Pinnacle moves away from dashboards with AI-powered data tool

NEWS  - eHealthNews editor Rebecca McBeth

Pinnacle PHO has launched a natural language data query tool called Ask Pinnacle that lets clinical and administrative staff interrogate aggregated health data by typing questions in natural language.

Pinnacle general manager of digital and innovation Garry Johnston says the new tool replaces the static dashboards and reports that primary health organisations regularly use to access population health insights.

Built on Snowflake, the platform is being piloted in two practices. Ask Pinnacle draws from multiple data sets such as; national enrolment data, prescribed and dispensed medicines information, clinical, administrative and financial data, and reference sets including PubMed.

"Everyone has a slightly different need in an organisation for data, and therefore what happens is their needs get expressed as reports that become seen as technical debt,” explains Johnston.

“In this new era, using AI, that need to have technical debt disappears because genuinely everyone can ask questions that are relevant to them in a way that makes sense to them."

He says Pinnacle's chief medical officer Joe Bourne used Ask Pinnacle to explore whether there is a statistical correlation between three diseases prevalent in deprived communities, a question he had always wanted answered but would have been too costly and complex to request.

"Within five minutes it came back with an answer and it was categorically yes, there is absolutely a correlation and it is immutable,” Johnston tells eHealthNews.

He says findings such as this have the potential to change clinical practice by providing the data to back up what clinicians may have known anecdotally for years.

Pinnacle is running coaching sessions with pilot practices, sitting alongside staff and working through the questions they have always wanted to ask but never been able to pursue.

Johnston says the new approach is also changing how the organisation thinks about data quality. 

"The quality of the data is not as important as it used to be because the AI can provide context that a dashboard or a report cannot," he says.

"The more we look at the data, the more we explore it to find the origins of where the data is wrong, the more likely it is that people will code it correctly in the first place.”

Ask Pinnacle also introduces a governance capability that traditional dashboards lack, because it logs every query, so Pinnacle's digital team can now assess user intent - flagging questions that appear outside a user's role or that raise privacy concerns, he says.

Read more in Garry Johnston's My View - Why I'm done with Dashboards.

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