This post is an excerpt from the article ‘’ by Andreea Plesea, Co-Founder and Global VP at Druid SA, published 11 Oct 2022.
Read the full article here.
Today’s patients seek support and information at their leisure via all channels, and they expect a seamless, rewarding experience with each health provider.
This spells change for the global healthcare industry because today’s digitally-savvy consumer is, at the same time, today’s patient. More knowledgeable than ever, they seek support and information at their leisure via digital channels, and they expect an impeccable experience with each interaction.
What Do Patients Want?
The interaction between healthcare providers and patients is changing, as is the delivery of health services. While trust is still the paramount prerequisite for health service quality, patients increasingly demand the flexibility of digital touchpoints to manage their medical data and journey.
Implementing conversational business applications in healthcare enables service providers in this field to keep up with the dynamic rhythm of patient demands. It puts patients at the centre of an exceptional user experience, letting them dictate the terms of the engagement and feel more in control of their healthcare interactions.
Patients increasingly want to have complete visibility into their healthcare journey. Healthcare providers realise that this does not stop at the point of care, it begins when the patient considers seeing a doctor and ends with payment, post-appointment care, and follow-up.
The Healthcare Industry Is Under Pressure
As we advance, the traditional healthcare model is no longer valid. Instead, the focus must be on transitioning to patient-centric models that improve the patient experience, and this can only be made possible using the right technology.
Although this has been the reality for years, the pandemic brought it into sharp focus. Once things were forced to go remote, the need for digital instruments became pressing, accelerating the industry’s openness to adopt conversational approaches.
Over the past 30 years, technology has consistently provided new ways for people to interact with one another, from emails to mobile telephony and, today, to always-on digital touchpoints.
The next step will be using technology like conversational AI to bring forth the next generation of entirely frictionless interactions that are fully available and feel as natural as talking to a neighbour.
How Can Conversational Business Applications Support Tomorrow’s Patient Experience?
Transitioning to using Conversational Business Applications (CBA) can be a powerful tool to take the patient experience to the next level.
In fact, CBA can help:
Speed Up Access to Information
A complex conversational platform that connects to various databases and enterprise systems and uses RPA bots to make connections easier and retrieve the correct information faster can be a significant advantage for any healthcare provider. Whether collecting patient data, finding past information in health information records, or making the connections between the two, CBA can accelerate the process of offering a satisfactory resolution to the patient.
Enhance Patient Support
Speed and ease of use are the defining characteristics of satisfactory patient interactions. Patients want to connect to their healthcare providers at any time and from any location, schedule appointments, select the doctors they want to see or access their medical history. Using CBA in these contexts improves the visibility offered to patients and extends the services they can access online to even more complex instances like invoicing and financial support.
Streamline Internal Productivity
CBA uses the powerful combination of AI and automation technologies to go beyond pre-defined questions and answers and make complex correlations between information to generate end-to-end solutions and guide users to complete their tasks. They can provide healthcare workers with simple, straightforward, and intelligent responses that can result in significant time savings daily. Additionally, they can automate meeting and appointment scheduling for managers. They speed up and improve the efficiency with which managers can complete routine but time-consuming tasks such as leave requests, expense and budget approvals, contracts, and salaries.
To Conclude
CBA eliminates friction by combining abilities to assist patients in navigating the administrative complexities of healthcare. It supplements, rather than replaces, human teams. Most importantly, it provides the scale of engagement that healthcare desperately requires.
Conversational AI is becoming a part of the healthcare experience in the aftermath of the pandemic. What started as a necessity to offer service is fast turning into the desired experience that patients come to expect as a minimum. The world of healthcare is taking steps toward a digital revolution, and it is just the beginning of an exciting journey.