Enterprise AI Profile: Beacon Health System
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Futuriom Enterprise AI Profile
Organization: Beacon Health System
Vertical industry: Healthcare
Description: The Beacon Health System, headquartered in South Bend, Indiana, is a not-for-profit healthcare system with 146 sites and 1,232 inpatient beds across seven counties in northern Indiana and Michigan. The hospital system serves over 4,000 patients per day. Its AI focus has been on streamlining repetitive and time-consuming tasks, reducing losses from uninsured services, and integrating all of this with an electronic health record (EHR) system aimed at improving its overall outcomes.
The Beacon Health System began its AI deployments in 2019 by adopting an AI-enabled platform called Dragonfly from Xiolis, a 13-year-old company based in Franklin, Tennessee, which uses AI to match patient requirements with insurance allowances. By becoming a development partner with Xiolis and hooking the AI-enabled system to three of its top insurance payers, Beacon has streamlined its medical necessity decision-making, the process of determining which service or treatment is appropriate for which patients, and whether these are covered by insurance. Closing the gap between what’s planned for patients and what’s insured has saved Beacon Health $95 million in denied services since 2019, the organization said.
In 2024, Beacon Health made changes that impacted its EHR system. “We’ve lived through the last couple of decades with the growing frustrations of the electronic health record not delivering on its original promise, which has been to make us more efficient and help us be better doctors,” said Dr. Scott Eshowsky, chief medical information officer at Beacon Health System, in a video produced by Oracle. “So, so many physicians have struggled with burnout, and spending a lot of time doing administrative tasks that really provide no clinical value and really just seem frustrating to the providers.”
To improve the situation, Beacon Health installed the Oracle Health Clinical AI Agent on physician phones and laptops. This is an ambient scribe system, which means that it uses AI to generate textual notes from live conversations. The agent generates clinical notes that are placed directly in Beacon’s Oracle Health EHR, an overarching electronic health record system. Doctors then call up the notes from the EHR to review them.
Since installing the agent system, Beacon Health says that, based on the number of patients seen, doctors have saved an average of 35 minutes per day more than half the time.
Beacon Health also has deployed Notable, a system that uses AI to generate a menu allowing patients to schedule their own procedures based on orders issued by physicians and contained in the EHR. This system eliminates the need for patients to wait for manual scheduling after a doctor has issued an order for a mammogram, x-ray, ultrasound, or other test—a process that can take time away from instituting remedial medical action.
AI Platforms and Models Used: Oracle Health EHR, Oracle Health Clinical AI Agent; Notable AI Platform; Xiolis Dragonfly
Key Success Factors: Using AI, Beacon Health System has reduced medical necessity reviews for insurance by 68%, boosting the number of daily patient reviews by 140% and cutting the time for payer approvals from 4 to 5 days down to 2 days. Automated documentation for physicians has reduced the amount of time spent per patient by 7%, reducing physician burnout. The overall success of AI at Beacon Health is counted in operational efficiencies and cost savings in time and administrative overhead.
Note: According to Futuriom’s data, collected in over 130 records in our Enterprise AI Index, operational efficiency is a top benefit of AI in the healthcare vertical. Any AI that can reduce the number of hours spent in tasks such as filling out forms or documenting patient visits results in better use of time by medical staff—and more time available to address patient issues to achieve better results.
Futuriom Take: Beacon Health System demonstrates how integrating off-the-shelf AI products can substantially improve operations and contribute to the welfare of healthcare staff and patients.
