Conversational AI for Healthcare. Transform and simplify patient experience.

Healthcare worldwide: challenges, needs, trends.

Research by Voicebot shows that the percentage of U.S. people interacting with the healthcare system via voice assistant was 7.5% in 2019. The exact figure climbed up to 21% in 2021. This happens because, in today’s world, people want to solve issues on their own, on a 24/7 basis, and through their favorite – often multiple – channels.

In fact, 56% of patients have declared that they would be interested in booking appointments, asking for information about hours, locations, or fees, asking for medical advice, etc., through automated interactions, resulting in 90% of U.S. hospitals implementing voicebots and chatbots by 2025.

Considering that staff worldwide has been hit by a general shortage, fund reduction, and a pandemic – all this with outdated technology – the challenge of giving patients the care and attention they need – or even improving it from past times – gets more and more pressing. No one can afford to not overcome it.

So the question is: how can healthcare organizations stay on track with appointments, schedules, questions, requests for advice, certificates, and so on, avoiding burnout, errors, and delays?

The answer is Imagicle Conversational AI.

Imagicle Conversational AI. The future of Healthcare is digital.

Imagicle Conversational AI automates conversations through natural interactions and integrates chat and voice channels with virtual and human agents to improve customer and employee experience. 

It’s natively integrated with your calling platform and Imagicle’s inbound call management solutions. It makes every interaction natural, intuitive, and efficient without requiring additional lines or telephone numbers.

It creates the perfect balance between human and virtual: every request is managed by a virtual assistant via voicebot or chatbot in real-time, through the patient’s favorite channel, with the option of transferring to an operator when needed. A complete omnichannel solution, answering the needs of any user.

Some examples? Answering standard questions, booking appointments, picking up after-hour calls, and much more.  

Conversational AI has what it takes to create a new future for healthcare organizations. Staff will have a virtual assistant available to help them with easy and repetitive tasks at any time of day, seven days a week, freeing them up to take care of more complex and pressing matters, thus avoiding overwork and minimizing errors or overlooks.

Let’s see some concrete use cases for Conversational AI in Healthcare.

Simplified appointment scheduling.

Patients tend to get frustrated about long waits on the phone and slow responses. Plus, if it’s 9:00pm, they might not want to wait until the following morning to book an urgent appointment.

Conversational AI automatically schedules appointments at any time of day, 7 days a week; and it takes it a step further. The AI enquires the cause of the visit, collects relevant information about the caller, checks for doctor availability and books mutually convenient time slots, giving live agents more free time to focus on their core activities.

Thanks to Conversational AI, appointment scheduling also turns into a valuable source of data: the AI is able to automatically collect data about the patient that will make it easier to provide them with the best assistance.

Answering FAQs.

Healthcare receptionists: how many times have you answered to questions about hours, locations, fees, available doctors, exam results, etc.?

And patients: how many times have you been waiting hours on the phone just to get this easy info?

Conversational AI ends the stress. Hours, locations, fee schedules: it handles repetitive questions at any time of day. Removing inquisitive calls from workers’ schedule frees up time to handle more important stuff and improves the service for patients, erasing the possibility of mistakes.

Proactive alerts and reminders.

Busy lives lead to forgetting important appointments, tasks, deadlines, and so on. Conversational AI takes care of the problem by sending proactive reminders over SMS, email, chat, and more.

“This sounds great, but this is just theory”. You’re right. There’s nothing like seeing a process first-hand to understand its true value, which is why we have a product demo ready for you.

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Conversational AI for Healthcare. See it in action.

Click here to see a live demo of Imagicle Conversational AI and understand its true potential.

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But how does it actually work?

Thanks to Imagicle Conversational AI, a user (whether internal or external) can start a conversation via voice or chat (using their favorite tool such as Whatsapp, Telegram, Messenger, Slack, Google, Webex, MS Teams, etc.) in any language, 24/7.

In the first case, the call will pass through the company’s calling platform and, thanks to the Imagicle UCX Suite, it will be taken over by a voicebot-type virtual agent who, thanks to an advanced conversational IVR, will answer and guide the callers in resolving their request. In the second case, the virtual agent will be a chatbot.

In both cases, the platform will interact with the information contained in the internal systems to provide adequate answers. Consider, for example, a request for information about the opening hours of a doctor’s study, to book an appointment, or to obtain the results of a medical exam.

At any time, the system can scale the request, either via voice or chat, to a human operator if the request proves too complex to manage via bot, or after an explicit request from the caller.

A look behind the scenes.

More specifically, multiple technologies process and contextualize the spoken or written word and figure out the best way to handle and respond to user input.

As you can see in the diagram above, the request that arrived via chat is first decoded by an NLU system (Natural Language Understanding that leverages AI to understand what a piece of text means), then the “brain” of the system understands the true intent of the user. 

At this point, thanks to NLG (Natural Language Generation), it responds adequately to the request.

If it is a voice request, the system works the same way, but at the beginning of the process, an STT system (Speech to text) transforms the voice into text before passing it to the NLU. At the end of the process, a TTS (Text to speech) system is able to vocalize the response.

When the system’s brain realizes that the request is too complex or the caller wants a “human” interaction, the operator can intervene directly via chat or by telephone. In the second case, of course, the call can be addressed using our Advanced Queueing algorithms and managed by the operator through our amazing Imagicle Attendant Console.

A complete suite of apps. More than a simple platform.

Imagicle Conversational AI is just one of many apps inside the Imagicle UCX Cloud Suite – the complete set of UC apps available behind a single pane of glass to simplify deployment, administration, support, and use; enriched with AI/ML and conversational experiences to keep up with the new, more digital world.

By pairing Conversational AI with the other apps in the Suite, healthcare organizations can reach a whole new level of automation, digital advancement, productivity, and overall happiness in their work, while providing patients with a renovated, easy experience and better care.

To give you some examples, Call Recording helps you stay compliant with regulations like HIPAA and GDPR by recording all calls with the possibility of skipping sensitive information. Voice Analytics analyzes all call data with transcription and sentiment analysis, making it easy to understand if agents are following protocols and solve disputes. Attendant Console with Advanced Queueing and Auto Attendant allows a more organized and professional management and routing and calls, and so on.

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Imagicle UCX Cloud Suite.

Would you like to see how it works? Book a free demo today!

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Conclusions.

Conversational AI is the piece the healthcare sector is missing to open the doors to the future. It can simplify the lives of both workers and patients and help organizations stay on track with digital advancements by implementing virtual assistants – either chatbots or voicebots – that automatize routine activities, taking them off the shoulders of employees and giving patients more info at any time of day and overall better care.

Start investing in your future today. Invest in Conversational AI.