Discharging patients, moving them from one provider to another, and providing daily progress notes are some of the most crucial and time-consuming tasks a doctor faces. Dallas-based Pieces Technologies was created to bring efficiency to the process by leveraging artificial intelligence. Its platform is now in place in hospitals across the country, where AI generates notes that doctors can review.
Over the past year, Pieces has grown from one million patient abstracts to four million across 96 different clinical specialties and has partnered with Parkland Health, Children’s Health and the top-ranked hospital in Texas, Houston Methodist.
The company began by using AI to turn terabytes of information into 150-word synopses of patient histories, updated every two minutes as it received more data. The summaries can be used in doctors’ notes or in handoffs in what Pieces CEO Dr. Ruben Amarasingham, an internal medicine physician, calls a “Here’s the Deal” statement.
The platform has since expanded to include discharge summaries, which are updated daily and provide information the next doctor will need for follow-up care after the patient leaves the hospital. Pieces’ ability to write daily progress notes is another time-saving feature essential for documenting for billing purposes.
More recently, Pieces launched stealth pilot programs with several local and national health systems and quadrupled its sales pipeline, Amarasingham says. The company is also looking to move into the outpatient care space. Other innovations are on the way.
Pieces in Your Pocket is a mobile version of the technology. Doctors can talk on their phones, and the program transcribes the information and adds it to health records. “The goal is to allow them to get off their screens and return to the traditional practice of medicine, where they (spend more time with) the patient,” he explains.
In September, Pieces completed a $25 million growth round with significant participation from Children’s Health. The company also recently secured a $2 million National Institutes of Health grant to bring a patient-facing version of the technology. It was not all smooth sailing. Earlier this year, the Texas attorney general reviewed reports on the accuracy of Pieces’ AI, and the two reached an agreement to have a third party evaluate the technology.
“The idea is to be more than clinical and help the patient navigate their cancer care,” says Amarasignham, “building on the strength of the work we have done.”
Author
Will is the senior editor of D CEO magazine and editor-in-chief of D CEO Healthcare. He wrote about health care…
