Smart hospitals are helping bring job satisfaction back to nursing, and care.ai, an artificial intelligence company redefining how care is delivered, is leading the way through gen AI and ambient intelligence powerful assistive technologies to empower clinicians to make healthcare safer, smarter, and more efficient by reducing administrative burdens, mitigating staffing shortages, and freeing up clinicians to spend more time with patients.
Chakri Toleti is the Founder and CEO of care.ai
care.ai’s founder and CEO, Chakri Toleti, a former filmmaker turned healthcare industry leader, was recently named to the Rock Health Top 50 in Digital Health list for his company’s Smart Care Facility Platform. He founded care.ai to bring the first AI-powered autonomous monitoring platform to healthcare to safeguard patients and improve outcomes. Daily Nurse spoke with Toleti about using the same technology as Tesla and other self-driving car companies to improve healthcare facility management and patient care to move toward his vision for predictive, smart care facilities.
What follows is our interview, edited for length and clarity.
You’re revolutionizing the healthcare industry with the same technology that Tesla and other self-driving car companies use to transform the automotive industry. Talk about how you reached this point in your career and your vision for predictive, smart care facilities.
I grew up around physicians. Though I’m not a provider, my mom, dad, and sister are physicians. Now, my daughter wants to become one. So, there are many healthcare people in the family, but I wanted to go a different route. I’m the black sheep of the family. In my previous companies, we were always looking at technology from other industries and trying to bring the learnings from different industries into healthcare. That’s what I’ve always wanted to do. In care.ai, we focused on bringing ambient technology to help the bedside teams be more efficient, just like a smart home. A smart patient room that gives you real-time visibility into operational clinical workflows.
How can it improve outcomes and efficiency in delivering that care within the hospital’s four walls? That’s our focus at care ai. Ambient technology, like self-driving cars, can be used in every other industry. For example, this cup of coffee that I’m drinking has AI in it. When manufacturing happens, cameras observe these cups. And if there’s a small tear, it pushes to the side. Technology is used in many forms; every vertical is usually in your smart home. You have a ring doorbell. Or a Nest thermostat. You can pick up your smartphone and control your garage door; it turns lights on and off. So, this technology improves our lives in multiple dimensions. You have Alexa devices and multiple voice-enabled capabilities as well. And with the advent of AI and bringing AI into regular use has transformed the acceptance and utilization of ambient technology dramatically. We’re doing that at care.ai, the single modality of capturing information. We are challenging the status quo.
So, a provider can walk into the room, do their job, and walk out without touching a keyboard or a mouse. The technology, which is transparent to the bedside team, should be able to document and understand what happened in the room and push it into the electronic medical record. And that’s what we’re trying to achieve. And now, when you bring virtualization capability into the room, your bedside team and other nursing teams can be anywhere, do the hourly rounds, admit discharges virtually, and interact with the patient more effectively in a focused way. With our experience during a Zoom call, a nurse can have the same experience with the patient to complete the admission mission. Some clinical and nonclinical tasks can be done remotely.
Talk about some of the hospitals that are currently using the Smart Care Facility Platform.
We work with some of the largest health systems, from HCA to Vanderbilt to Houston Methodist, for-profit, not-for-profit, and education institutions. We’re very strong in the acute and post-acute nursing spaces.
How is the Smart Care Facility Platform empowering Smart Care Teams?
We start with words, and nursing is one of the core modules and the core feature and workflow to centralize all the admissions discharges and help the bedside nurses. That’s the number one focus for many organizations we work with. In some institutions, when we deploy, it impacts employee satisfaction—reducing burnout. Turnover has dramatically come down, and people are applying to go into these units where we are deployed across the organization from one hospital to another, saying, ‘Hey, you know, we do have some additional support. So we’re not running from room to room to room as we used to do before.’
From employee and patient satisfaction, a significant fundamental paradigm shift of how changes to the care delivery process and redesigning the care delivery process is accelerating our growth.
Healthcare has a growing problem because there aren’t enough clinicians to deliver healthcare, and they spend more time with administrative tasks like filling out paperwork. Talk about how care.ai can help mitigate the staffing shortage, freeing clinicians to spend more time with patients.
