Vega Health, the end-to-end partner for health systems navigating the complexity of AI adoption and scaling, today announced a collaboration with Baptist Health, Northeast Florida’s largest health system — consistently recognized for excellence in integrating technology to enhance care. Through the relationship, Baptist Health will integrate Vega Health’s AI infrastructure platform to accelerate multiple initiatives, beginning with an AI-powered patient selection screening tool to support the health system’s rapidly growing Baptist Hospital at Home program.
The engagement brings together Baptist Health’s clinical and technical leadership in deep collaboration with Vega Health to address the health system’s key priorities with purpose-built AI solutions. With Vega Health’s platform now installed within Baptist Health’s secure environment, the health system is accelerating the adoption of AI solutions across additional key clinical and operational use cases. The two teams are starting with a use case directly impacting patient experience: helping Baptist Health’s clinical teams quickly and accurately identify patients who are good candidates to receive hospital-level care at home.
Extending the Promise of Hospital at Home
Baptist Health launched its Hospital at Home program in February 2026, offering clinically stable adult patients with acute-care needs at Baptist Medical Center Jacksonville the option to receive hospital-level care in the comfort of their own homes. Research has shown that patients prefer to recover at home and that those in Hospital at Home programs often require less skilled nursing care after acute care. The launch of Baptist’s Hospital at Home program is just one way Baptist Health is meeting the changing needs of patients.
A critical clinical challenge for any Hospital at Home program is eligibility screening: quickly and consistently identifying which patients meet the specific clinical criteria for home-based care. Vega Health’s AI screener supports Baptist Health’s clinical teams in making determinations consistent and efficient, using large language model (LLM) technology applied to Baptist Health’s own patient inclusion and exclusion criteria. Vega Health’s solution searches every inpatient chart for eligibility criteria, then surfaces best-match patients so to be evaluated by clinical staff.
“Baptist Hospital at Home is about giving eligible patients the choice to receive safe, hospital-level care in a setting that they often prefer – in their own homes,” said Alison Bartfield, MD, Medical Director of Baptist Physician Partners Senior Strategy and Baptist Hospital at Home. “Accurate eligibility screening is fundamental to the program as it prioritizes patient safety and allows the program to grow. Vega Health started with our criteria, our patients, and our clinical context and the result is a solution that feels like it was built for us, because it was. That’s the kind of collaboration that makes AI actually useful at the bedside.”
“Empowering our care teams with intelligent technology is central to improving outcomes for our patients and we will continue to build AI alongside our clinicians, not around them,” said Aaron Miri, DHA, FCHIME, CHCIO, executive vice president and chief digital and information officer at Baptist Health. “As we continue developing home-grown AI capabilities, our IT and clinical teams will remain fully aligned in driving innovation that is both meaningful and measurable.”
Patient volumes and outcomes, including satisfaction with the care received, are already being monitored. With Vega Health, the health system will also be able to measure how efficiently patients are identified and referred into the program and provide an objective standard to track health outcomes.
A Platform to Accelerate AI Across Baptist Health’s Environment and Deliver Value for Providers and Patients
Operating entirely within Baptist Health’s existing infrastructure, the Vega Health platform ensures patient data never leaves the health system’s cloud environment. The platform architecture enables data security and HIPAA compliance consistent with Baptist Health’s standards. It also ensures that AI solutions actually deliver value for the health system, because those solutions are validated on that health system’s own patients, not on external benchmarks from different populations and clinical contexts.
“We built Vega Health on the belief that health systems deserve AI that is accountable to their patients, their clinicians, and to delivering outcomes,” said Mark Sendak, MD, MPP, CEO and Co-Founder of Vega Health. “That means starting inside the walls of the health system, working alongside the clinical teams who will actually use these tools, and treating implementation as a starting point, not the finish line. The Baptist Hospital at Home program is exactly the kind of high-stakes, high-impact use case where our approach matters most, and we are proud to be building it alongside the amazing team at Baptist Health.”
The Vega Health and Baptist Health teams have conducted multiple on-site sessions focused on clinical discovery and platform configuration, establishing the working relationship that underlies Vega Health’s collaborative model. Beyond the Hospital at Home screener, the engagement includes two additional priority AI use cases: medication history surfaced at the transition between the emergency department and hospital admission and using predictive analytics to help care teams detect potential health concerns earlier and coordinate appropriate care.
A Collaborative Model Built on Three Principles
Vega Health’s approach to its work with Baptist Health reflects three principlesall designed to address the most common reasons AI fails to deliver sustained value in health systems.
The first is shared accountability for outcomes. Vega Health’s engagement structure is milestone-driven and oriented around clinical and operational results, not technology deployments.
The second is deep clinical discovery before any go live. The Baptist Hospital at Home AI screener was built in direct collaboration with Baptist Health’s clinical staff, incorporating specific eligibility criteria to augment existing clinical workflows.
The third is local validation and configuration. Every solution evaluated through this relationship is assessed against Baptist Health’s own patient population, inside their secure environment. Solutions are selected from Vega Health’s curated marketplace of validated AI use cases, or in the case of the Hospital at Home screener, built to fit the health system’s specific clinical priorities.
“Innovation at Baptist Health has always been in service of one goal: better care for the patients and communities we serve,” said Irene Louh, MD, PhD, Vice President of Data Intelligence & Decision Science at Baptist Health. “We hold AI to a high bar: it has to be safe, it has to be clinically meaningful, and it has to perform for our patients, not just on a benchmark dataset from somewhere else. This joint work reflects the importance of collaboration between clinical, operational, and data teams to ensure emerging technologies are built, implemented, and aligned with the realities of patient care. This rigorous, locally informed approach is essential to responsible AI adoption in health care.”
“Hospital at Home is one of the most exciting care delivery innovations in health care today and Baptist Health is building one of the most thoughtful programs in the country,” said Sendak. “Our goal is to make sure AI accelerates that program responsibly, with tools that are validated, co-designed with clinicians, and built to perform on Baptist Health’s patients. This is what it looks like when AI actually works in health care.”
About Vega Health
Located in the heart of Durham, North Carolina, Vega Health is the trusted partner for health systems working to identify, implement, monitor, and scale AI solutions aligned with their goals. Built by a group of experienced healthcare and technology operators, Vega Health helps healthcare organizations cut through the AI noise and start generating value from validated AI solutions that put patient care at the center of operations. The company’s proprietary platform, curated marketplace, and practical experience are essential infrastructure for health systems looking to generate measurable impact from healthcare AI. To learn more, visit www.vegahealth.com.
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