In its first 20 days since joining Atrium Health, Carolina NeuroSurgery & Spine Associates is already leveraging new tools to enhance patient care.
The partnership stems from more than a decade of collaboration between the two Charlotte, N.C.-based entities, Jennifer Sullivan, MD, leader of national service lines at Advocate Health, told Becker’s.
On a systemwide scale, that means benefits like having a connected electronic medical record for information sharing, Dr. Sullivan said. On the practice level the new digital and AI tools will streamline patient care and handle note taking during patient visits, Mark Smith, MD, said in an Oct. 20 interview.
“One of the bigger challenges in setting up spine care is getting the patient to the right provider in the right amount of time, and that leads to the correct diagnosis and treatment,” Dr. Smith, president and board chair of CNSA, said. “The amount of data that exists around our patients is growing over time, and so how we consolidate all that data, analyze it and get a patient to the right person has an opportunity for improvement across the spectrum of spine care. I think AI will help us tremendously with this … Moving forward, the question of, ‘How do we provide quality care in a more efficient way?’ is one that we can answer together. That answer is going to be way more sophisticated now.”
Ambient AI tools have also been helpful for physicians taking notes during visits, Dr. Smith said.
Dr. Smith said CNSA has been lucky to be able to deepen its partnership with Atrium amid a time when more independent practices have been seeking various consolidation options.
“We’ve been fortunate to have good leadership over the years on the physician and administrative side,” Dr. Smith said. “We’ve been mindful of changes in healthcare not just over the past five years, but over the past two decades. As we see movement in the healthcare space, we’re typically able to anticipate it and respond to it … We felt fortunate to be in a position where we could analyze the options in front of us outside of a scenario where we felt forced to do anything. It became very clear that from a strategic standpoint, we’re very aligned with Advocate [which merged with Atrium in 2022]. As we began to talk about how the partnership would come about, the leadership at Advocate was very easy to work with and understood the issues that we would need to work through in a private practice to accomplish something like this.”
Dr. Sullivan echoed Dr. Smith, saying the partnership offered new opportunities amid the merger.
“We were presented with this incredible opportunity as a much larger organization to pioneer national service lines, neurosciences being one of them,” she said. “The idea behind national service lines is that you make big feel small, and CNSA is a perfect example of that. There is an incredible culture within CNSA, a history that is long and storied of providing care close to home, and that was exactly the mission that we want to continue across the entirety of our organization. Bringing CNSA closer in partnership of our in our neuroscience and service line, providing this extraordinary care close to home and also being part of a larger ecosystem across six states, is really exciting for all of us.”
