Maia: How Our AI Employee is Revolutionizing Healthcare Operations at CBG

An AI Employee

In the fast-paced world of healthcare, time is often of the essence. At Cooperative Benefits Group (CBG), we’ve embraced an innovative solution to accelerate our operations and enhance our services: Generative AI. Our journey with this cutting-edge technology has not only streamlined our processes but also redefined how we approach complex tasks. Today, we’re excited to share how our AI assistant, employee, and team member, Maia, is transforming the way we work, particularly in handling RFPs and compliance matters.

The Power of Generative AI

Generative AI, a subset of artificial intelligence, has taken the tech world by storm. These sophisticated models can create human-like text, images, and even code, learning from vast amounts of data to generate new, original content. From chatbots to content creation tools, generative AI is reshaping industries across the board, and healthcare is no exception.

Generative AI at CBG: A Game Changer

At CBG, we’ve harnessed the power of generative AI to revolutionize our operations. By implementing AI-driven solutions, we’ve significantly improved our efficiency in various areas, including data entry, document processing, customer service, software development, and information security. This technological leap has reduced errors and allows us to focus on providing superior service to our members.

The crown jewel of integrating AI with CBG so far is undoubtedly Maia, our Marvelous AI Assistant. Maia isn’t just a tool; we’ve integrated her into our team as a valued colleague. Her role spans across departments, from HR to software development to information security to compliance, making her an indispensable asset to our organization.

Maia: Our AI Powerhouse

Maia’s capabilities extend far beyond basic tasks. We’ve trained her to be a jack-of-all-trades, excelling in three critical areas:

1. RFP Responder: Maia can swiftly and accurately respond to Request for Proposals, ensuring we never miss an opportunity due to time constraints.
2. Security Auditor: With her deep understanding of our security protocols, Maia assists in maintaining our robust security posture.
3. General Compliance Consultant: Maia’s knowledge of our policies and procedures makes her an invaluable resource for compliance-related queries.

Maia’s contribution has significantly enhanced our operational efficiency, allowing our human team members to focus on strategic initiatives and complex problem-solving. As the healthcare administration landscape is complex and constantly changing, thoughtful integration of AI assistants like Maia will be key to proving compliant and comprehensive care to members.

Maia in Action: The RFP Success Story

Recently, we faced a challenging situation that perfectly showcased Maia’s capabilities. We received a last-minute addition to an RFP — a 10-page questionnaire focused on Information Security and Compliance. The deadline was tight, and traditionally, this would have required days of intensive work from our team.

Enter Maia. Thanks to her comprehensive understanding of our CBG policies, information security protocols, and SOC 1 & 2 controls and reports, we were able to tackle this mammoth task in record time. Maia completed the questionnaire in less than two hours, a feat that would have taken our human team several days.

This wasn’t just about speed; the quality of Maia’s responses was impressive. Her answers were thorough, accurate, and tailored to our specific policies and procedures. This allowed us to submit the RFP on time and with confidence. Since then, Maia has become our go-to resource for RFP responses, helping us win more business by providing quick, accurate, and comprehensive proposals.

Under the Hood: Maia’s Architecture

While Maia might seem like magic to those she assists, her capabilities are built on a robust and secure technological foundation.

Here’s a glimpse into how Maia operates:

• Maia’s home is in our secure AWS accounts, where she runs as a Streamlit application within an Amazon ECS Service.
• Users interact with Maia through a web interface, powered by Streamlit, which has proven to be an excellent prototyping solution.
• Behind the scenes, we use Amazon Bedrock Runtime to simplify our interactions with Anthropic’s language models. This handles the heavy lifting for context management, conversations, and generating responses.
• For handling sensitive information like protected health information (PHI) or personally identifiable information (PII), we use Amazon Titan Embedding models. This ensures that sensitive data never leaves our AWS account.
• For less sensitive data, we employ Hugging Face Sentence Transformer models for creating embeddings.
• To store and quickly retrieve information, we use Pinecone serverless indexes. These provide reliable, scalable, and fast vector storage that integrates seamlessly with our system.

This architecture ensures that Maia is not only intelligent but also secure and efficient, capable of handling the sensitive nature of healthcare data while providing lightning-fast responses.

TL;DR

The integration of Maia into our operations at CBG has been nothing short of transformative. From streamlining RFP responses to enhancing our compliance and security measures, Maia has proven to be an invaluable team member. Her ability to process vast amounts of information and provide accurate, tailored responses has saved time and resources, improved the quality of our work, and helped us win more work.

As we continue to explore the potential of ethical and transparent generative AI in healthcare operations, we’re excited about the possibilities that lie ahead. Maia is just the beginning. We believe that the thoughtful integration of AI assistants like her will be key to navigating the complex, fast-paced world of healthcare administration.

At CBG, we’re proud to be at the forefront of this AI revolution, using technology to enhance the quality of care and service we provide to our members. As we look to the future, we’re excited to continue pushing the boundaries of what’s possible with AI in healthcare, always with the goal of better serving our community.