constipation, and chronic heartburn, and they may not know what the underlying cause is. And then we also reach those members through our clients, which are large self-funded organizations and health plans. People traditionally gain access to Cylinder as part of their employee benefits package."

"But there's also a lot that we continue to understand in terms of our overall digestive health system connection. The gut-brain axis, which serves as a bilateral feedback loop between the gut and the brain, is where we found that your digestive health often correlates with your mental health, and vice versa. So we know that some of the reasons for the onset of these conditions can be genetic, but to your point, we're also seeing a lot of impact from our environment and certainly from the foods we eat. And so as you think about the American diet, and as you think about how that's changed over the past several decades, we're seeing an increase in the incidence of these conditions and an increase in people who are presenting with these symptoms and not really sure where to go or what to do."

#CylinderHealth #GIhealth #digestivehealth #cylinderhealth #GIcare #virtualhealth #employeebenefits

cylinderhealth.com

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Pat Michael, Director of Patient Contact Services at Nebraska Medicine, highlights the challenges of high-volume patient contact centers and how agentic AI can improve operational efficiency, enhance patient access, and allow human agents to focus on more complex and critical calls. The AI agent offers patients self-service options for scheduling, cancellations, and medication refills, resulting in a 40% reduction in call volume to human operators. Integrating AI into the contact center also enables the prioritization of time-sensitive calls, such as those related to organ transplant coordination.

Pat explains, "I'm the Patient Contact Services Director for Nebraska Medicine, which means I oversee our three main contact centers. They're our ambulatory contact center, which takes and schedules all the calls for our ambulatory clinic, and our radiology contact center, which schedules all of our outpatient radiology services. And then our medical communication center, which is our 24-hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week operation with our hospital operators and a group of triage nurses."

"So, some of the challenges that we had are that one of the big things is that we deal with the sheer volume of calls coming into the contact center. And so through the three contact centers, we have about 2.5 million calls that come in, but they're not evenly distributed. They come in when they come in. And so the key to success is managing all these complex calls while ensuring accuracy in the call handling. And what does that mean in the simplest terms? You have to have time to handle the calls accurately. Are we actually staying ahead of the volume, or are we just trying to catch up?"

#NebraskaMedicine #ActiumHealth #AIAgents #PatientEngagement #healthtech #AgenticAI #automation

Nebraskamed.com

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