Allina Health, Qventus Co-Developing Custom AI Agent Solutions

Minnesota-based Allina Health is the first health system client of what care operations automation vendor Qventus calls its “AI Solutions Factory,” a co-development partnership model for building custom AI solutions. Dominica Tallarico, executive vice president and chief operating officer at Allina Health, recently spoke with Healthcare Innovation about how a joint R&D team staffed by Allina Health and Qventus team members will work over the next three years to identify and build high-impact solutions.

Tallarico explained that Allina Health has already adopted several tools that Qventus developed, including the automated Surgical Growth Solution to optimize use of their operating rooms. 

“We saw that we were not fully utilizing all of our OR capacity, and when we did have release of blocks of time or availability, there wasn't an easy way to let surgeons know that we had openings on the schedule,” she said. “So if you think of this like an Open Table, when we release these blocks of time or if we have cases that cancel, we can identify surgeons that we want to push that out to and let them know that we have availability.”

After piloting the solution, Allina Health found it allowed them to add 3.5 cases per OR per month, and in 2025 alone the health system unlocked 689 hours of robotics capacity. “We have now scaled that across the organization, and it’s really been a tremendous growth lever for us and for our surgeons,” she said. Allina Health followed that up with deployment of a perioperative care coordination solution from Qventus, and is also working with the company on an inpatient capacity project to help streamline the flow of patients.

In addition to off-the-shelf solutions from Qventus, Allina Health execs realized the health system has other problems to solve, and rather than trying to get point solutions from many different vendors, they saw the opportunity to develop this partnership platform to help transform care operations. 

Tallarico described the joint R& D team they have set up as an incubator of sorts to work on health system transformation. During brainstorming sessions, the team came up with more than 50 ideas. 

“We also developed a case evaluation framework,” she said. “We ask, what is the financial impact? There has to be a financial ROI for the investments that we're making. Is it scalable? What's the speed of impact? Are we talking about something that's going to take a year or two to develop or could we have this live in three to six months? And then we do the risk assessment,” she said. 

Another element that they consider is durability. “We want to make sure that if we're going to invest, is this durable over time? As an Epic user, is there something coming quickly from Epic? We have a very important partnership with Qventus, but we always want to evaluate what's going to be coming through our EHR vendor and the timing on that vs. what we are going to build," Tallarico said. 

The use of AI agents is already starting to mature in the revenue cycle arena, she noted. Allina Health is now looking to mature the use of AI assistants in several other areas in the clinical and operations space. 

“After looking at all of the opportunities that came forward from our team, we ran them through that case evaluation framework. We decided that the next thing we're going to launch is on specialty referrals — how to prioritize call support automation in that space,” Tallarico said. “We’ve estimated that the overall impact of better managing specialty referrals is very significant. We have high confidence we can do this in about 15 weeks. The risk assessment was low, and t we assessed that it was very high for durability. We didn't have another vendor out there that we're already partnered with, and this is absolutely something that's scalable.”

In an interview with Healthcare Innovation earlier this year, Qventus CEO Mudit Garg spoke about the importance of building close partnerships with health system customers to do this work. “The true success of AI is in understanding the job to be done very deeply, and therefore working very closely with customers is critical to the success of the work. So being very close to the customer is the most important thing that we can have in the development of these new tools.”

Garg also was asked whether most health systems were starting to create chief AI officer roles to oversee this type of work.  “In some cases CIOs or CMIOS are filling this role, and in some cases, there are chief AI officers or chief transformation officer roles being created to do it,” he responded. “I think there's very much a shift, where you're seeing more operational involvement, people getting closer to the clinical care and the workflows and the technology and bringing all those pieces together. And as I said, in some cases, those are new roles, but in almost all cases, it is someone changing what was expected of them before to bringing all these things together much more tightly.”