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AI In healthcare contact centers

Important Uses Of Artificial Intelligence In Healthcare Contact Centers

Abhirami

13 October 2023

While the majority of businesses are concerned with “consumer happiness”, the patient experience is a very similar concern in the healthcare industry. Healthcare providers are struggling due to the growing demands of patients as well as employee expectations. In this blog article, we'll examine various ways that healthcare contact centers are utilizing artificial intelligence to improve patient satisfaction and agent performance.

Healthcare contact centers are steadily adopting artificial intelligence (AI) solutions that are pervasive in modern business and daily life. Healthcare providers could benefit from artificial intelligence in many aspects of patient care and administrative processes, allowing them to build on existing solutions and find solutions to issues more effectively. Artificial intelligence (AI) can reduce the workloads of patients, physicians, and hospital administrators by doing tasks that would otherwise take humans hours to complete, at a fraction of the cost. Artificial Intelligence makes even the most difficult tasks of healthcare contact centers easier. With the use of technological breakthroughs, solutions have been created over time that require at least a minimum of human interaction. When a hospital or healthcare facility implements AI-powered contact center solutions, it benefits everyone in the ecosystem, including patients, physicians, nurses, office personnel, and clerical or front office workers.

With the deployment of AI in contact centers, staff members do not have to deal with the influx of an overwhelming number of patients for various objectives such as admission, appointments, insurance clearance, or even clinical assessment. On the other hand, patients do not have to stand in line for extended periods. Healthcare providers can prioritize their patients, contact center employees get immediate access to all patient information, including appointment status, caller ID, and doctor availability, etc. all with the help of CZ contact center solutions. Contact centers improve hospital agent calling efficiency by over 27%.

Using artificial intelligence, one may simply schedule appointments, order medications, schedule diagnostic testing, and obtain reports now. The biggest benefit to humanity comes from the rising usage of artificial intelligence in conjunction with machine learning algorithms to detect diseases at an early stage and offer early diagnosis and treatment. With an AI-based solution, healthcare providers may enhance their automation and self-service capabilities more effectively to manage complicated interactions that may otherwise call for staff dialogues and more efficiently coordinate care and resources.

Content:

1. What is a Healthcare Virtual Assistant Exactly?

2. Use cases of a virtual assistant

3. What are the benefits of AI in Health care contact centers?

 

What is a Healthcare Virtual Assistant Exactly?

Intelligent Virtual Assistants (also known as chatbots) have the potential to transform the way healthcare providers interact with patients. These healthcare virtual assistants can provide patients with current and accurate information to help them navigate any support they require or book appointments. With AI-powered chatbots that can assist patients throughout their care journeys, hospitals can create a simpler, friendlier, and more personalized ecosystem for their patients. While healthcare chatbots will never be able to replace doctors, they can make their jobs easier, faster, and more efficient.

The success of any healthcare virtual assistant is defined by intuitive, natural, and conversational user experiences.

Your patients will benefit from medical virtual assistants in the following ways:

- Provide access to healthcare information 24 hours a day, seven days a week

- Schedule appointments

- Send notifications or appointment reminders; and

- Automate customer support with contextual help.

Hospitals can benefit from virtual assistants in the following ways:

- Gather patient history, insurance details, demographic information, costing, and record analysis

- Concentrate on the patient's needs

- Reduce doctor and hospital staff burnout

- Lower hospital operational costs

 

Use cases of a virtual assistant:

1. Information on Personalized Healthcare

Virtual assistants are a great way to provide healthcare information to patients while also reducing the number of calls to hospitals. Medical virtual assistants are trained with the help of a massive healthcare database that contains symptoms, diagnoses, and treatment options for the health condition. Conversational virtual assistants' intelligence level aids in understanding the questions asked by patients and providing appropriate suggestions based on the training provided.

Patients, as well as doctors and other staff, can use virtual assistants to access patient information. Hospitals are no strangers to emergencies, and time is critical in dealing with these emergencies. In situations where every second counts, virtual assistants provide users with critical information immediately. When a patient attempts to contact your hospital via virtual assistants, the virtual assistants collect the patient's information by asking simple questions such as their name, age, location, symptoms, and current doctor. The virtual assistants then enter this data into the hospital database, which is then used to improve care.

2. Symptoms Checker

Healthcare virtual assistants can assist patients in understanding their health conditions by inquiring about their symptoms and medical history. Then, based on the patient's input, virtual assistants can determine whether the illness is severe or not. The first step in developing a symptom checker is determining what data is required. What better way to do this than to involve doctors? Virtual assistants for checking symptoms work best when doctors collaborate with software developers to create customized solutions based on the needs of the patient and the hospital. This helps in narrowing down the department or specialization that the patient requires when reaching out to a multi-specialty hospital or clinic.

3. Appointment Scheduling & Reminders

Patients do not always have the time to visit the hospital in person to schedule appointments with doctors. Furthermore, calling a hospital to schedule an appointment can be time-consuming when the staff must answer numerous calls each day, making patients feel left out.

Here's how a virtual assistant can assist you in resolving this issue:

When a patient chats with the virtual assistant to schedule an appointment, the virtual assistant gathers information about the appropriate doctors, working days, and available slots and assists the patient in scheduling an appointment. They also assist in rescheduling or canceling appointments. As a result, virtual assistants can manage patient requests more efficiently and save time when scheduling appointments.

