Pluto Health on Thursday announced a partnership with Help.AI aimed at supporting clinicians in surgical assessment.
Pluto Health, headquartered in Durham, North Carolina, is a spinout of Duke University. Its platform integrates records, labs, diagnostics and research to support clinical recommendations. Help.AI provides a surgical population management platform that leverages artificial intelligence to integrate clinical records, automate assessments, and support surgical team decision-making.
Through this partnership, Pluto's platform and patient engagement engine will be integrated into Help.AI's surgical population management platform. Using this combined platform, clinicians can identify higher-risk patients earlier, as well as complications that may affect surgery, such as drug allergies.
The technology also notifies clinicians of any missing tests that need to be completed, or if there are existing diagnostics and labs that can be used again. Additionally, it provides virtual agent-driven intake and care navigation tools to support administrative tasks.
Dr. Perrin Jones, founder of Help.AI, said the partnership will enable hospitals to provide safer and more efficient surgeries while reducing unnecessary costs.
“Help.AI's surgical population management platform uses artificial intelligence to automate and standardize preoperative assessments to generate personalized perioperative care plans with minimal clinician input,” Jones said in an email. “Pluto Health contributes its enterprise-grade interoperability infrastructure to aggregate and normalize health data across systems. Together we are creating a seamless solution that enables health systems and surgeries to deliver safer, faster and more cost-effective surgical care.”
The companies declined to disclose the financial arrangements for the partnership.
Currently, surgical care accounts for approximately 30% of U.S. health care spending. Patients are often transferred from one provider to another, and those providers don't always have a complete health history. As a result, patients often have to undergo repeat labs and tests, as well as longer hospital stays, which increases health care costs, the announcement said. Additionally, surgeries are sometimes postponed or canceled at the last minute due to inefficiencies in the process.
That’s the ultimate goal of this partnership, said Joy Bhosai, MD, MPH, founder and CEO of Pluto Health.
“Our goal is to make surgical care and outcomes safer through correlated review of patient histories,” Bosse said in an email. “Our goal is to ensure every clinician and patient gets the right care at the right time, thereby eliminating the inefficiencies of fragmented preoperative processes. With Help.AI, we are working to reduce last-minute cancellations and prevent avoidable complications.”
Photo: Gerasimov174, Getty Images
