The Challenge: A Complex Problem at Scale
For employers and health plans, helping members access expert cancer care isn’t just about speed. It’s about precision. But that precision often hits a wall when operational systems can’t handle the load. Clinical teams are flooded with referral packets, handwritten notes, scanned PDFs, and EMRs—all needing review. That manual triage not only drains time, but also delays decisions where time matters most.
This wasn’t just a process problem—it was a precision problem. And in cancer care, precision is everything.
A next-generation oncology navigation provider saw this challenge unfold in real time. As more members sought connections to National Cancer Institute (NCI)-Designated Comprehensive Cancer Centers, the operational burden grew. Intake teams spent hours parsing documents; nurses triaged patient histories; experts waited for structured context. The care model worked—but the supporting infrastructure was hitting a ceiling.
It became clear: the model needed more than scale. It needed intelligence.
The Pivot: Building a Clinical Intake Engine with Generative AI
To transform operational triage into clinical precision, the organization partnered with Persistent Systems. The result was a Generative AI-powered Clinical Intake Engine—a platform that didn’t just speed up documentation but reshaped how it was understood and used.
Instead of relying on templates or rigid forms, the engine:
- Parsed EMRs, referral packets, genomics reports, and clinician notes
- Extracted key data like cancer type, site, biomarkers, medications, and treatment history
- Summarized longitudinal patient context within seconds
- Identified the right subspecialist for review, while flagging urgency
With this foundation in place, the engine fundamentally changed how clinicians interacted with patient data.
Clinicians could now prompt the system with questions like “What was the last recorded tumor marker?” and instantly receive source-linked answers. The result was a shift from reactive processing to proactive clinical intelligence.
Operational Shift: From Hours to Seconds
What once took hours of manual effort now happened in real time:
- Documents spanning 30–70 pages became 5-second summaries
- Cases were auto routed to appropriate subspecialists with embedded urgency signals
- Gaps in documentation were flagged to prevent back-and-forth cycles
This operational backbone allowed the navigation team to refocus attention on expert review, rather than administrative friction.
How It Works
- Intake packet is uploaded or synced
- AI parses and extracts relevant cancer-specific data
- Agents generate summaries and flag missing information
- Subspecialist is matched and alerted
- Prompts allow clinicians to query specific context
Results That Spoke Volumes:
In just a few months post-deployment, the Clinical Intake Engine delivered:
- 4x faster clinical intake for complex oncology cases
- 80% reduction in time spent reviewing routine documentation
- Referral volume scaled without additional staffing
- Improved diagnostic-reviewer alignment for better outcomes
- Higher satisfaction among clinicians and subspecialists
As BCG notes, Generative AI is driving major productivity gains across high-complexity workflows like medical intake and triage.
Building for Privacy, Speed, and Scale
Security was foundational to the platform’s design. Built with a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) architecture, the engine ensured:
- Built on privacy-first principles, the platform ensures all PHI remains fully within the organization’s control.
- Full HIPAA compliance and audit trails
- Secure ingestion and parsing of EMRs at scale
- Ongoing reinforcement learning based on reviewer feedback
Persistent delivered the platform from PoC to production in just 12 weeks.
Beyond Oncology: A Playbook for Complex Care
Oncology was just the beginning. The same principles apply to any domain where deep documentation meets expert review. While designed for expert oncology access, the platform’s architecture lends itself to broader clinical use. Its capabilities can extend to:
- Rare disease case review
- Genomic-driven treatment planning
- Chronic condition management and care coordination
Future phases will take the model further, enabling physician-facing copilots, automated case triage, and smarter patient engagement portals.
Gartner forecasts that by 2026, most of AI-driven workflow automation in healthcare will focus on alleviating clinician fatigue and operational bottlenecks.
From Intake to Intelligence
The Clinical Intake Engine didn’t just automate data handling. It delivered a strategic shift—from manual review to intelligent activation. From intake friction to real-time access. From information overload to expert focus.
This wasn’t about replacing human judgment. It was about elevating it.
Start where it matters most—at the clinical frontlines.
Connect with Persistent’s Generative AI Engineering Team to explore how intelligent automation can drive measurable impact in your care delivery systems.
