How Rhapsody Is Advancing Healthcare AI Governance and Patient Identity Management

At Rhapsody Connect, healthcare leaders shared how AI and interoperability are helping organizations tackle some of healthcare’s toughest data challenges. From improving patient identity management and patient matching to governing APIs and AI agents, the conference highlighted practical applications of technology at organizations like Prisma Health and Abacus Insights, along with new solutions such as Rhapsody Guardian and Axon.

I was sadly only able to attend the final day of the conference, but here are some of the key announcements, use cases, and insights from the event that I captured on social media.  Plus, I added a bit of additional commentary about each.

Michelle Blackmer and her marketing team at Rhapsody are some really creative people.  You can see some of that creativity in the Rock theme throughout the conference including this cool Rhapsody Connect conference mascot.  People really loved taking pictures with it and I had to get in on the fun too.

Conference theme aside, Rhapsody featured a couple of big announcements at their user conference: Rhapsody Guardian and Axon.  You’ll see quite a few details about the AI governance that Rhapsody Guardian provides below.  It works to control AI agent and API access along with monitoring access policies and usage.  In this world where we want AI to have access, but we fear what it will do with that access, Rhapsody Guardian helps to enable the benefits while still enforcing your AI policies.

As far as Axon, you likely saw our coverage of Rhapsody Axon.  We have a video featuring Axon Broadcast coming out soon.  I won’t spoil it now, but watch for it to see all the details.

The day that I was able to attend the conference started off talking about identity.  Rhapsody has some deep roots in identity and has been helping organizations address it for a long time.  The story of Abacus Insights doing identity management on 13 million member records with 99.98% accuracy was incredible.

It was also compelling to hear John Pyhtila mention how they weren’t able to leverage the advanced identity management that Rhapsody offered because of some internal needs.  Rhapsody was able to adapt to their needs and then later were able to use the more advanced identity tools.  That was impressive.

Wouldn’t it be nice if we just did identity management once and we were done?  Unfortunately, that’s not how it works in healthcare.  Abacus Insights shared how they kept getting new batches of members for their payer customer and needed to perform identity management on the new batch.  Rhapsody was able to support this ongoing need.

If you’ve ever run into an identity management issue as a patient, it’s brutal.  Patients are truly impacted when identity isn’t proper.  As Pyhtila appropriately shared, the payers can give their members better care when they have a trusted identity.

In the second session I saw at Rhapsody Connect, experts from Prisma Health shared their experience doing identity management at their health system.  If you know the history of Prisma Health like I do (I interviewed for a job there many moons ago), you know they’ve done a lot of acquisitions which I’m confident has made identity management a real challenge.

In this session it was appropriately pointed out that to do patient matching well, you need to know your data and know your HIM people.  It definitely is a team effort.  Plus, it takes some time and effort to do it well.  Technology and AI have made it better and more efficient, but there’s a lot more nuance in identity management than most people realize.

I appreciated the Prisma Health users talking about the guardrails that are needed.  She also commented on how the Rhapsody Autopilot AI EMPI solution was so good at what it did that she’d been able to build up trust in it over time because it has the proper guardrails.

When we’re talking about AI in healthcare, we often hear about the need to “Do No Harm.”  I like to remind people that doing nothing can cause harm too.  Like most things in life, there’s a balance.  Although, they made me smile when she said that “Do No Harm” was next to “Clean Data” in her heart.  There’s definitely a correlation between the two in healthcare.  Clean data can definitely improve care and dirty data can do harm.

Do you think identity management and integration is easy?  Maybe those reading this are slightly more educated on this and realize it’s hard.  Many patients don’t appreciate all the nuance in sharing data.  Not to mention the volume of data that needs to be shared across multiple systems including many systems that came from an acquisition.  It gets really complex really quickly.

I think this data speaks for itself.  I appreciated them being willing to share this data so that people could see the impact of well implemented AI on identity management.  Also, it gives other healthcare organizations a view into what identity management challenges they may have in their organization if they don’t know already.  If they do know of the challenges, this slide will make you not feel so alone. Kudos to Rhapsody and the Prisma Health team for sharing a great use of AI.

How are you approaching governance of your APIs and AI tools?  My guess is that most people’s response would be that it’s really ad hoc right now.  The number of APIs in healthcare is really growing, so we need to have a more formal governance framework.

I love that Rhapsody is working to tackle this idea of API and AI governance with their new Rhapsody Guardian product.  It can help you govern your APIs, MCPs which are becoming more and more popular, and much more.

During this session, Big Sky Care Connect shared how they were using Axon Data Health Agent at their health information exchange.  He shared how other tools in the past could give you a view into some of the problems that were happening.  However, a dashboard view of the problems isn’t as useful if you can’t drill down into the problematic messages to see what’s really going on.  With Rhapsody’s Axon tool, they were able to get down to the problematic messages to see what was really going on which saved them a lot of time troubleshooting.

I sadly missed the first 2 days of Rhapsody Connect, but I would have been remiss if I didn’t share this Rock Star entrance by Rhapsody CEO, Sagnik Bhattacharya, at the conference.  I love when a CEO embraces the theme of the user conference.  Plus, that’s a sweet look!

Thanks to the Rhapsody team for inviting me to your user conference.  Hopefully next year I can experience the full event, but I appreciated learning from the Rhapsody community and learning about some of their great product announcements.