Virtual medical assistants, on the other hand, remind patients about these appointments and follow-ups. When the appointment date approaches, virtual assistants can send automated messages to confirm, reschedule, or cancel the appointment via text messages, emails, or phone calls. This helps patients remember their appointment date and time and reduces no-shows in your hospital. In the end, this saves both the doctor and the patient time. Virtual appointment scheduling and reminders are being used in several healthcare facilities. As a result, the market for automated patient appointment reminders is expected to grow at a 10.57% CAGR.

4. Pre- and post-operative care in real-time

No one enjoys having to wait a long time to initiate a conversation and receive a response from hospitals for something that only takes a few seconds. As a result, incorporating virtual assistance is an essential step in communicating with your patients.

Many patients now prefer to interact with hospitals through chat support. This is because patients want faster answers to their questions, and what better way to accomplish this than to invest in virtual assistants?

When compared to human-to-human interaction, virtual assistants improve the support experience by providing instant, automated, and high-quality responses. Furthermore, by providing 24*7 support virtual assistants avoid downtime when providing real-time assistance.

5. Patient Onboarding & Engagement

The rise of virtual assistants has introduced newer approaches to care delivery and broadened access to healthcare by reaching out to patients outside the four walls of the hospital. Virtual assistants used to answer simple patient questions, but now they help patients find different services and choose the best ones based on their needs. Patients want information that is specific to them to learn about their health. Virtual assistants bridge this gap and assist patients in completing tasks more quickly.

Virtual assistants can improve patient onboarding and healthcare consumer engagement in a variety of ways, including:

a. Provide a customized experience: To maintain a conversational tone with patients without requiring one-on-one human interaction, virtual assistants rely on continuous tuning and testing.

b. Maintain a meaningful relationship with patients: The ability of virtual assistants to communicate with patients across multiple platforms and languages contributes to increased onboarding and engagement.

c. Provide interesting information: Chatbots successfully deliver engaging information to patients by utilizing fact sheets, web links, images, videos, and FAQs.

By responding quickly to queries and providing educational content, virtual assistants help you build trust with your patients. Patient onboarding is critical because it represents revenue opportunities for your hospitals, especially if you want to enroll new patients as soon as possible. Implementing virtual assistants can significantly reduce manual patient onboarding efforts.

6. Live call transcription and symptom detection

Live call transcription will help in identifying certain words and phrases that indicate a patient is healing well or that should receive additional attention. This will create a better chance to make timely decisions by detecting symptoms at an early stage.

RPA can enter the data (the symptoms detected) into a case management system for some experts to investigate further. With the least amount of human involvement, RPA may set up template auto-fill, copying and pasting information, field entries, and more. So if a symptom is detected with RPA integration, a ticket can be created or a case can be created in CRM. The time spent switching between applications on the desktop is eliminated via integrations with such solutions.

This removes the need to switch back and forth between separate systems. Additionally, it lessens the chance of any typing errors. RPA integration enables the agent to provide the patient with satisfactory service without having to wait for the agent to enter the data, hence improving average handling time.

7. Post-call analytics can detect the patient's concerns and trends

To ensure customer satisfaction, analyzing your calls is crucial. You can routinely detect the patient's concerns and trends with post-call analytics. To attribute and analyze phone calls from their marketing channels, campaigns, keywords, and websites to their clinics, AI-driven call tracking, and post-call analytics can be beneficial. The campaigns that are generating the most appointment calls can then receive more of their budget.

They can pinpoint issue sites by monitoring the percentage of appointment possibilities that convert at each location, and then dig deeper into the transcripts to figure out what went wrong. As a result, healthcare contact centers can ensure that their locations and agents are converting the worthwhile appointment calls they are generating from their marketing initiatives by identifying and fixing the problems.

On the other hand, patients calling the healthcare contact centers are providing valuable data. These data can be analyzed to understand the patient’s concerns, and emerging trends and design a better response system if needed.  This improves patient satisfaction and creates a better reputation for the healthcare provider.

8. Post-hospitalization follow-up

Many patients need to be followed up from the hospital even after they are discharged from the hospital. Voicebots designed with conversational AI are very useful. They can reach out to the patient or their family member, enquire about the health conditions, and if required set up a doctor call. This is a very smart way to engage with patients. Thanks to AI in healthcare contact centers.

 

What are the benefits of AI in healthcare contact centers?

- Enhanced accessibility to individualized care through self-service choices, leading to improved health management.

- Large data sets can be analyzed by AI, which can then be used to compile patient insights and do predictive analysis.

- Links patients with live agents who can assist with more complicated medical requirements or inquiries.

- Enhanced operations by assisting human contact center agents. As a result, staffing and IT resource costs are reduced.

Additionally, it allows the healthcare contact center to assist more patients and strengthens innovation through the tracking and reporting of patient data to the team of physicians by the healthcare contact center using automation and intelligent tools.

AI

Conclusion:

Artificial Intelligence studies patterns and employs algorithms and data to provide healthcare professionals with automated insights. Artificial Intelligence relieves agents of heavy workloads and helps healthcare contact centers save financially. Increased diagnosis effectiveness, improved information exchange, and improved preventive care are just a few of the many advantages that artificial intelligence in healthcare brings. Since Artificial Intelligence is unquestionably the future of healthcare, the only question that remains is, when is your business putting this into practice?

With the help of C-Zentrix, healthcare institutions can now provide high-quality, individually tailored patient care more affordable. Implementation and design are made simpler by Artificial Intelligence solutions to produce a distinctive experience for the business and, most crucially, the patient.

 

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