Sentara Health has put an AI chart-reading tool in front of its case managers, extending a partnership that started on the physician side. The 12-hospital system and its software vendor Regard announced the deployment on October 20.
Case managers carry the least glamorous load in a hospital. Weekend caseloads can top 100 patients each, and much of the work is detective duty: assembling a patient’s history, status changes and screenings from a chart that was never written for discharge planning. Sentara says its teams had been doing that by hand, then walking the results into daily discharge rounds.
Regard lets them ask the chart questions in plain language and see what changed in the last 24 hours. Dr. Rollin Reeder, Sentara’s chief health information officer, said the tool surfaces chart information he could not have found himself and called the change transformational for moving patients through the system.
Sentara says it screened more than 100 AI products before settling on Regard, which it had already deployed for diagnosis and documentation at the bedside. Following a pilot, the organization estimates broader case management use could recover close to 90,000 hours.
The vendors frame the expansion as a template. Regard chief executive Eli Ben-Joseph said the system has surfaced more than 20 million diagnoses accepted by physicians with supporting evidence, and that extending the same clinical layer to operational teams is the natural next step.
The company’s platform runs at more than 150 hospitals. Sentara expects shorter lengths of stay and fewer readmissions, though those outcomes have not been independently published.
