U.S. Patient Activation Platform Rolls Out AI Assistant for Underserved Populations

CareMessage, the United States’ largest patient activation platform for underserved populations, announced the launch of its AI Assistant.

The AI assistant is designed to understand and process patient responses into structured data, enabling it to more quickly identify replies that highlight patient requirements, including food insecurity or transportation obstacles.

CareMessage is a non-profit patient engagement platform that uses the Health Equity Engine™ to enhance access to care, improve clinical outcomes, and address social health drivers.

Minority and poor socio-economic groups are disproportionately affected by common obstacles to attending appointments, such as financial limitations, employment conflicts, and transportation issues. According to studies, no-show rates in these populations can reach 33–40%, which exacerbates health outcomes and fragments treatment.

CareMessage’s AI Assistant is designed specifically for safety-net organizations and aligns with their aim to solve health inequalities in healthcare. As part of their commitment to the safe and ethical development of AI-powered products, CareMessage tested numerous large language models (LLMs) and eventually chose Google Gemini for its accuracy and ease of use.

To further validate the solution, they co-developed and tested their AI Assistant with a few important customers, focusing on their specific demands, correcting biases, implementing thorough validation, and assuring safety while emphasizing patient impact. As part of their ethical position on AI implementation, clinics can opt out at any moment during the broader rollout.

“We saw patients trying to have conversations with their providers critical to addressing health inequities and facing barriers with stricter response logic that could not interpret their intent. Through this approach, CareMessage is driving a paradigm shift in patient engagement and healthcare delivery, particularly for underserved populations,” said Cecilia Corral, CareMessage Co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer. “We’re bringing technology to safety net organizations that is designed to work alongside their team and with safeguards in place to protect patient safety. The healthcare organization remains in control of the parsing logic that drives critical decisions while improving the interactive conversations with patients at scale.”

CareMessage’s AI tools expand their already extensive patient engagement success, which has seen impressive results for over 20M patients and 400+ safety-net organizations.

“As part of our strategic focus on providing quality, comprehensive health care that is accessible to all, identifying patients who will miss their appointment is critical. Automatically classifying patients who won’t attend their appointment via CareMessage’s AI Assistant allows our staff to quickly fill open appointment spots while also identifying and rescheduling patients to ensure they don’t slip through the cracks.

We’re now able to do this without increasing the time needed to manually review patient responses,” said Paul Shetler Fast, Maple City Executive Director. “Pairing CareMessage and Maple City’s efforts across multiple features, we’ve been able to reduce our no-show rates by 27.7% since the beginning of the year, getting them down to 9.9% in October.”