We all know it: AI is seemingly everywhere, in nearly every industry. But when it comes to healthcare, there are important factors for organizations to consider when implementing AI tools. As a healthcare IT vendor, those of us at Altera understand the overwhelming number of choices you’re faced with when selecting the right AI vendor.

Here are a few things we keep in mind when exploring AI vendors.

Accuracy and performance

Accuracy is an incredibly important factor to consider when bringing an AI tool into your organization. With AI ambient listening and speech-to-text tools, testing is key. Test cases should iterate through real-world cases like medical transcription and multilingual conversations between patients and providers to ensure consistency and safe accuracy levels. When looking at support for various languages, it’s also important to look at region-specific adaptability. Additionally, when integrating large language models (LLMs) with medical data, it’s critical to evaluate not just general accuracy, but also the precision of included and excluded clinical details. Even small omissions or incorrect inferences can have serious consequences in a healthcare setting, so LLMs must be rigorously validated to ensure they include the right context and exclude irrelevant or misleading information.

Cost and pricing

Everything comes with a cost, but with these types of tools, it can certainly be worth it. Transparent and predictable pricing is a major factor for most organizations looking at an AI vendor. Choosing a vendor with a clear cost model will help ensure your organization knows exactly what you’re getting for your money. Many of the AI tools have cost structures based on usage metrics like token consumption, time-intervals or payload size. Gathering anticipated usage metrics for your AI workflows will help to achieve accurate estimates of costs that should be communicated to your clients.

Flexibility and integration

AI tools are meant to make jobs easier, right? An AI vendor should be easy to integrate into existing products and infrastructures. Of course, there’s always a learning curve, but ultimately AI tools are built to help specific operations run more smoothly. Constant evaluation of AI tools is essential to ensure optimal performance, especially as models and capabilities rapidly evolve. To stay agile, it’s equally important to architect solutions in a modular way that enables easy integration or replacement of AI tools and vendors. This flexibility reduces vendor lock-in and ensures your organization can always leverage the best available technology.

An AI vendor should be easy to integrate into existing products and infrastructures.

Transparency and visibility

Having full visibility into dashboards and usage reporting tools is essential in tracking and analyzing your overall performance. When integrating a new tool of any kind, it’s also important to have full transparency with practices like regulatory, compliance and billing.

Altera’s Sunrise™ team knows there are many important things to consider when thinking about integrating AI tools. After all, with AI making massive strides everywhere, we’re here each step of the way to support our clients on their journeys to the summit of healthcare and beyond. Learn more about Altera’s Vision for the future, and how we’re climbing higher every day.