Highmark Health is all in on incorporating artificial intelligence enterprisewide and has taken a unique step in accelerating adoption.
Highmark, which includes the 14-hospital Allegheny Health Network and a 5 million member health plan, is pushing broad adoption of generative AI systemwide with its AI center of Excellence focused on creating an internal “AI easy button,” said Richard Clarke, PhD, senior vice president and chief analytics officer of Highmark Health.
“There’s lots of exciting things going on from large scale solutions, like the ambient listening technology that we’ve been rolling out across Allegheny Health Network to improve the clinicians’ day to day work, and bringing a lot of joy back to practice,” he said. “We also rolled out our at-scale, secure generative AI solution we call Sidekick for every single one of our 50,000 employees. That’s been just amazing. We have over 10,000 active users on our internal platform. We just surpassed the 1 million prompt submitted threshold.”
Highmark has been training thousands of employees on prompt engineering and teaching every director-level and up leader to use AI.
“I’ve never had so many people stop me in the elevator or in the hall and tell me a new, cool way that they’re using this technology to create efficiencies to better serve our patients and members, and it’s just been such an exciting time,” said Dr. Clarke.
In the next year, he sees big opportunities to realize value from the scaled use of generative AI based on early areas of adoption. The system has engaged in several pilot programs and is starting to scale the most successful.
“We’re liberating many hours for our clinical staff by taking away some of the administrative burden and I’m excited to see that continue,” he said. “The next wave of innovation is what everyone is talking about: agentic workflow. We’re excited about that. We’ve launched our first single-use agent. We’re really exploring not only the technical aspects of what has to be true to have broader ecosystem agents that are orchestrated against tasks, but also the people aspect of that. We are not only building them within the AI center of excellence, but really enabling the broad swath of our enterprise to be reimagining processes and workflows using AI as another piece of the workforce.”
It will take time to fully realize the benefits of agentic AI, but Dr. Clarke sees it as a “big step forward” in accelerating growth systemwide. Highmark struck a partnership with Google Cloud in 2020 which has supported quick movement in safely connecting generative AI solutions with the health system’s data.
“I’m in some ways less worried about whether or not a particular use is the absolute highest ROI use case,” Dr. Clarke said. “We see huge strategic value in a broad swath of our workforce learning how to talk to machines, getting very used to prompting and getting very used to incorporating an AI assistant into their work.”
The system is very intentional about adding new solutions, including ambient listening for clinicians. Highmark has been running a pilot for nearly 500 clinicians with multiple potential ambient partners in the inpatient and ambulatory settings to evaluate their options. They’re planning to select a company for the immediate term, but are also working hard to make sure the ecosystem will allow for onboarding new options and integrating new solutions easily.
“We make sure our build-buy decision isn’t a binary one that can never be revisited because everything is changing so quickly that to think you can pick today and be perfect is a fool’s errand,” he said. “You have to acknowledge that innovation is moving quickly, and being able to have an innovation ecosystem that allows for experimentation and rapidly moving solutions in and out of the ecosystem, in terms of contracting that has to come with it.”
