By Sarianne Gruber
Twitter: @subtleimpact
Getting information from your health insurance company such as the cost of a co-pay, treatment coverage, or perhaps a low cost MRI or CAT scan facility within your network, can be frustrating. Perhaps the customer service representative doesn’t know the exact answer, leaving you with that “ambiguous kind of fear” as referred to by Sensentia’s CEO Jan Jungclaus, PhD. It is that very feeling of uneasiness, when you do not have the correct and all the information you need to make a healthcare decision, Sensentia, Inc., can help. I had the pleasure to meet with Dr. Jan Jungclaus at this month’s Health DataPalooza in Washington, DC. He shared with me how his company’s new self-servicing tools work and how artificial intelligence is the backbone of their technology. Interestingly, I learned Sensentia is derived from the term “meaning” in Latin. Dr. Jungclaus added, “We push the understanding of language from a keyword approach like the Googles of the world to understand all the meaning of it”. They are currently working to get the product into people’s hands with their first prototype, self-service tool. Sensentia’s vision is to automate healthcare administration and keep it simple. All you need to do is ask the questions.
Here are some interesting highlights from our conversation.
This technology removes the ambiguity in estimating the insurance costs and of out-of-pocket expenses.
Sensentia automates healthcare administration. We provide a whole range of new self-servicing tools and the backbone of our technology is a totally new artificial intelligence that we are building out for healthcare. Our first product is a Call Automation product. Basically, we take on those phone calls that the industry receives, in particular insurance companies, provide them with new tools that we are building. Behind all those tools, we see our artificial intelligence, which is capable of taking text and unstructured information, read it fully automatically, and then put it into a knowledge model. Let’s say that you have been diagnosed by your doctor to potentially get an MRI. As a member or a patient, you would like find out the cost of the MRI and where is most economical place to receive it. Using you mobile device, you can ask “what are my benefits for an MRI?” You submit it by means of speaking it or typing it into the application. Just imagine as simple as a Google-like application. You can think of it as a Siri for an iPhone for healthcare. But what is different from Siri is that we don’t relay you to some webpage to give you the answer or like Google that gives you millions of links for you to do the last step. We really return the specific answer.
There is an app, a web version and customer care center service integration. Policies are not stored in databases but in text information. The text is taken word for word and then it’s passed into the artificial intelligence.
We are channel agnostic. An app, web version of that service or both is available. We also support IVR call center integration. It is really up to our customer how they want to integrate this. The question we get most often is, can you give us an app? The information we need for the highest level of granularity to get the answers is the policy that you also receive as an individual member of a health plan. That is exactly why we need artificial intelligence to read through this- because that knowledge is not stored in a traditional databases like an Oracle database where you look these values up. It is unfortunately mainly stored in text formation. What we need to do at the end of the day is what basically a human being has to do when answering questions from text. We have to look at text word and extract logic and all the relationships. Only then, can you get specifically precise answers. We need artificial intelligence, not machine learning or statistical methods to preserve such logic. Not a method that really relies on previously given answers, which we see a lot in the domain. What is required is basically, classic strong Artificial Intelligence.
Providing transparency in healthcare for the patient/consumer. People will be able to make their own informed decisions about their healthcare choices.
That is a topic I am very passionate about, and it makes a lot of sense to me from the consumer perspective. It is all about transparency and a new type of consumerism. There is no sector in the world we really see so little consumerism compared to healthcare. It really is astonishing. We have given a lot of knowledge and responsibility of health to other people, other agents in the system when looking at it from a systems of systems approach. The insurer takes care of our payments and the doctor takes care of our health. We have come to a level of knowledge in these times where we don’t know any more as to what I should do. We see with applications like ours and similar “what should we do” innovation in the field. People are now returning to a situation where they want to take care of their own health care decisions, their investment to their health, and their maintenance of health and wellbeing. And transparency tools like ours will hopefully contribute to this. That is why it is so very important for us to create a simple interaction channel for people with healthcare administration and providers. We are like a concierge that helps you to do much better in decision making.
About Dr. Jan Jungclaus, CEO of Sensentia
Dr. Jan Jungclaus holds a Masters in Economics from the University of Cologne and a doctoral degree from Harvard University in Design/Technology. He met his co-founder and Chief Technology Officer, Ronen Amit at Singularity University a few years ago. In charge of Sensentia’s business development is Peter Stephenson, PhD, formerly head of Emerging Technologies at the Innovation Center at Humana. They have been working together to bring Artificial Intelligence to healthcare. Sensentia was formed over 3 years ago and has offices in San Francisco and Miami. Please visit Sensentia’s website for more information.