AI Case Study

"Lane and a team taught an AI system to use software that already exists in health care just like a human would use it. They named it Olive.

“Olive loves all that crappy software that health care already has,” said Lane. “Olive can look at any software program, any application for the first time she’s ever seen it, and understand how to use it.”

For example, Olive navigates electronic medical records, logs into hospital portals, creates reports, files insurance claims, and more.

Olive does so thanks to three key traits. First, using computer vision and Robotic Process Automation, or RPA, the program can interact with any software interface just as a human would, opening browsers and typing. Second, machine learning enables Olive to make decisions the way human health care workers do. The team trained Olive with historical data on how health care workers perform digital tasks, such as how to file an insurance eligibility check for a patient seeking to undergo a procedure.

Finally, Olive relies on a unique skill that Lane developed based on his work at the NSA identifying criminals across disparate government sources—the ability to match identities across databases. Just as NSA software can determine if a terrorist in the CIA database is the same as in the Homeland Security database, so Olive matches a patient across disparate databases and software, such as multiple electronic health care record programs.

The software became commercially available 18 months ago (Spring 2017) and is currently being used in 195 hospitals and health care companies, Lane told IEEE Spectrum.

So far, those users have primarily put Olive to work automating insurance eligibility checks and claim status denials, said Lane. In the future, he hopes users will also adopt the tech to handle medical records and identify cohorts for clinical trials."