How Liberty Dental is improving care management with AI tools

AI-driven care management revolutionizes dental insurance: Liberty Dental Plan has implemented a groundbreaking generative AI system to automate and enhance care plan creation, significantly improving efficiency and accuracy in member care management.

• The new AI-powered system has reduced the time required to create a care plan from 90 minutes to mere seconds, while also increasing accuracy by analyzing vast amounts of patient data.
• Care managers, who previously struggled to manage thousands of members each, now benefit from improved output and more efficient workflows.
• The project, which earned Liberty Dental a CIO 100 award, demonstrates the potential for AI to transform healthcare operations and improve patient outcomes.

Data strategy lays the foundation for AI success: Liberty Dental’s CIO, Rajendra Kadam, emphasizes the critical role of a robust data strategy in enabling the successful implementation of AI technologies.

• Upon joining the company, Kadam identified data management as a key opportunity for improvement and initiated a cloud migration project to Azure.
• The team focused on creating a tailored data model that aligned with their vision for future capabilities, even before the widespread adoption of generative AI.
• Data governance emerged as a crucial component, ensuring high-quality data that could effectively power AI applications.

Education and business knowledge drive AI adoption: Kadam highlights the importance of educating stakeholders and bridging the gap between technology and business domains to facilitate AI implementation.

• The CIO invested time in educating the board and senior management about generative AI, its potential applications, and expected ROI to secure support for the project.
• Technologists at Liberty Dental are encouraged to develop a deep understanding of the business domain, which Kadam believes is essential for identifying valuable AI use cases.
• This focus on business knowledge has helped the IT team become more valuable to the organization and drive innovation.

Identifying high-impact use cases is key: Liberty Dental’s success with AI implementation stems from carefully selecting use cases that offer significant return on investment.

• The care management automation project yielded a 400% ROI, which was realized quickly due to the groundwork laid in data management and governance.
• Kadam predicts increased adoption of generative AI in business throughout 2024, driven by the sharing of successful use cases across industries.
• He emphasizes the importance of technologists understanding their business domain to identify opportunities where AI can deliver the most value.

Broader implications for the healthcare industry: Liberty Dental’s AI-driven care management system showcases the potential for similar technologies to transform other areas of healthcare and insurance.

• The success of this project may encourage other healthcare providers and insurers to explore AI applications for improving patient care and operational efficiency.
• As more companies share their successful use cases, it could accelerate the adoption of AI technologies across the healthcare sector.
• However, organizations will need to carefully consider data privacy and security implications when implementing AI systems that handle sensitive patient information.