Sentara Health Rolls Out AI Tool to Help Case Managers Move Patients Through Care Faster

Think about what happens behind the scenes before a patient gets discharged from the hospital. Someone, usually a case manager, has to comb through days or weeks of notes, labs, medication changes and specialist updates to figure out what's actually going on and what needs to happen next. It's a bit like trying to reconstruct a mystery novel by reading scattered pages out of order. That work is essential, but it's slow, and every hour spent piecing together the story is an hour a patient spends waiting in a hospital bed they may not need to be in.

Sentara Health, a not-for-profit system that runs 12 hospitals and more than 400 care sites across Virginia and Northeast North Carolina, is betting that artificial intelligence can shrink that gap. On Tuesday, the system deployed a new AI case management tool co-developed with Regard, a clinical decision support company. The platform lets case managers query a patient's chart in plain language, the same way you might ask a colleague a question, and get back a clear summary of patient history, status changes and anything new in the last 24 hours.

For patients and families, this isn't an abstract technical upgrade. Faster, more complete information for case managers can mean quicker, safer discharge planning. It can mean fewer days in the hospital spent waiting for someone to track down a detail buried in the chart. And it can mean fewer gaps in the handoff between hospital and home, which is often where things go wrong for patients after they leave.

From Diagnosis Support to Operations

Regard didn't start out building tools for case managers. The company made its name helping physicians with diagnosis, and it says its platform has already surfaced more than 20 million diagnoses that doctors reviewed and accepted, each one backed by supporting clinical evidence pulled from the chart. That track record at the bedside is what convinced Sentara and Regard to expand the technology into the operational side of hospital work, where case managers spend their days coordinating care rather than diagnosing it.

"We've built an intelligence platform that physicians trust, surfacing more than 20 million diagnoses that they've accepted, with supporting clinical evidence," said Eli Ben-Joseph, Regard's CEO and co-founder, in a statement. "It's a natural next step for us to extend that complete clinical picture that is reliable and credible to operational teams, giving health systems a consistent layer of support across the organization. That's the exciting part about getting it right at the bedside. You quickly start to see other high-impact areas where the technology can make a difference."

Rollin Reeder, M.D., Sentara's chief health information officer, described the shift in more personal terms. "It's incredible to think about how much time we used to spend piecing together a patient's story before they could even start discharge planning," he said in a statement. "Now, with Regard, I have information from the chart I could not have found on my own, sometimes critically important information that could change the course of management. This is transformational in many ways, but especially in how effectively and confidently we can move patients through the system."

That phrase, information he "could not have found on my own," is worth sitting with. It suggests the tool isn't just saving time on tasks humans already do well. It's catching things that might otherwise slip through the cracks in a system where clinicians are stretched thin and charts can run hundreds of pages long.

Sentara executives are putting numbers behind the ambition. They estimate the tool could save nearly 90,000 hours of staff time, which they equate to adding more than 40 full-time employees and almost $5 million in labor costs. Those are big claims, and like any projection, they deserve scrutiny once the tool has been in use long enough to measure real outcomes rather than modeled ones. Still, even a fraction of that savings would represent meaningful relief for case managers who are often juggling dozens of patients at once.

The rollout isn't finished. Sentara plans to expand the tool beyond acute care and into ambulatory settings, where coordinating care across outpatient visits, specialists and primary care can be just as fragmented as it is in the hospital. If the tool performs as well outside the hospital walls as it reportedly has inside them, that could extend the benefits to a much larger slice of Sentara's patient population.

This deployment also fits into a broader pattern at Sentara. In mid-September, the system began piloting GW RhythmX's AI precision care platform, which is designed to feed AI-powered clinical recommendations directly into clinician workflows at the point of care. Together with the Regard partnership, it points to a health system trying to build AI support across multiple layers of patient care, not just one isolated tool bolted onto an existing process.

Why It Matters

Health systems have talked about AI's potential to ease administrative burden for years, but the proof has always been in deployment, not promises. Sentara's move matters because it's a live rollout at a multi-hospital system, not a pilot confined to a single unit or a research paper. The claimed labor savings and the direct testimony from a chief health information officer give this some real weight.

There are open questions worth watching. How will Sentara verify that the AI's summaries are accurate and complete, especially as it expands into ambulatory care where patient histories can be even messier? Will the promised time savings hold up once the novelty wears off and the tool is used at full scale across all 12 hospitals? And will case managers, who are the ones actually relying on this tool day to day, find it as trustworthy as Reeder's statement suggests?

None of that diminishes what's being attempted here. Hospital discharge planning is one of the quiet pressure points in American healthcare, a place where delays ripple outward into bed shortages, longer wait times in emergency departments and frustrated families. If AI tools like this one can genuinely shave hours off that process while improving the quality of information case managers rely on, the benefit extends well beyond any single health system's bottom line. It reaches the patients waiting, often anxiously, to go home.