SCAN has been using AI to transform case management and patient care coordination, cutting down the time for pulling a member’s full history from two hours to five minutes.
Following SCAN’s appointment of its first chief AI officer, Aman Bhandari, PhD, Becker’s spoke with him and Corinne Stroum, SCAN’s senior director of emerging technologies, to learn more about the organization’s AI strategy.
Ms. Stroum said gathering information across multiple systems used to be a time-consuming process for case managers and care coordinators, becoming a bigger concern as SCAN’s membership grew.
“When we grew, these were the teams that got hit the hardest. They had to maintain their turnaround time, their throughput and their high quality of service, but doing so to a growth of over a third of our membership,” she said.
SCAN has been using AI to help streamline and expedite the retrieval of documents across systems, allowing case managers to have more time directly communicating with patients, even as they have more on their plate.
“If I have a panel of 150 members and one of them is hospitalized, I want to very quickly catch up on everything that we know about this member — their preferences, their history, their risks — and then I want to talk to that member,” Ms. Stroum said. “What we want is to give that employee more time with the member than reading documents.”
She said this aggregation has been a major focus for SCAN this year, ultimately receiving “rave reviews” from employees.
As Dr. Bhandari gets settled in his new role, he described what makes a strong health plan AI leader.
“You have to simultaneously be the most optimistic person in the room, but also the most skeptical,” he said. “On the one hand, on a small prototype basis, you can theoretically build anything you want. … On the other hand, scaling that — so it’s industrial grade, enterprise grade … safe, secure, ethical — takes a lot of work.”
He also emphasized leaning into the people as an AI-driven cultural shift shakes up the workplace. His position is situated under Chief People and Transformation Officer Lindsay Crawley-Herbert, instead of just living within a technology team.
“The people part is the hard part,” Dr. Bhandari said.
Ms. Stroum added that an “improv mindset” — embracing every idea as a great idea — is one way to make an organization’s people feel engaged in change.
“Historically, they might have waited for some top-down push that something needed to change or that some transformation was upon us,” Ms. Stroum said. “That is a unique role of AI leadership, to be open to lots of new ideas and opportunities coming in and giving them space.”
At the Becker's 5th Annual Fall Payer Issues Roundtable, taking place November 2–3 in Chicago, payer executives and healthcare leaders will come together to discuss value-based care, regulatory changes, cost management strategies and innovations shaping the future of payer-provider collaboration. Apply for complimentary registration now.