MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA – Medtrade attendees at last month’s show in Dallas went looking for new artificial intelligence (AI) solutions and they found one in Elsa by Celeritas AI. Elsa is a staff training tool / AI assistant and it earned Medtrade’s New Product Pavilion Providers’ Choice Silver Award, sponsored by HomeCare Media.
Named after Einstein’s wife, Elsa has three main features, the first being a user-centric interface where users can ask training/job-related questions and get direct answers. Many of these questions would be posed by junior staff members seeking guidance from senior staff members.
“Staff members with less than five years’ experience typically have a lot of questions, and they go to the folks who have 7 to 15 years of experience,” explains Geoff Seyon, co-founder and CEO (pictured holding the award with Celeritas AI team members at Medtrade). “That takes a lot of time from them [senior staff]. Junior staff members might be stuck on a simple question for a couple of days just because someone hasn’t typed in a response to their question.”
From his office in Mountain View, Calif., right next door to Google, Seyon sat down with Medtrade Monday to learn more about the product and its ability to train staff members and improve the billing process.
Medtrade Monday: What is Elsa?
Seyon: Elsa is our AI assistant for medical suppliers and DME companies. We see her as a tool that everyone from entry level customer service reps, to the managers of those teams, to billing specialists can use to navigate this whole world of medical billing. It can help by dealing with coverage rules, limits, the regulations, and all the codes—and getting them right. We make sure everything is set up correctly so that when you submit that invoice, you are going to get reimbursed with a high probability. That’s what Elsa is about.
Medtrade Monday: What are the features of Elsa?
Seyon: Elsa has three main features. One is the user-centric interface where you can just ask questions and get direct answers—including many questions that junior staff members are always asking senior staff members.
The second feature is an automated checklist, so when you’re putting the order together for your patient, it’s automating all the tasks necessary to completely order, and then ultimately submit the invoice for reimbursement. It’s broken down into different categories and you get either a red light or a green light depending on how stuff looks to Elsa. Then you can quickly drill in and figure out; what’s missing here? You can then fix it and you don’t have to be confused about what the process is. It’s all driven off of the LCDs [local coverage determinations] and things of that nature.
The third feature is one we don’t have yet, but we are building. It is a training module so that staff can use Elsa to stay current on the coverage rules which change all the time.
Medtrade Monday: What was the reaction at Medtrade?
Seyon: All of these capabilities seemed to align really well with the attendees at Medtrade. A lot of prospective customers would come back to the booth and bring their managers and owners. Ultimately they voted for us in the New Product Pavilion because they really felt this was practical. There were other AI competitors at Medtrade, but we were the company to take the prize because what we were building and demonstrating was solving the most problems that people had, which is dealing with the headache of medical billing.
Medtrade Monday: What are the misconceptions about AI?
Seyon: The first is that AI is just about chat. Everyone is talking about ChatGPT and everyone equates that to AI, but ChatGPT is just a cursory demo on top of what’s possible. AI is a broad field that has advanced to the number one discipline that students are going to study for the next 30 years or so. We’re going to apply AI to make our lives better.
The biggest misconception is that AI is about taking away jobs. We see Elsa as enabling growth, which in turn is going to create jobs and not take away jobs. As a philosophy, we don’t want to work with companies whose sole goal is to cut jobs and cut costs. We want to work with people who want to improve productivity across their team and improve revenue. Elsa is the right tool for the right time in the industry. We see Elsa as creating jobs and not destroying jobs.
Medtrade Monday: What does Celeritas mean?
Seyon: The “C” in Einstein’s famous equation is Celeritas. It is the Latin word for the speed of light. This industry is built by a lot of husband/wife couples, so we wanted to choose Einstein’s wife [Elsa] as the name of the product. She is bringing the intelligence and helping the staff members of your DME company to be the heroes of the day.
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For questions about exhibiting at Medtrade, contact Kerry Tyler at [email protected]
