The health system on Wednesday, April 30, announced it has partnered with Irving, Texas-based Pieces Technologies Inc. to deploy Pieces' AI platform and Pieces Ambulatory Platform.

The partnership will bring in AI tools to the health system to help professionals streamline complex health care tasks such as clinical hand-offs, length-of-stay management and discharge planning, according to a news release.

"Pieces' AI-powered solutions will help MetroHealth enhance patient care and improve access by reducing inefficiencies and eliminating time-consuming administrative tasks, allowing our talented caregivers to work at the top of their licenses and provide more personalized care to more patients," said Dr. R. Douglas Bruce, interim executive vice president and chief operating officer for MetroHealth, in a statement.

MetroHealth chose Pieces because of the company’s frameworks to monitor, catch and mitigate generative AI’s hallucinations, which is when the technology raises untrue or incomplete information, Dr. Yasir Tarabichi, MetroHealth’s chief health AI officer, told Crain’s.

Pieces Technologies, founded in 2015, specializes in bringing generative AI solutions to help healthcare providers make informed decisions, improve the speed of care, and reduce costs, manual effort and resource pressures, according to the company’s LinkedIn profile. The company has developed AI tools and has published a risk mitigation framework to set transparency standards for clinical AI safety and quality metrics.

Pieces Inpatient Platform is the company’s flagship product and has produced 6.7 million AI-generated inpatient summaries across the nation at hospitals and health systems, the release stated.

Within MetroHealth, Pieces' AI platform will be integrated into the health system’s existing electronic health record across inpatient and outpatient settings, according to the release.

While MetroHealth uses AI solutions within the system currently, including prior authorizations systems in the pharmacy department or generative AI to respond to patient requests, Pieces is not just a “single point solution,” Tarabichi said.

“Pieces is definitely more of an enterprise-wide platform decision that we've undertaken,” Tarabichi said. “It’s a big solution that offers a lot of opportunity across the board.”

Pieces Inpatient Platform generates work summaries which consist of three to four sentences based on the assessment portion of a SOAP note — which stands for subjective, objective, assessment, and plan — a method of health care documentation that organizes information from a patient session.

The Pieces Inpatient Platform has proven its model by generating more than 10 million clinician-ready documents for health systems nationwide,” according to the release.

Within MetroHealth’s operations, those AI capabilities will be applied to “power progress notes, discharge summaries, utilization-management reviews, and discharge barriers in seconds.” The Pieces Inpatient Platform saves case managers an average of 60 minutes a day and about 40 to 50 minutes a day for physicians, the release stated.

Additionally, MetroHealth will implement Pieces' Ambulatory Platform, which produces “lifetime patient summaries.” The summaries are intended to give immediate context to clinicians by composing information and perspectives across encounters and settings.

The partnership consists of two costs for MetroHealth: integration costs and software-as-a-service costs. Tarabichi declined to disclose exact investment figures for the Pieces partnership.

However, MetroHealth expects that the savings in terms of clinical operational efficiency and how the technology will inform operations will be able to “at the very least cover the cost of the platform,” he said.

The partnership between MetroHealth and Pieces is contracted over the “next several years,” Tarabichi said. Within this collaboration, the health system and company will collaborate and co-build additional solutions that will benefit MetroHealth in clinical and operational opportunities and inform Pieces’ solutions.

“If we can build something that is universally useful, both to MetroHealth and something that Pieces can take to other organizations, and it becomes a win-win,” Tarabichi said.

“We hope that, across the enterprise, Pieces helps lighten the load," Dr. Ruben Amarasingham, chief executive officer of Pieces, said in the release.

MetroHealth and Pieces also have a contract with the National Cancer Institute and National Institutes of Health to research how conversational AI can be used to enhance cancer patient care, according to the release. The funded study is currently undergoing regulatory approval, Tarabichi said.

“The idea is we're hoping to generate new signals that tell us a little bit more about our cancer patients, and potentially give us opportunities to acquire, understand and bridge some of those social drivers of health,” Tarabichi said.

AI is a broad and growing market. The global AI industry was valued at $279.2 billion in 2024 and is projected to grow at a compounded annual growth rate of 35.9% from 2025 to 2030, according to Grand View Research.

Within the wider industry, the global AI productivity tools market size was estimated at about $6.94 billion in 2023. The segment is slated to grow at a CAGR of 26.7% from 2024 to 2030, Grand View Research said.

Health systems across Northeast Ohio have started to plan how AI will work as a tool in care and operations.

For instance, the Cleveland Clinic hired its first chief artificial intelligence officer, Ben Shahshahani, at the start of 2024. The Clinic established an AI partnership with Massachusetts-based Health Data Analytics Institute to deploy AI technology at the health system’s spine center, Crain’s reported in November.

Similarly, University Hospitals Cleveland Medical Center announced its partnership with Qure.AI earlier this month. The partnership gives UH access to Qure.AI’s clinical AI technology that provides a second read on X-rays to catch lung cancer nodules and support earlier identification.

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