Qualitas Health puts 'Samantha' to work in 20 clinics

The Australian arm of Malaysian-owned medical clinic operator, Qualitas Health, has rolled out a Google Gemini-based document processing agent across nearly half of its sites with a broader rollout expected.

The Sydney-headquartered division, which operates 45 medical practices throughout Victoria, NSW and Queensland, told iTnews that it began rolling out the agent early in August and finished deploying it to 20 sites over the following eight weeks.

Named 'Samantha' and marketed as “for hire” by its developer, Care GP, the agent analyses digital and hard copies of medical records and uses AI to automatically allocate them to patient records.

Qualitas tested the agent at two pilot sites to harvest feedback about its performance before going ahead to roll it out to a further 18 sites.

Qualitas’ Queensland and Victoria operations director, Rajesh Sharma, told iTnews that some resistance to any non-human labour-saving agent was expected.

However, he said that there was “not a lot at all” in the case of Samantha and that staff warmed to their new digital colleague after they saw it spared them a tedious and time-consuming task.

The aim of the of the new agent, he said, was to improve customer service rather than save on labour costs.

“This hasn’t impacted headcount. The advantage is that humans find that task very laborious. Now the AI does it, so that same workforce can enhance the patient experience where personal interaction is required,” Sharma said.

Intentional or not, however, the clinics might be shaving a few dollars off their overtime budgets.

“[People] were staying back a while scanning and trying to complete all these manual processes, but now they see the benefit of doing it on time. It’s (now) done in quite a timely way. It’s a repetitive process – I don’t think people enjoyed it,” Sharma observed.

Practices were saving between 30 to 90 minutes labour per day depending on the size of the site, Sharma said.

With hourly rates for medical admin staff ranging from $25 to $30 per hour, that means that larger Qualitas sites could be saving up to about $11,500 per year.

According to Care GP’s website, Samantha files, tags, and routes incoming records with “sub-30-second speed and level-one accuracy” and while “keeping every byte of data locked to Australian privacy standards”.

Samantha is deployed via the cloud and hosted by AWS.

Sharma also said that the health brand was yet to strike any problems with the accuracy of the agent – which includes eliminating human error among its selling points – and had actually seen improvements.

Qualitas said that it is now awake to the possibilities of using agents currently being developed for other administrative tasks such as taking bookings, calling patients and answering calls, the latter currently the domain of IVR systems.

Sharma said that the company had “looked at a few” but to date had only tried out Samantha.

However, he made it clear that with AI agents becoming commodity labelled products, he expected their deployment to be commonplace.

“We haven’t tried out anything but Samantha and we haven’t implemented any others, but I think that’s the way the world is going,” he said.

Care GP, Samantha’s creator, has been on a steep growth curve since launching in July last year.

Earlier this week, it announced that it would accelerate its national rollout after average month-on-month usage growth reached 140 percent with average contract values of US$5000 ($7680).

Describing Samantha as its “wedge agent” the company has development pipeline that anticipates the creation of a further seven agents.

Three, for making and receiving phone calls and billing and debt collection, are currently in beta testing.

Others for tasks including medical record transfer, secure health information exchange and medical marketing, it said, were still in the research and development phase.