Bringing sophisticated care to all Americans

By Andrew Toy

This is a lightly edited excerpt of testimony recently provided to the U.S. House’s Energy and Commerce Health subcommittee hearing "Examining Opportunities to Advance American Health Care through the Use of Artificial Intelligence Technologies."

My perspective on healthcare is shaped, not only by my role as a plan CEO, but also by my personal experience as a patient with Marfan syndrome, a rare, chronic, genetic condition. My father had the same condition, and while I have been fortunate to benefit from modern preventative care, he was not as fortunate. Sadly, he died from an aortic dissection — a tearing of the aortic wall — a complication that might have been prevented with earlier diagnosis and better-coordinated care. The story of my father drives my personal mission to use technology to ensure that no patient is failed by a fragmented healthcare system or by leaving conditions undiagnosed and unmanaged for too long.

That said, our physicians face tremendous challenges when caring for our seniors. For many doctors, it is still too difficult to access complete patient data. And too often, that data is siloed across fragmented data systems and stored in difficult-to-use (let alone comprehend) formats. This is where AI comes in. 

Using AI we can pull together, synthesize and summarize data far more rapidly than we ever have before. We can also quickly extract the most salient insights and put them in the hands of physicians, pharmacists and other clinicians. And because our platform, Clover Assistant, is Cloud-AI-native, it can run in a practice that is still largely paper-based as easily as it can in a modern electronic health record (EHR) environment. 

Historically, the most advanced care coordination and data analysis capabilities have been limited to some large, well-funded health systems. This creates a significant disparity, as independent physicians, especially those serving in rural and other underserved communities, often lack the tools to deliver the same level of data-driven care to patients who need it most.

This is a daily reality for seniors with common chronic conditions. Consider a senior with diabetes who sees a primary care doctor for a check-up, an endocrinologist for specialized management and an ophthalmologist for a retinopathy screening. If they do not practice in the same connected system, the primary care doctor may not see the specialist’s notes or the results of a recent lab test ordered by the endocrinologist. This fragmentation of information, compounded by the time pressures clinicians are under, can lead to missed diagnoses and missed treatment opportunities. For my father, this fragmentation meant that the warning signs of his deteriorating condition were missed even though he was seeing a number of different physicians.

AI can level this playing field by putting data-driven insights at the fingertips of every clinician. Clover’s own AI platform, Clover Assistant, acts as a digital assistant for primary care doctors, integrating data from across the healthcare ecosystem and providing real-time, actionable insights during a patient visit. The majority of current Clover Assistant users are independent physicians who are not affiliated with large health systems. These are often small practices, where a physician runs the practice with a family member (often a spouse). These are practices that cannot afford an additional employee to help with paperwork, let alone care coordinators and other support staff.

But with the AI capabilities provided by Clover Assistant, a family doctor in a rural part of Iowa or an independent physician in an underserved neighborhood in New Jersey can now access the same type of sophisticated clinical support that was once only available inside some large, vertically integrated health system. It helps ensure that no matter where a patient receives care, their doctor can quickly get a complete picture of their health, making it much harder for a critical detail to be missed.

Read the full testimony here.

Listen to an excerpt from the testimony here.

Andrew Toy is the CEO of Clover Health

*The opinions expressed in this column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of HealthPlatform.News.