Elevance Health is integrating artificial intelligence into healthcare operations, emphasizing a human-centered approach to AI deployment. The company focuses on ensuring automation supports critical decisions without replacing the essential expertise and empathy required in patient care.
This human-centered AI strategy is particularly crucial for payer operations, where administrative complexities can impact provider response times to member needs. Labor-intensive processes like provider inquiries and claim research are being streamlined.
"Instead of providers having to recreate a claim and understand what happened to answer a question, we get them 90% of the way there and they can just answer the question quickly and get back to providing care to our members," stated Danny Brakebill, staff vice president of business operations at Elevance Health.
Elevance Health, in partnership with Deloitte, developed a solution on Google’s Agent Development Kit. This framework synthesizes unstructured provider data, providing associates with pre-assembled context. This reduces manual effort while keeping human judgment central to the process.
Responsible AI governance was integrated from the outset, with legal, compliance, and security teams involved in design reviews. Human oversight is a core component of the application stack, creating a feedback loop where associates validate outputs and improve model accuracy, allowing them to focus on higher-value tasks.
"I think that is the secret sauce - having a person in the middle of this who can use their judgment and reasoning to get to the right outcome and make the model better," Brakebill added. "The consistency we're seeing in our output is increased because humans have that judgment."