Cedars-Sinai Expands Virtual Care Access with New mHealth App

  Cedars-Sinai and digital health company K Health have created an app that aims to streamline and expand access to diagnoses and treatment through AI and telehealth.mHealthIntelligence.com, by Anuja Vaidya

October 12, 2023 - Cedars-Sinai has launched a new artificial intelligence-driven mHealth application for patients in California that provides virtual care options for various clinical conditions.

The Cedars-Sinai ConnectThe Cedars-Sinai Connect app provides 24/7 virtual access to healthcare professionals for urgent care and same-day appointments for primary care. Patients can use the app to access care for numerous conditions, including colds, headaches, anxiety, type 2 diabetes, wellness visits, and specialist referrals.

The app offers a guided intake process that enables new and existing patients to provide their health information and symptoms. The app assesses the information and provides it to a healthcare professional to review. The patient can then connect with the healthcare provider via video.

Additionally, the app provides reminders about prescriptions, lab work, and follow-up appointments.

“Patient care plans and visit information are integrated into the Cedars-Sinai health record, making it easy for patients to move between online and in-person care in a coordinated way, and for patients to access our broader network of specialists when needed,” said Caroline Goldzweig, MD, chief medical officer of Cedars-Sinai Medical Network, in the press release. “This new platform will help us expand and enhance care for patients across California.”

The app leverages AI technology developed by K Health, a digital health company that provides remote access to primary, urgent, pediatric, and mental healthcare. The AI technology powers a chat-based feature that gathers information from patients about their symptoms and searches through anonymized notes to find diagnoses and treatments for people with similar symptoms. According to the company, this can help streamline clinician workflow.

“By fusing K Health’s technology with Cedars-Sinai’s renowned care, we are advancing primary care delivery by extending essential services to a wider spectrum of people in need while alleviating physician burnout,” said Ran Shaul, co-founder and chief product officer at K Health, in the press release.

Research shows that K Health’s AI technology can help accurately diagnose patients. According to a study published in September in Mayo Clinic Proceedings: Digital Health, providers selected an AI-recommended diagnosis in 84 percent of virtual primary care cases. The study analyzed the performance of K Health’s AI tool through a retrospective chart review of 102,059 virtual primary care encounters.

The study shows that providers not only chose one of the potential five AI-recommended diagnoses in 84.2 percent of cases but also selected the AI’s top-ranked diagnosis suggestion in 60.9 percent of cases.

K Health and Cedars-Sinai developed the Cedars-Sinai Connect app through a new joint venture, announced earlier this year. According to a Forbes article, Cedars-Sinai not only partnered with the digital health company but also joined as a strategic investor in a $59 million funding round for the company.

The app will be available to patients with any insurance that Cedars-Sinai accepts, including employer-provided health plans.

This is K Health’s latest partnership with a prominent healthcare provider organization. Last year, the company collaborated with Mayo Clinic Platform, Mayo Clinic’s portfolio of digital healthcare initiatives, to develop a personalized hypertension treatment algorithm.

K Health and Mayo Clinic Platform said they plan to create an algorithm that utilizes real-time, de-identified patient data to generate personalized hypertension treatment recommendations. The collaboration will use Mayo Clinic Platform_Discover, a de-identified patient dataset that comprises structured and unstructured data from 10 million patients across clinical specialties, including 1.2 billion lab test results, 3 million echocardiograms, and more than 640 million clinical notes.

In addition to its health system partnerships, K Health, in collaboration with funds managed by Blackstone Growth, launched Hydrogen Health in 2021. The joint venture, backed by an investment from Anthem, aims to leverage K Heath’s AI technology to develop new digital health solutions for direct-to-consumer, direct-to-employer, and direct-to-insurers markets.