A Columbus-based startup is expanding its technology to bring artificial intelligence into the health care industry.
Olive is an artificial intelligence service offered to companies to automate administrative health care tasks like insurance authorization and billing. Now, the company is working with another AI business, Clinc, to use voice recognition in their technology.
Olive spokesperson Rebecca Hellmann says the change will let Olive take over simple conversations like patient scheduling.
"Our belief is that strong artificial intelligence would be indistinguishable from a human," Hellmann said. "So the way that we would think about this is the patient would never know whether they were talking to a human or to Olive."
Hellmann says this kind of automation could help reduce the $1 trillion dollars spent on health care administration annually in the United States.
"We know that not every patient has health care, that we still don’t have health care at the quality that we might like," Hellmann said. "What could we do with those dollars if they were reinvested?"
Olive is currently being used at Ohio Health. Nationwide Children's Hospital previously explored a pilot version but never implemented the service.