A recent post from the blackbox Lab at Harvard Business School’s Digital Data and Design (D^3) Institute, “Bridging the Care Gap: How RE-Assist Enhances Healthcare Access,” featured a conversation between James W. Riley, Principal Investigator of the lab and Assistant Professor of Business Administration at HBS, and Ashley Barrow, Principal Product Owner of RE-Assist. Their conversation covered the impetus for RE-Assist, its current mission, and its promising future.
A licensed nurse with many years of experience in healthcare and insurance, Barrow has also spent many years applying process knowledge (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources, Agile, and Scrum) to explore how artificial intelligence (AI) can be used to improve healthcare. But the original idea for RE-Assist was more personal. When a family member experienced serious health issues and encountered obstacles to care, both small (transportation and nutrition) and large (equity and access), Barrow saw firsthand how even educated individuals with strong support networks are frustrated by the healthcare system.
Barrow conceived RE-Assist as a way to guide patients through the healthcare system by connecting them with quality healthcare, regardless of their resources. The RE-Assist tool runs on an algorithm that helps healthcare providers identify at-risk patients facing a variety of challenges. By filtering on patients’ health and access issues, RE-Assist suggests appropriate providers from a network of services, customized to address patients’ needs and constraints. The process happens in a fraction of the time it would take providers to make these connections manually.
RE-Assist is in its early stages of testing and enhancing its algorithms and looking at ways to innovate by incorporating AI into its functions. But the overall mission remains the same—to make healthcare available and understandable to everyone regardless of their backgrounds and resources.