Most clinicians and patients are well aware of the challenges they have to deal with when interacting with the healthcare ecosystem. The right AI-enhanced systems can help ease the journey.
By John Halamka, M.D., M.S., Dwight and Dian Diercks President, Mayo Clinic Platform and Paul Cerrato, MA, senior research analyst and communications specialist, Mayo Clinic Platform
If there is one word that best describes modern healthcare, it’s fragmented. The list of contributing factors is long, including the siloed care patients receive from clinicians who often don’t share important information; financial incentives that seem to reward providers who focus on complications and readmissions; poor discharge planning; and a complex network of third-party payers that can slow down provider reimbursement. Several investigators have addressed these issues, offering potential solutions.
Tyler et al, for instance, conducted a systematic review and meta-analysis of several studies that looked at the impact of numerous interventions that might help patients transition from a hospital to community setting. Their analysis “mostly supported the use of low- and medium-complexity transitional care interventions for reducing healthcare utilization for patients transitioning from hospitals to the community.” Effective interventions included medication reconciliation, involving family in the predischarge stage, family education, input from the primary care clinician, home visits, and communicating the discharge plan to clinicians.
However, while all of these interventions have been shown to be effective in helping patients successfully navigate the healthcare maze, their research didn’t provide details on exactly how they were implemented. Several companies are using AI tools to fill the gaps. Dock Health is among the organizations that may ease some of challenges facing clinicians and patients. Provider-founded and spun out of Boston Children's Hospital, Dock Health’s productivity platform, which is used by Mayo Clinic, can automate the referral process between providers in several ways, provide HIPAA-compliant workflow optimization, and more.
While EHRs serve as critical systems of record, many care teams still rely on fragmented operational processes outside the EHR to coordinate referrals, intake, scheduling, prior authorizations, discharge planning, and patient follow up. As a result, much of the operational work required to move patients through care journeys continues to live across disconnected channels rather than within a unified execution system. Fax remains one of the most widely adopted and trusted methods for securely transmitting referrals and medical documentation across the healthcare ecosystem. Rather than replace faxes, Dock Health’s healthcare productivity platform leverages them to trigger patient-contextual workflows, parsing key fields like patient name, referral reason, and insurance information in seconds into auto-populated actionable steps. In this model, inbound fax is not an endpoint, but a trigger for operational execution. AI capabilities within the platform generate structured summaries of incoming referrals, extracting clinically relevant and operational fields that support downstream analytics and insights, and enable care teams to rapidly prioritize and route patients.
The same approach extends beyond fax into the broader healthcare IT ecosystem. Dock Health’s productivity platform can also listen for events and triggers from the EHR and operate in coordination with clinical systems to ensure these intents translate into downstream operational workflows. Integrated within environments, Dock Health serves as the operational hub, working alongside the EHR, with its AI-assisted processing and summarization of events.
The Mayo Clinic Rochester Cardiovascular team, which onboards approximately 8,500 new patients annually, uses Dock Health to reduce fragmented, manual workflows, which are highly dependent on individual staff coordination. Key information often arrives through disparate systems (referrals, faxes, MyChart, phone calls) that can lead to inconsistent information capture, inefficient triage, delayed appointment scheduling, and variability in patient readiness.
Dock Health provides a centralized, structured, and trackable system of work built specifically for healthcare teams, streamlining intake by automating task assignment, standardizing workflows across the care team, and integrating directly with the EMR and other healthcare delivery tools. Dock Health is designed to ensure every new patient follows a consistent, accountable onboarding path, improving operational clarity, reducing errors, and freeing up staff to focus on higher-value patient interactions.
The goals include:
- Faster access to care through improved scheduling and intake efficiency
- Reduced risk of missed documentation, imaging, or pre-visit requirements
- Enhanced care coordination between clinical support staff, schedulers, and providers
- Optimized access management
- Improved patient satisfaction and care team experience
We sometimes hear thought leaders in healthcare complain about the entire ecosystem being broken, but with the assistance of low/medium complexity interventions and the right AI tools, it is fixable.
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