The Regard (Group) Ltd.

Phoenix-based healthcare provider Banner Health expanded its partnership with Los Angeles-based clinical decision software company Regard, bringing clinical support decision-making to clinicians across Banner Health hospitals. Regard utilizes algorithms and artificial intelligence to generate clinical decisions, documentation and facilitate clinician-to-clinician communications. Through the partnership, Regard's software will be phased into and embedded in the EHR of Banner’s 33 acute care hospitals, which cover patients in six states. "When we started Regard, we saw the need to unlock valuable clinical data stored away in EHRs. Over the past several years, we’ve created an AI tool to streamline EHR navigation, improve patient safety and free up clinician time for direct patient care. We’re beyond excited to continue our relationship with Banner Health as we work together to improve clinical workflows and patient outcomes with a measurable ROI," Nate Wilson, Regard’s chief operating officer and cofounder told MobiHealthNews in an email. The company originally partnered with Banner Health for a pilot program at Thunderbird Medical Center in Arizona in 2022. "Giving the best care to our community starts with prioritizing our clinical workforce. If we provide innovative tools to make their jobs easier and more efficient, they can spend valuable time in front of patients. We are hoping to streamline critical administrative and documentation responsibilities with Regard’s AI innovation, providing our clinicians more time to listen to our patients," Dr. Susan C. Lee, physician executive at Banner Health, told MobiHealthNews in an email. THE LARGER TREND According to the National Center for Biotechnology Innovation, AI in the clinical setting can increase the time to focus on more patient-centered tasks and improve risk-assessment performance. The AI market for clinical decision-making is expected to double in the next five years, and the AI health market at large is expected to exceed $22.45 billion, with an annual increase of 36.4% between 2024 and 2030. News of the partnership comes as Regard looks to expand use of its clinical decision solutions. Regard recently announced that the company’s solution covers 173 oncology diagnoses. Earlier this year, Hamilton Ohio-based Kettering Health partnered with the clinical decision company to integrate Regard solutions into its EHR. In August 2023, the company partnered with OpenAI to release a chatbot built on the large language model GPT-4. In 2022, Regard secured $15.3 million in a Series A funding round along with $5 million in early 2021. Additional players in the AI clinical assistance space include San Francisco-based Augmedix and real-world data and AI company ConcertAI, which recently acquired cancer research platform CancerLinQ.

Regard's existing pilot with a Banner hospital in Arizona revealed “very promising” results, executives said. Building on a successful pilot, Regard, an AI tool that helps clinicians diagnose conditions, is expanding an enterprise partnership with Banner Health. The nonprofit health system will roll out Regard’s tool in a phased approach to all 33 acute-care hospitals in its system across six states in 2024. The technology is an opportunity to increase face time between providers and patients, the partners say.  Regard aims to enable clinicians to take full advantage of all the data hidden in an EHR by analyzing patient data and generating diagnoses. Last year, the company teamed up with OpenAI to develop new chatbot functionalities. The co-pilot tool is reportedly integrated with Epic and Cerner and used by more than 100 hospitals. Regard claims the tool ultimately enhances provider communication and optimizes for eventual reimbursement. “Electronic medical records are all-encompassing, and there are good things to that and there are some challenges to that,” Susan Lee, D.O., Banner’s physician executive, told Fierce Healthcare. “Sometimes, pieces of data that clinicians need are difficult to find and could be old.”  As an “elegant search tool,” Lee said Regard recognizes words clinicians use to pull the relevant data from all existing Banner Health records for a particular patient. It can pull out tests, lab data and imaging reports “far, far faster than a human can ever do it.” The existing pilot with a Banner hospital in Arizona revealed “very promising” results, per Lee. She has heard the tool can save up to 10 minutes per patient per day. “We want the clinicians to feel like their time is well spent,” Lee said.  Throughout implementation to date, starting in Arizona, Regard has provided Banner with the in-person resources to train clinicians on the tool, per Lee. Clinicians can practice seeing patients and using the tool in a test environment. The tool, while embedded in the EHR, is always optional to use.  Regard has internal ways of tracking the accuracy of its tool and Banner doctors can provide real-time feedback to the Regard team. That combination helps Banner feel confident in the tool. “They've worked hard to make the rollout efficient and effective for us at Banner Health,” Lee said. 

Following the success of a recent pilot program, the health system will adopt Regard's AI-powered technology enterprise-wide, augmenting clinical support for hundreds of clinicians LOS ANGELES, March 18, 2024 /PRNewswire/ -- Regard, an AI clinical platform within the EHR that helps clinicians diagnose medical conditions, today announced an expanded enterprise-wide partnership with Banner Health, one of the country's largest nonprofit health systems. Banner will roll out Regard's tool in a phased approach to all 33 acute-care hospitals spanning six states in the system in 2024. Regard and Banner originally partnered in June of 2022 with a pilot at Banner Thunderbird Medical Center. Recognizing successful adoption and performance of the pilot, Banner will implement the company's clinical automation technology. As health systems seek to address high rates of clinician burnout amid financial headwinds, the technology represents an opportunity to increase time spent face to face with patients. "Banner is a leader in innovation, and we're proud to partner with their teams to address care team burnout and ensure their patients receive the best care, by surfacing critical information that exists within the EMR," said Nate Wilson, Regard's Chief Operating Officer and Co-Founder. Regard uses proprietary algorithms and artificial intelligence to generate clinical insights to improve workflows and patient care. The tool can add more details from a clinician's diagnosis in a fraction of the time it would take a person. Post-consultation, Regard enhances clinical documentation, improving clinician-to-clinician communication and optimizing for eventual reimbursement. In this way, Regard streamlines workflows between the care team and clinical documentation improvement (CDI), drastically reducing the need for time-consuming reviews, queries and even denial appeals. Currently Regard has begun implementation and has received positive feedback from clinician users already leveraging the tool. About Regard Regard, the leading AI clinical automation technology company, analyzes the entirety of the medical record and streamlines EHR navigation for busy physicians, enabling them to accurately diagnose patients and automate clinical workflows like chart reviews and notes. Regard users call it their "AI Resident." The technology helps health systems get the most value out of their clinical data, saves physicians time, improves patient care, and rejuvenates hospital finances. Regard is carving a path forward for health systems and physicians to meaningfully leverage AI, with the goal of empowering physicians to provide world-class healthcare to everyone. Media contact: Dori Young [email protected] SOURCE Regard