It might be a new year, but healthcare is dealing with old problems:
Too much time spent on administrative tasks. Staff struggling to keep up with high call volumes. Patients waiting too long for care or falling through the cracks altogether. Services delayed or cancelled because patients were not appropriately prepared.
It’s past time for healthcare to adopt workflow automation and patient self-service tools to address these challenges. Other industries embraced these options years ago, documenting better performance and higher satisfaction among staff and consumers.
Where do bottlenecks occur and what solutions are available to improve workflows related to the patient care journey?
Obstacles impede these pathways in two significant ways:
How patients access information and care. Most consumers want to go online at their own convenience to check symptoms, learn about providers and make appointments. They prefer not to make a phone call – and, candidly, providers seek strategies to reduce call volume too. It’s critical for providers to deliver smart, conversational chatbots and virtual assistants that can be accessed across the web, text, email or voice channels to satisfy patients and alleviate staff workloads.
How patients navigate an episode of care or procedure. Both patients and staff struggle to complete forms, education and prep steps – in the right order and at the right point of the process – to ensure scheduled services happen in a timely manner. Interactive digital tools guide patients through their journey and give them online options to complete all prerequisites. Dashboards allow staff to monitor patient progress and flag individuals who need one-on-one intervention.
How can these tools support the complex nature of healthcare, as well as ensure the information provided is accurate?
Early generations of chatbots failed healthcare. Rarely did they provide patients the information they needed, resulting in dead ends, inaccurate answers and an unacceptable level of drop-offs.
But today’s virtual assistants and online tools are smarter and more responsive. Developers leverage conversational AI so patients can pose questions in the words and phrases they are comfortable with. Interactive dialogs probe for more details to add context. This means the virtual assistant can zero in on the precise answer the patient is looking for.
Chatbots have come of age. And they’ve come a long way from the clumsy pop-ups once deployed on websites to generate leads. Thanks to Artificial Intelligence, the latest generation of chatbots are more clever than ever and are increasingly playing a role in the global fight against COVID-19.
Chatbots on the Front Lines
You might not expect to find chatbots on the front lines of a public-health crisis, but multiple hospitals and health organizations have recognized their value at a time when all human hands are on deck. Take Hyro’s COVID-19 Virtual Assistant, for example, this free AI-powered, corona-focused chatbot answers questions, parses responses, poses follow-up queries of its own, triages symptoms and addresses patients’ concerns while sharing important information from the CDC and WHO.
The Hyro COVID-19 Virtual Assistant can be embedded on websites, call centers, and apps, allowing patients to freely interact with it via voice and text using their own natural language. In essence, this data-driven virtual assistant assumes the role of a human point of contact, relieving strain at a time when health organizations are increasingly overloaded. Hyro, a member of Microsoft’s Partner Network, has been entrusted by a number of healthcare facilities including New York’s Montefiore Hospital, the Austin Regional Clinic, and Ohio’s Fisher-Titus Medical Center. The tech startup has made the plug-and-play chatbot completely free for the purposes of combatting the outbreak.
How Chatbots Are Sparking Conversation
This isn’t the only example of a chatbot being integrated into the typical patient journey: developers such as Txtonomy and Orbita and have created similar conversational AI tools to help combat the rampant spread of misinformation related to Covid-19 and support medical professionals in screening patients and educating worried citizens. The UK government introduced a special WhatsApp chatbot for the same reasons. Could this be an insight into the future of healthcare: clinical smart-bots handling preliminary inquiries, screening and funnelling patients accordingly, introducing efficiencies in testing and treatment?
Amazon announced that a version of their virtual assistant technology, Alexa, is now HIPAA-eligible. This means it’s available for applications that are subject to the data privacy and security requirements of HIPAA. The new HIPAA-eligible version of Alexa, specifically the Alexa Skills Kit, is now available to a limited number of developers by invitation only.
Why?
Amazon has seen increasing interest in Alexa’s potentialto serve as a virtual healthcare assistant. While devices like PCs, tablets, and smartphones have contributed to advances in healthcare, they’ve been problematic for some aspects of patient engagement – particularly among the elderly and others whophysically cannot – or will not – use them.
The idea of a smart, always-available, hands-free, voice-powered virtual assistant that can answer questions, deliver medication reminders, facilitate communication with one’s doctor, provide health coaching, and more, has piqued the interest of the healthcare community. Amazon has responded.
What’s different
Until now, Alexa’s use in healthcare has been mostly limited to questionanswering services – voice apps, or “skills” in Alexa parlance, that answer general questions about health conditions, treatments, symptoms, etc. Amazon Echo users, for example, canaccess health benefit information from a skill like Answers by Cigna, or tap into one of many symptom checkers in the Alexa marketplace. The big change is that Alexa can now be used in certain applications that collect and transmit protected health information (PHI).
Thisopensa whole new world of voice applications beyond basic Q&A, such as remote patient monitoring population health, medication adherence and clinical trial optimization. It seemed inevitable that voice assistants like Alexa and smart speaker-equipped devices like the Amazon Echo would find their way into clinical applications. Amazon’s announcement confirms this.
Beware
Organizations must understand the full range of issues surrounding the “what, why and how” of securing, voice-first healthcare applications. HIPAA is just the start. There is no formal certification process for HIPAA, and it applies only in the U.S.Also, many healthcare IT departments use other industry standards or ?have created their own standards for data privacy and security. In their eyes, completely securing a voice application may go well beyond ensuring that a service provider will sign a HIPAAbusiness associate agreement. Issues like user authentication, data privacy in shared spaces,network and device hacking, secure system integration (e.g. with an EHR), should all be addressed.Continue Reading
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