Provide Smarter Patient Engagement With Artificial Intelligence

Artificial intelligence (AI) has led to many advances in healthcare, including robot-assisted surgery, real-time remote patient monitoring, enhanced imaging, and diagnostic tools that help clinicians make better decisions. While some AI solutions improve healthcare delivery, others improve healthcare communications — helping patients get all the information they need, when they need it. 

Modern Medicine Meets AI 

At the start of the COVID pandemic, many segments of healthcare rushed to digitally transform their virtual care. The results are integrated video interfaces that have become a standard in patient care. 

As we migrate to the post-pandemic economy, patient and consumer behavior and expectations continue to change. Businesses need to respond by expanding their digital transformation initiatives to meet these expectations. Organizations across all healthcare sectors face increased competitive and regulatory pressure to improve patient experiences. 

And let’s not forget the need to improve provider’s own healthcare efficiency to tackle today’s economic challenges and medical staff shortages. 

Thankfully, smart conversational AI-driven technology can help. 

That’s because AI elevates and enriches patient engagement and streamlines healthcare workflows. Healthcare providers and practitioners can now combine the power of modern medicine with AI to deliver smarter and more efficient care. Consider that: 

• Thirty percent of US healthcare spending is associated with administrative tasks, many of which can be automated. 
• The global healthcare chatbots market is expected to reach $768.1 million by 2028, up from $250.9 million in 2022. 
• Nearly one in five physicians use augmented intelligence for practice efficiencies, and two in five plan to adopt it in the next year. 

What Is Conversational AI? 

Conversational AI engages patients — through a personalized and simplified experience — within any phone call or right inside their favorite messaging and chat app, or even within a company’s website. It aims to provide a frictionless, omnichannel experience whether the customer or patient is talking with a live agent or AI-powered virtual agent. 

Conversational AI “bots” (software) conduct conversations with users using a variety of AI technologies. Here are a few examples: 

• Natural language processing analyzes human speech or text and generates human-like responses. 
• Machine learning lets bots “learn” from each user interaction and improve their capabilities over time. 
• Automated speech recognition translates voice messages into machine-readable text for analysis.
• Text to speech turns generated text responses back into understandable speech – and the latest technology creates very natural speech. No more robotic voices! 

Conversational AIs include both chatbots and voice assistants. Chatbots communicate in written text through SMS, messaging apps, and other online channels. Voice assistants communicate with users by “speaking” with them. These AI-powered resources can communicate like humans but without human involvement. This can mean less work for staff and, more importantly, a better patient experience. 

The Benefits of Conversational AI 

Conversational AI gives healthcare organizations an automated, scalable way to share important information, send personalized messaging, and provide 24/7 patient support. These are invaluable for time-starved clinicians. 

But the benefits don’t stop there. AI-powered communications can: 

• Save time and money. Chatbots automate communications, which frees clinicians to spend their time on high-value interactions and conversations. Instead of scheduling appointments and answering basic questions, clinicians can spend more time in exam rooms to treat and engage with patients. Recent research shows that deploying conversational AI in hospitals can reduce treatment costs by up to 50% and improve outcomes by 30% to 40%. 
• Provide flexibility. Human representatives can only talk to one patient at a time. But chatbots can help an entire queue at once. Patients also enjoy greater flexibility to reach out when it’s most convenient for them and stop and start the conversation when they have time to chat. 
• Elevate the patient experience and journey. Less time on hold, more personalized information, communication lines that are always open — these are all perks that improve the patient experience and journey. Modern consumers are accustomed to self-serve options and communicating across channels. They want personalized information, fast. And they’ve come to expect this from all businesses — and thanks to conversational AI, they can now get it from their healthcare providers, too. 

AI Implementation 

AI has the potential to cost-effectively augment and modernize healthcare legacy systems — without having to rip and replace platforms — and deliver an improved ROI. 

The ease of implementation means that conversational AI can be deployed across company-owned properties like websites and mobile apps — or on third-party messaging apps like Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp. And AI-enhanced video is growing from telehealth appointments to an important element of 360-degree patient engagement, from remote patient monitoring to life sciences. 

AI is meant to help humans work smarter, not harder. As one of the hardest-working industries, healthcare certainly needs all the help it can get. And Conversational AI is more than ready.

To learn more about how AI can improve patient engagement and streamline healthcare workflows, visit the Vonage team at ATA2023, Booth #1401.