Organizations across the care continuum are embracing AI’s potential, but no two leaders approach its use in the same way. 

We know the buzz around the technology is growing – AI recently was ranked as the most exciting emerging technology for the fourth year in a row in an executive survey. But to understand more about how healthcare leaders are using and thinking about AI, it’s worth going right to the source. 

Ahead of our panel presentation at the National Association of Specialty Pharmacy annual meeting, Infinitus CEO and Co-founder Ankit Jain spent time discussing AI approaches, considerations, and barriers to success with the participants. Here are some key excerpts from those conversations. 

Glen Howell, Exec. Director, Pharmacy Innovation & Tech Strategy, CVS

Q: It’s been great to learn from you and your team as we’ve been getting to know each other over the last couple of years, and I’d love to understand whether you see AI more as an enabler of cost savings or a driver of revenue.

A: It’s both. We think about how AI helps our customers and colleagues. But then when we think about specialty pharmacy, there are many other customers – there is pharma, there is our clients. And so I think there’s an opportunity for AI to provide deeper insights where information can be used as another source of revenue. There are opportunities as it relates to AI outside of driving cost efficiencies.

Jennifer Millard, VP, Integrated Patient Support Services, IQVIA:

Q: Would you share some examples of how IQVIA is using AI today or thinking of using AI in the near future?

A: In patient support services at IQVIA, we’ve been looking at adopting AI in improving our call centers, improving and automating our workflow, and looking at operational efficiency. So, that can be in building out items like real-time sentiment analysis – what’s happening with a patient is you’re having conversations with them on the phone, which then drives into real-time quality metrics, which we can start doing calibrations and training with, with the ability to impact that patient’s experience. 

We’re looking to continue to drive AI, and particularly generative AI, in helping to support content generation in order to have a more natural conversation when patients are on the phone, but also be compliant to our call guides and our call scripts. We’re also starting to infuse AI into really great ways of being able to ask what we call our Patient Insights Engine a question like, “Tell me how long my hold time is from July 31 through today?” That ability to ask questions and remove the need to have advanced analytics so we can more easily get real-time insights. 

Gaurav Khanna, VP & Segment CIO, Pharmacy, Humana

Q: How is Humana using AI, or thinking about using AI?

A: We’re thinking about how we can leverage AI to help on a couple of different fronts, one being making the patient experience a lot easier. The other side is, how do we use AI to take the administrative burden off of our techs and pharmacists? How do we make this work less burdensome by automating some of the key processes that they do today manually? 

As an example, one of the things that we are actually implementing currently is, how do we take our referrals and all the unstructured data that we get as part of prescriptions by implementing AI to augment that, make it automated and send it right into the queue for a screening agent or a screening tech, rather than having somebody manually enter that.

Kyle Skiermont, PharmD, Assistant Dean for Clinical Affairs Vice President of Pharmacy and Therapeutics for Nebraska Medicine

Q: In your experience, what have been some of the biggest barriers to AI adoption, within specialty pharmacy and elsewhere?

A: A couple of the big things. One is just the technology itself. What I mean by that is, what is that flow of information, or essentially, what do we need to share external to our organization to make that flow of information happen? The pure operations of getting the pipes built right, to get the information flowing back and forth, to let some of these amazing tools really work at their best possible ability.

The other is more philosophical, if you will. How good does the AI need to be before you can turn it on? So, for example, is it 100% right? Do we have to make sure that if we’re using it in a two-way communication, it gives the exact right information every single time? Or where are people comfortable with an error rate, if you will? Because in healthcare, the expectation is zero, and in particular in pharmacy, that the error rate is zero. And so how do we work with AI to ensure that it’s at least as good, if not better, than where our clinicians and our staff are at?

Ryan Fluharty, VP of Enterprise Optimization, Amerita Home Infusion

Q: It’s been great for our teams to explore what impact we can truly have for Amerita, but I’m wondering if you can share some examples of how your organization is thinking about using AI.

A: For Amerita specifically, we are not using AI today, but it’s definitely top of mind as we’re trying to transform our company and move into more of a technology-driven organization. And as we think about that, the number one area that comes to mind is within our call center environment. 

The way we think about that is automating the call center tasks to free up our agents to work on the better, more important tasks that a system is not really capable of doing. When I think about the call center, I think about making outreach calls to payors for prior authorizations or benefit investigations, not on patient automation, because we want to keep that patient touch, but really on those back-office benefit investigation areas is really where we think about using it.

Contributor quotes have been edited for clarity.