HIMSS 2025 Conversation

If you think about it, the electronic health record (EHR) pretty much functions as a giant billing system.

Every piece of data—whether clinical details or personal history—that finds its way into the EHR is largely there to serve billing purposes.

This process leaves behind a critical gap: the rich, nuanced aspects of the patient’s story as a human, that matter most in building trust and delivering personalized care.

Back in the day, there was no concept of “personalized care” because the village doctor already knew everything about you. They cared for your parents, your grandparents, and your children with a depth of understanding that went beyond charts or billing codes.

In those intimate settings, there was no need to list "social determinants of health" or "health equity" metrics—because every nuance of your life, every aspect of your family, community, and unique circumstances was already woven into the fabric of care.

That all-encompassing, personal relationship has largely faded as healthcare evolved from these small, community-centered practices into a sprawling, complex industry.

The Limits of Traditional EHR Systems

At the core of most EHRs is an emphasis on the transactional elements of care. Since the data captured is predominantly selected to satisfy billing requirements, it rarely includes the subtleties of the patient’s life.

Therefore, even in the age of endless amounts of digital health data, elements such as personal preferences, family dynamics, personality traits, and other factors that influence how a patient truly experiences care remain largely unrecorded.

Consequently, the genuine relationship between patient and provider suffers—resulting in interactions that feel impersonal and, at times, ineffective.

Why is Your EHR the Foundation of Your Entire Health System?

Every health system leveraging ambient listening technology should be rethinking its foundational reliance on the EHR.

In today’s world, clinging to an EHR as the central hub for all workflows is like insisting that my email marketing tool must connect to my invoicing system—it just doesn’t make sense.

With generative AI capabilities being trained on ambient listening data, whether you’re using Nabla , Abridge , Nuance Communications from Microsoft , or any other ambient listening solution, you need to realize the power that is at your fingertips.

Now that you are collecting all these interactions with patients via ambient listening, imagine training your data to create a unique patient story for every interaction—tailoring insights so that Every single patient, every single time receives a personalized experience because their doctor can receive insights that are personalized not just to the patient, but to the exact reason why they are seeing that specific doctor and to that very day.

A pediatrician receives a completely different narrative than a cardiologist, nephrologist, internist, or family doctor would.

By harnessing the endless analytical power of AI together with ambient listening, health systems can finally reintroduce the hyper-personalized patient-provider relationship that modern healthcare desperately needs.

EXACTLY How We Are Doing This for Care Coordination:

Recognizing this disconnect, CareCo has reimagined care coordination by introducing powerful generative AI capabilities, In a deeply integrated workflow tool. Instead of simply storing billing-related data, the system builds out what can be best described as a “brain” that works in tandem with the human heart of care.

This AI "brain" listens to patient conversations, capturing every detail—from tone and sentiment to understanding what makes the patient tick, what inspires them, how they like to be spoken with, understanding their social and communal environments, and the subtle cues that reveal what might actually get the patient to change their behaviors, and as a result, their health outcomes.

By retaining and analyzing vast amounts of conversational data, CareCo is able to distill only the most relevant insights. These insights are then used to construct a hyper-personalized profile for each patient, which is far more reflective of their complete, lived experience than the sparse details of a conventional EHR.

Building a Call Guide: From Insight to Action

One of the standout applications of this technology is the call guide feature—a tool designed to empower care coordinators with actionable, deeply personalized talking points. Here’s how it works:

• Comprehensive Data Capture: The AI listens to and processes entire patient conversations, ensuring that every piece of context—from family background, personal events like birthdays anniversaries et cetera, all the way to social determinants—is considered.

• Personalized Analysis: Using generative AI, the system analyzes the data to understand not just what the patient needs medically, but also how they prefer to be engaged. This includes understanding the patient’s personality, communication style, and even the emotional factors that influence their decisions.

• Tailored Conversation Guides: The AI then synthesizes this analysis into a custom call guide. Each guide contains hyper-personalized questions and talking points that are designed to help the care coordinator build a trust-based, empathetic relationship. This is not a one-size-fits-all checklist but a dynamic tool that adapts to the unique narrative of each patient.

• Outcome-Focused Engagement: Ultimately, these AI-generated guides are engineered to steer conversations towards positive care outcomes by ensuring that every call is as meaningful and impactful as possible.