Ask Avo is Much More Than a Clinical ChatGPT – It Enables Clinicians to Receive Real-Time Recommendations and Complete Routine Tasks by Leveraging Patient Data from Nationwide Health Information Exchanges and Evidence-Based Guidelines
SUNY Downstate Medical Center, Driscoll Children’s Hospital, Harbor Health, and NeighborHealth are Early Adopters of Ask Avo
Today, Avo announced the launch of Ask Avo, a first-of-its-kind, customizable AI consult tool that seamlessly integrates into Electronic Health Records (EHR) systems. Ask Avo leverages patient data, local population context, institutional pathways and protocols, and continually updated society guidelines to ensure trustworthy and relevant responses to complex clinical questions.
Ask Avo acts as a “digital front door” for clinicians, helping them navigate their complex EHR with ease. Ask Avo is actionable, allowing providers to ask for a patient chart summary pre-visit, a care gaps analysis, an ambient note, an order placement, and more. This unique combination of clinical decision support paired with real-time actions not only enhances provider decision-making but also saves them valuable time and improves patient outcomes.
Ask Avo’s early adopters include SUNY Downstate, Driscoll Children’s Hospital, Harbor Health, and NeighborHealth (formerly East Boston Neighborhood Health).
Ask Avo is the latest addition to the Avo platform and can be used as a single interface for providers to leverage Avo’s other EHR-integrated workflow tools. Other Avo tools include Avo Pathway, a medical reference tool customizable to health system guidelines, and Avo Assistant, a set of end-to-end clinical workflows that help automate everyday tasks like pre-charting, care planning, documentation, and ordering.
“As a hospitalist tasked with treating patients with complex issues within just a few minutes, I struggled to quickly grasp all of the scattered information from their medical records and treat them according to my health system’s unique guidelines,” said Dr. Joongheum Park, Chairman and co-founder of Avo. “Our goal was to build a supercharged ‘Siri-meets-ChatGPT’ for the EHR, allowing clinicians to navigate the patient chart within seconds, and do so in a way that answers questions according to the latest and most relevant evidence.”
“AI technology can be an amazing asset for clinicians and health systems, but only if done thoughtfully. The Avo team studied the current AI consult tools market and saw a major gap between what the current technology offers and what practitioners actually want,” said Yair Saperstein, MD MPH, co-founder and CEO of Avo. “Ask Avo was inspired by the ethos of our entire Avo platform – to build tools that clinicians love. With EHR integration, a fully customizable and easy-to-deploy model, and a relentless focus on relevance, actionability, and trustworthiness, Ask Avo is the AI tool clinicians and health systems need.”
David Berger, CEO of SUNY Downstate Medical Center said, “Avo has been our AI partner across ambient listening with decision support and medical calculators, and we are excited to expand our work together with the launch of Ask Avo at SUNY Downstate, an AI consult tool that we expect to help reduce unnecessary referrals and improve quality of care.”
As healthcare institutions have adopted AI technologies, clinicians remain skeptical of their usefulness. These tools can be challenging for institutions to deploy or see positive outcomes from due to the following reasons:
- No EHR Integration or Actionability: Tools not integrated into the EHR are never top-of-mind for clinicians and therefore require a huge investment from health systems to drive up adoption. Additionally, point solutions slow clinicians down instead of streamlining everything they need in one place.
- One-Size-Fits-All & Resource-Intensive: AI consult tools currently in the market simply produce a basic clinical summary, aren’t customizable, and lack critical, hospital-specific guidelines that meet the needs of local populations. Additionally, many tools require a tremendous amount of time and effort for IT teams to create, implement, and maintain.
- Untrustworthy & Opaque: Studies have shown that, especially in healthcare, ChatGPT is prone to hallucinations and incorrect or irrelevant source citations, in some cases referencing research that does not even exist. Health system decision-makers often lack insight and control into how AI tools on the market will guide their clinicians.
With medical evidence changing frequently and clinician burnout rising, healthcare systems are searching for new ways to help clinicians become more efficient while not losing sight of personalized, high-quality patient care. AI has much promise but poses unique risks and challenges if not designed and implemented with the patient and the clinician in mind.
Here’s how Ask Avo is different:
EHR Integrated
Ask Avo is designed to integrate seamlessly into EHR systems, leveraging nationwide patient data from HIEs to provide relevant and trustworthy responses based on the latest system and society guidelines. Unlike conventional AI consult tools, Ask Avo’s EHR integration allows it to consider important patient context without manual data input, ensuring efficiency and accuracy. Ask Avo is currently integrated with Epic via the App Showroom and Athena, with a Cerner integration available by the end of 2024.
Customizable, Actionable & Easy to Deploy
Ask Avo is never one-size-fits-all. Using Avo’s customizable, back-end Builder, healthcare systems can swiftly customize and upload their own guidelines to Avo’s Knowledge Base and work with Avo’s team of informatics and technical experts to determine various guidelines’ relevance in clinical settings. In other words, health systems are empowered to implement AI within their own determined limits, prioritizing responses based on their guidelines and unique patient populations.
They don’t need IT resources to do it, which is generally the key blocker to implementing AI solutions in the EHR. Systems have access to drag-and-drop functionality via Avo’s Builder platform to customize Ask Avo, and updates can be published immediately without needing IT support.
Because Avo offers an end-to-end workflow solution, clinicians can also seamlessly integrate Ask Avo into many aspects of their work. For example, once a clinician asks the tool a question and receives a response, they can easily pull that response in their everyday tasks like pre-charting, documentation, and ordering, among much else.
Trustworthy, Relevant & Transparent
Ask Avo is much more than a clinical summary aggregating information from often out-of-date and irrelevant sources. It is designed to generate responses from recent content relevant to the institution whose clinicians are using it. The tool’s unique design includes a proprietary questioning system triple verification against trusted guidelines, and offers clinician visibility and control, further enhancing its reliability.
For example, when a clinician “Asks Avo” a question, the AI rephrases the question on the backend based on what it believes the clinician intended to ask. At the same time, its’ large-language-model questions and verifies the response for accuracy, relevancy, and comprehensiveness. The clinician then has full visibility into where the response was sourced from and has the power to change the source if they wish. Avo believes that AI must understand its limits, and thus the product allows clinicians to click the “AI Critic” button to see where there may be clinical gaps in the response. The product was purpose-built to assist, not dictate.
Recent Study
In a recent study of Ask Avo, 61 clinicians were asked to question both Ask Avo and ChatGPT 4o with the same 10 clinical prompts that involved questions about complex patient scenarios. After receiving a response, the physicians rated the answers based on trustworthiness, actionability, relevancy, comprehensiveness, and format-friendliness. Ask Avo outperformed ChatGPT 4o on all fronts with an average of 33% better ratings across all criteria and was statistically significantly better. Clinicians’ feedback included, “Ask Avo is MUCH better than ChatGPT. I love the citations built directly into the source and the ability to easily pull those citations up on the same tab. I love the “AI Fact-Check” option that makes the limitations clear as well. This is excellent” and “This program cited its sources, which increases my comfort and trust in it tremendously.”
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