How Artificial Intelligence and Chatbots are Enhancing Medical Experiences for Patients

When Microsoft announced its recent deal to acquire Nuance Communications, it told the world that the health care industry is serious about leveraging the latest and greatest technology solutions to advance the industry significantly into the future. For several years now, health care has been leveraging more technology—in all facets including patient care, physician charting and documentation, medical technology and procedures, and especially facility amenities.

The deal with Nuance is of particular interest because it will enable more physicians to leverage speech recognition technology as doctors seek to increase the speed of patient documentation through dictation rather than traditional note taking.

If anything, the recent pandemic has certainly expedited the way health care and insurance professionals are leveraging technology to increase patient care and overall efficiencies to improve the all-around customer experience.

Technology Today Isn’t Just Building Up Doctors

Resolving customer inquiries more quickly and helping patients and their families connect with more of the important information they need in a speedier manner are just a few areas where technology has already been playing a larger role for the industry.

For several years now, patients have been increasingly interacting with technology during their medical experience, either at home or within the walls of the medical facility. This interaction has not always been smooth, and at times it has created more problems and confusion when patients simply can’t get the answers they need to questions they have.

Patient resolutions are a critical and necessary part of the health care process today, and it’s important that health care organizations and insurers are leveraging the right technology to reach resolutions more rapidly and more accurately.

Helping Patients Resolve Issues Quickly

As an example of this, today’s patients want customer service representatives to meet their unique needs and provide them with answers that serve as an extension of their medical providers’ offices. When a question needs to be answered, patients want the right assistance at their fingertips.

To meet this need, health care providers are leveraging highly sophisticated customer service technologies, such as artificial intelligence (AI), self-service, and new, advanced chatbots to provide a resolution-centered, stress-free solution.

With technology adoption at an all-time high, tools that allow self-service customer response techniques are more important than ever—and embraced. Expanding online options can help alleviate health care facilities’ high call volumes. Self-service is a rapidly growing customer care pathway that can make a significant impact on workforce load for hospitals, healthcare facilities and insurers.

Self-discovery tools, such as interactive tutorials, adaptive FAQs, interactive guides, and videos that contain the simple, DIY answers many patients are looking for reduce contact center volumes, reserving agents to address more complex customer inquiries.

These tools allow the patient to solve most of his/her needs themselves, putting the power back into their own hands. A patient can tap into multimedia-support materials for productive learning that mimics the experience of chatting with a live agent. Self-service tools, such as interactive tutorials and videos, can also aid patients in their customer care journey by visually showing them how to resolve a problem.

In a fully AI-enabled customer support environment, not only are patients relying on self-service and FAQ tutorials themselves; contact center agents can also retrieve AI-curated content from the same source materials, creating a fast and personal experience for the patient versus agents relying on scripts. What’s more, the AI-powered information hub often allows agents to be quicker and more accurate in resolving a customer issue.

Furthermore, in some instances, patients are seamlessly redirected from a chatbot to a live agent on more technical questions where a higher skillset level of expertise is required to field questions.

Finding Resolutions

With the AI-powered resolution technology available today, more health care and insurance contact centers can empower the delivery of health care through technology. It is becoming clearer each and every day that health and insurance organizations that embrace and accelerate their digital, AI investments can improve patient outcomes, reduce costs, scale appropriately, and arrive at quicker customer resolutions.