How one health care testing company gets results with AI

It’s hard to forget the challenging first year of the COVID-19 pandemic: the sudden lockdowns in many parts of the world, the promise of vaccine rollouts, and the uncertainty of the time in between, with testing and other social-distancing protocols trying to help us stay safe. Health care providers and systems were strained like never before, and due to their hard work those days increasingly feel like a distant memory.
 

One such Fortune 500 company was on the front lines providing diagnostic testing. Each week from 2020 to 2021, millions of patients and students needed to be tested for COVID-19. Additionally, this company was still responsible for testing people for cancer, cardiovascular disease, neurological disorders and more. Facing enormous backlogs, the company needed to shrink turnaround time frames from weeks to days — so that people could get results sooner, leading to treatment planning or the reassurance to move forward in their lives and reclaim a sense of normalcy. 
 

In this time of crisis, innovation flourished as the forward-thinking executives at this diagnostic testing company recognized that their overstrained systems could be relieved by artificial intelligence (AI) and intelligent automation. The company had already been using AI; but in this crisis mode, they wanted to hit the accelerator and move from not only completing administrative tasks but also analyzing specimens, processing test details and streamlining results communications.
 

But how did these leaders get from goals to reality — quickly? The answer was teaming with great providers. The company turned to Ernst & Young LLP (EY) and UiPath, an EY ecosystem partner that provides an intelligent automation platform to scale AI solutions. The global EY organization has a deep bench of experience in UiPath automation and artificial intelligence, as well as top analyst rankings (including Forrester Wave and IDC MarketScape) consistently showing EY is a global leader in AI and automation service delivery.
 

“Our work with this testing company during COVID-19 and beyond has yielded $50m in organizational savings through AI and automation-enabled transformation,” said Ricardo Villanova, EY Artificial Intelligence and Intelligent Automation Leader. “And while the pandemic is nearly behind us, the innovation implemented on the journey is still saving the company time, money and effort, thanks to AI and automation — all to serve health care professionals and their important patients more efficiently.”

When this diagnostic company’s journey with EY first began in 2020, COVID-19 testing relied on humans to do the swabbing, put the specimens into a machine for analysis and perform other manual activities to complete the process. EY teams scrutinized the end-to-end process and determined that additional AI automation, bots and an automated control tower could eliminate some of the manual processes and improve turnaround times for doctors so that patients could receive their results sooner.
 

“Amid the crisis of the pandemic, EY professionals noted the need for immediate data sharing, as cohorts of test results could inform policy decisions and quarantine recommendations,”. said Joshua Spencer, EY Artificial intelligence and Data Leader. “To help, EY teams created a data-sharing platform to improve research and heighten awareness about the spread of viruses and diseases – an opportunity not only to equip health care professionals with more information but also to anonymize and monetize it within the bounds of regulation. This data went to the White House and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to better inform genomic R&D studies and government regulations.”
 

As the pandemic abated, leadership at this diagnostic testing company saw the immediate efficiencies brought to their organization by AI and wanted to invest in further AI enhancements. The pandemic offered the organization proof points that patients demanded better and faster care, and that AI and automation worked at scale without compromising quality. So as society moved into a post-pandemic world in 2022 and 2023, the organization wanted to broaden its AI transformation beyond just patient testing improvements; the goal was to continue deploying AI at scale to increase efficiencies and reduce cost throughout the organization. To help meet these goals, EY ran workshops with leadership teams, which identified additional AI and automation opportunities totaling more than $20 million in savings.
 

The next phase of the organization’s transformation included technology upgrades to over 1,000 patient service centers. With the help of the UiPath alliance, bots were integrated with lab data platforms to analyze specimens, with doctor approvals. Home-testing kits could be processed faster using new technology, with results delivered to patient portals automatically. On the back end, automation was used to optimize routine order and vendor management activities. Vendor and courier applications were digitized, e-orders were streamlined, account management and billing services were upgraded, and AI was used for reading and processing appeals from insurance companies.