Cognizant to Scale Enterprise AI
Cognizant announced an expanded partnership with Google Cloud to help large companies operationalize agentic AI systems. The collaboration aims to assist enterprises in translating their AI strategies into deployed and governed systems at scale.
- Cognizant's healthcare-specific AI solutions, built on Google Cloud's Vertex AI platform and Gemini models, focus on administrative tasks like claims resolution, contract management, and marketing operations. Google Cloud recognized these efforts by naming Cognizant its 2024 Industry Solution Services Partner of the Year for Healthcare and Life Sciences. - Agentic AI in clinical settings aims to reduce administrative burdens by automating tasks like data extraction from clinical notes and checking for prior authorization, allowing clinicians to focus more on patient care. In acute care, this technology can assist with dynamic triage by assessing a patient's history against population data to suggest next steps. - An ICU nurse's experience is valuable for an informatics role because it provides deep subject matter expertise on clinical workflows, which is essential for developing and implementing new health IT systems. Many employers now seek nurses with at least a certificate in nursing informatics, with some requiring a Master of Science in Nursing (MSN) in Informatics for certain roles. - The American Nurses Credentialing Center (ANCC) offers the board certification in Nursing Informatics (NI-BC). Eligibility typically requires an active RN license, a bachelor's degree, two years of full-time RN practice, 30 hours of continuing education in informatics, and at least 2,000 hours of informatics practice in the last three years. - Common frustrations with EHRs among frontline nurses include slow system response and login times, excessive clicking, information overload from poorly organized data, and workflow interruptions from frequent, often irrelevant, alerts. An informaticist's role is to help address these issues, such as by optimizing Epic flowsheets to reduce documentation time. - Federal regulations from the ONC and CMS mandate the use of standardized APIs, like HL7 FHIR, to promote interoperability and prevent "information blocking". These rules require hospitals to send electronic notifications upon a patient's admission, discharge, or transfer to improve care coordination.