There’s a significant burnout because you ask nurses to do more with less. That’s the fundamental challenge. More nurses are retiring and want to be still involved, but they don’t have the capabilities. Today, with platforms like these, retired senior nurses with experience can do the same work from home, doing the virtual nursing component and the administrative as they have been doing for decades. They have the experience to share, so when new nurses come on to the job and have to intubate a patient, they may not have the knowledge, so mentorship is a huge thing, or working remotely from home. In a five-day week, one day, they can work remotely, and the rest of the four on the bedside so they can change pace. So, there are multiple ways to empower the bedside teams that are changing how they look at the day-to-day work structure. Imagine if you’re giving them one hour back rather than them doing these documentation tasks. And the remote team takes all that there’s a significant value to the website team – amazing customer satisfaction.
Suppose you look at a simple workflow for discharge. If I do discharge instructions for a patient, I’m called ten different ways. So I tell them, ‘Hey, I’ll be back in five minutes and go and do something else come back.’ So you cannot spend that 20-30 minutes, focused, dedicated time with the patient to complete the discharge. And you’re doing five other things. That’s where a virtual nurse can be focused, dedicate 20 minutes one-on-one, and complete the discharge much more effectively. HCAHPS increased dramatically for patient satisfaction. Education is much more adherent. All of those impacts have a multi-dimensional effect.
Nursing leaders talk about how they see telemedicine and technology playing a critical role in bringing back retired nurses who can oversee nurses at the bedside. It’s a way of being part of the nursing team without being in the environment. Do you have any examples of how technology is enhancing patient care?
We have a great story from one of the bedside nurses. He injured himself at work. He couldn’t be on the floor standing for hours and hours. But he still wanted to be a part of the team. So he came back to work. And he’s now in the command center on-site. He’s part of the huddle every morning. And then he returns to his bunker, does all the admits, and discharges.
care.ai recently partnered with Google and is building Google Cloud’s generative AI and data analytics tools into your Smart Care Facility Platform. How is this partnership a game-changer for nursing, healthcare, and patient care?
AI is fundamentally going to redefine how care is delivered. If it has clinical context, imagine a virtual AI assistant helping you document the entire conversation and presenting it to you. And then you can say, ‘Yes, this is accurate, and then publish it to the medical record.’ So, those workflows will fundamentally change how you do your job daily, like using ChatGPT to write an article. It will write an article, but it’s not there yet. You still need a human in the loop. But it at least gets you 70-80 percent there.
Imagine when it comes to tools like Med-PaLM to make a generative AI large language model where you can ask a question to the model. It passed medical boards with 86% accuracy, which is top-performing. Medical students get those scores. So, the democratization of that knowledge is a fundamental change. As humans, we will have to get used to imagining a remote village in Africa having those tools that a Stanford professor who’s a neurosurgeon or a neurologist or a cardiologist has but now multiplied by 10,000 times those types of people training and in AI, that can give that kind of diagnosis and tools to people who didn’t have access to that before. Imagine someone sitting in Tallahassee, Florida, or getting access to a Stanford professor or someone in Nemours Children’s Hospital—some of the best minds in the world, and having access to that. Similarly, when you take the collective knowledge of thousands of nurses, imagine the best of them. Taking an understanding and teaching algorithms to document is a pretty passive task.
What’s next for care.ai?
We are focused on building technology that is transparent to the bedside so that they would never have to interact the same way they would have been interacting with technology. We build these complex electronic medical records and all these tools that are becoming barriers to the bedside teams to provide more human care. That empathetic care is why nursing exists. Bringing that job satisfaction back is what we’re focusing on, and building technology that gives that capability back to the bedside teams. AI will help us get there. As humans, we are prone to errors and mistakes. In the airline industry, 80%-90% of the flying is done by algorithms and computers. You still need humans in the loop. We’ll get to a point where, for safety, you can depend on some of these tools, and at care.ai, we are diligently working on improving patient safety to the maximum possible in a care setting. That’s our aim.
Do you have anything else to add?
We are building tools for nurses. We are building tools for the bedside teams who never stopped caring. They wake up, go to work, they come home, same thing. They never stopped caring, either at home or at work. And that’s the community that we’re working with. And it’s a privilege to be helping that community build tools that will truly transform how they work and live.
