Making outpatient care safer and enabling clinicians to spend more time with patients
How AI and ambient intelligence can empower real change.
As the Global Chief Medical Officer for Health Information Systems at Solventum — formerly 3M Health Care — it’s Dr. Sandeep Wadhwa’s job to help doctors and hospitals document and manage the immense trove of patient information they are required to capture and navigate. With the right tools, that information can be hugely helpful, leading to better patient outcomes, less clinician burnout and more accurate payments — but without technology leading the way, it can be completely overwhelming.
At the heart of the healthcare industry, Dr. Wadhwa saw one area that sorely needed the right tools to better capture patient outcomes and proactively address safety. That area was the outpatient, or ambulatory, setting. More and more, procedures are moving away from the inpatient setting into outpatient settings where patients head home after the procedure, often that same day. But historically, there hasn’t been a way to keep tabs on what happens to them next.
“We kind of lose sight of people after they get discharged,” Dr. Wadhwa said. “The site of care has changed, but the measurement system hasn’t caught up.”
Dr. Wadhwa and the Solventum team created a tool to solve that problem: the Solventum™ Ambulatory Potentially Preventable Complications classification system, or AM-PPCs. It tracks what happens after an outpatient procedure — if a patient winds up being readmitted to a hospital or emergency room within 30 days of an elective procedure for a potential complication of the procedure, it is reflected in the software. As a result, doctors and hospitals can see, on a big-picture level, which procedures are leading to complications, allowing them to proactively address problematic areas and improve patient outcomes.
“We’re now able to give folks a drill-down ability to look at different specialties. We’re seeing health systems really look at the data and ask, ‘What can I be doing differently or better?’ And we’re really excited by that.”
— Dr. Sandeep Wadhwa, Global Chief Medical Officer
for health information systems, Solventum
The software has already been rolled out on a vast scale, encompassing “hundreds of thousands of cases,” Dr. Wadhwa said. It’s also being used by a major U.S. media company to inform its Best Hospital Rankings — giving prospective patients insight into which hospitals have the lowest rates of readmissions and complications by selected specialties.
Dr. Sandeep Wadhwa, Global Chief Medical Officer for health information systems, Solventum
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“The more attentive I can be to you, eye-to-eye, listening, not looking at the computer, the better. That has been a really powerful advance with conversational AI.”
— Dr. Sandeep Wadhwa,
Global Chief Medical Officer
for health information systems, Solventum
“Having this new tool that looks at patient safety events starts to focus attention on potentially avoidable complications — and then encourages healthcare providers to compete around patient safety,” Dr. Wadhwa said. “So much care is delivered in outpatient settings. Now, we can bring a measurement system to bear, pointing out excellent practices and areas where there may be opportunities to improve.”
The software is just one way Solventum — a company of more than 22,000 healthcare professionals, researchers, scientists and engineers — is using technology to improve healthcare. The solutions it develops are always rooted in the human side of healthcare, Dr. Wadhwa said, created to make the on-the-ground experience of providing care better for doctors, and the experience of receiving it better for patients. That human-focused approach also extends to Solventum’s embrace of artificial intelligence (AI), Dr. Wadhwa said.
A major area of focus for Solventum is on conversational AI and ambient intelligence, Dr. Wadhwa said. Solventum’s ambient documentation solution helps make the clinical note a byproduct of the patient-physician interaction and not a separate task for the clinician to complete. As the technology works unobtrusively in the background, doctors can now focus completely on the patient and not on documenting the visit, which otherwise takes their attention away from the person in front of them and directs it, instead, at a screen.
Dr. Sandeep Wadhwa, Global Chief Medical Officer for health information systems, Solventum
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“There’s a lot of time doctors are spending documenting,” Dr. Wadhwa said. “We are looking to minimize the physical computer during the patient-doctor interaction, and allow for conversational and generative AI to help automate the creation of a draft clinical note. That allows the doctor to focus on the patient, caregivers and/or family members present instead of also having to worry about documenting during the patient visit.”
Solventum customers using its ambient documentation solution are seeing major benefits, Dr. Wadhwa said. The doctors who have used the solution report feeling more present with their patients — spending more time caring for them and getting to know them, and less time documenting the patient interaction and care provided. For patients, this translates to a far better experience with the feeling that their doctor is focused on them, and not a computer.
“Every patient wants that undivided attention,” Dr. Wadhwa said. “The more attentive I can be to you, eye-to-eye, listening, not looking at the computer, the better. That has been a really powerful advance with conversational and generative AI.”
These Solventum solutions are set to revolutionize how patients can be tracked after outpatient procedures to improve outcomes, and how clinical documentation can be automated to reduce clinician burnout and improve the patient experience.
“Things are moving fast. Every 60 days, I feel like there’s big steps forward for us,” Dr. Wadhwa said. “Two years from now, three years from now, I expect this to be the standard of care.”
Solventum is passionate about patient-focused solutions.