KEY TAKEAWAYS
- Zus works to give providers something much more valuable than just access to patient data – clinical truth in the right places and in a clear voice.
- With tech-powered patient narratives from Zus that turn raw data into insights, partners like Elation and Firefly can help doctors provide better patient care.
- While AI represents the next step in the evolution of healthcare data, its ultimate success relies on provider confidence and adoption – which is why Zus focuses on building trust into the foundation of its AI approach.
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There’s plenty of patient data flying around these days. But what does it all mean? The goal should be to give providers clinical truth in the right places and in a clear voice.
It’s something we think a lot about here at Zus as we work with partners like Elation Health and Firefly Health to help them make sense of data and improve the patient experience.
In a webinar discussion, Elation’s Fareed Taghvaee, Firefly’s Nisha Basu, and our own Eric Gunther discussed a few specific areas where these efforts are really paying off.
Data That Tells a Story: Elation Gets ZAP-ped
Thanks to dramatic improvements in interoperability, it’s not nearly as difficult as it once was to access dense Consolidated Clinical Data Architecture (C-CDA). These days, providers can find plenty of patient data related to doctor visits, medications, treatment plans, and more.
But what does it all mean? Turning that mountain of overlapping facts, timestamps, and codes into a usable clinical narrative remains a persistent challenge across healthcare, including for Elation and the care delivery organizations it supports through its practice management, EHR, patient portal, and database platforms for primary care practices.
This is where the Zus Aggregated Platform (ZAP) comes in for Elation’s customers. Embedded directly within their EHR and designed to integrate seamlessly into any systems clinicians are already using the ZAP surfaces and organizes thousands of pieces of data into a clear, concise narrative overview – with an audit trail of where everything came from.
Thanks to its integration with Zus, Elation’s solutions help physicians quickly understand and act on their patients’ data. In other words, it’s not just about piling up more and more information – it’s about helping providers make sense of that information so they can deliver better patient care.
Getting to Know You: Upgrading the Onboarding Experience at Firefly
Firefly is a value-based care provider that teams with employers to create better health plans while also lowering costs.
But one of their big roadblocks to delivering a better experience was onboarding new patients. Getting up to speed with a patient’s history through a phalanx of forms, repetitive Q&As, and multiple EHRs was often a 20- to 30-minute process.
The time commitment would cause many providers to take shortcuts or bypass the full process. That often led to a fragmented medical picture, diminished patient outcomes and, over time, an erosion of patient trust.
But by working with Zus, Firefly was able to consolidate and summarize all of those data points into a clear longitudinal picture of the patient.
The result? A significantly condensed onboarding routine that still gives the doctor a better, more well-rounded understanding of the patient they’re about to see. And patients who trust the process more because they feel their provider has invested real time into reviewing their background.
Talk about a win-win.
Post-Visit Problems: Why Is It Easier To Track a Pizza Than a Specialist Referral?
Post-visit actions, such as specialist referrals, are a critical piece of the care continuum. When referrals aren’t fulfilled, patient care suffers. But referrals are also a huge pain point. Why? Because too many get lost in the shuffle or slip through the cracks in the system, leaving physicians flying blind.
Think about it. We’re in the year 2026, and technology has made it easier for a hungry customer to track where their pizza order is along the delivery chain than for a doctor to know whether their patient has visited a specialist and what came out of that appointment.
Here’s another area where Zus is helping Firefly streamline.
Then: A team would manually track down referral information to make sure notes were being shared and patient appointments were happening. It was a cumbersome, labor-intensive process – with plenty of room for error.
Now: The process has been automated to cut down on data-chasing. Doctors are alerted when a referral has been fulfilled, providing timely insight on how the care plan is progressing.
Trust Comes First: How Zus and Firefly are Using AI
There’s nothing more annoying for patients than seeing their precious few minutes with a doctor eaten up by administrative wrangling. So when Firefly was looking for ways to cut down visit prep time for doctors, Zus employed AI to help gather and organize massive amounts of patient data.
The result was a dramatic decrease in that prep time – from a half-hour to five minutes or less in some cases. This reclaimed time fundamentally changes the visit itself. Instead of scrambling to assemble a patient’s history, clinicians walk in prepared and informed: patients feel seen, understood and confident in the care they are about to receive. But realizing that shift requires more than speed. Many doctors remain skeptical of AI, burned by past “revolutionary” data and tech advances that didn’t always lead to great experiences. That’s why trust was non-negotiable. If doctors couldn’t trust the AI, they simply wouldn’t use it.
Enter the Zus approach to AI, which focuses first and foremost on building and maintaining trust. Firefly has seen multiple benefits from this approach, including…
- Source data that is as complete as possible, so doctors aren’t left to summarize multiple sources on their own.
- More information, rather than less, which helps increase physician trust.
- Detailed source information, meaning every AI result is accompanied by a clear audit trail.
Next Steps: Define Value, Find a Champion
Drawing on the experiences of Elation and Firefly, providers looking to make the connection between the data they have and the meaning they’re looking for should:
- Define “value.” There are plenty of good reasons to make this effort – to cut down on patient prep time, to improve the patient and clinician experience, to shorten visit length, to improve referrals, and the list goes on. But it’s important for organizations to decide which of these areas matter most, and to pursue them one at a time.
- Find a clinician champion. Great tech shouldn’t require a lot of change management – the benefits should be obvious. But nothing will get physicians on board faster (and more enthusiastically) than one of their own singing the praises of a data solution that makes their lives easier.
Most providers can access a lot of patient data these days. But can they find the meaning? That’s where the real value of data in healthcare lies.
And that’s the gap that Zus is bridging for Firefly and Elation. Learn more about what we can do for you.
