AI Phone Agents in Clinical Practice and Patient Centered Care
In Clinical Practice, patient interaction is at the center of everything when it comes to achieving positive outcomes. Put more simply, it's about communication and access to information.
Artificially intelligent phone agents are one massive opportunity for the healthcare industry to improve patient outcomes on a level never before seen. Simply by improving upon some of the fundamental challenges of clinical practice.
Patient care doesn't just happen when the doctor is in the room. While treatment is paramount, it's not the only factor in a good outcome for a patient. In fact the many "challenges" stem from what happens "outside the room".
Some of these challenges include:
- Care Coordination and scheduling appointments
- Post-discharge information needs
- Follow-up calls
In this article we'll cover how intelligent phone agents can address all of the above challenges and more for healthcare providers and clinicians.
Understanding Bland's AI Agents in Healthcare
The Artificial intelligence revolution has given healthcare systems a giant opportunity. AI phone agents have the capability to not only reduce costs but simultaneously increase the level of care and patient outcomes.
Fully Dynamic Call Scripts
With Bland's Conversational Pathways tools, you can build elaborate scripts for your agents to follow when they speak to your customers or prospects. These are similar in design to regular "scripts" with one powerful exception. Phone agents can be prompted with "goals" to accomplish in their own way versus simply repeating exact lines (though they do this well too!). This is the secret sauce that allows our agents to think and react based on what the caller is saying.
Integration Capable
No phone calls happen in a vacuum. There is always a CRM to be updated, support ticket to be created, appointment to be schedule, or transfer to another person to be made. Bland's AI phone agents are designed to handle all integrations with your existing tools and systems seamlessly. The agent (once taught how to access your system) will update them and interact with them according to your instructions and policies.
Enhancing Clinical Practice with Bland's AI Agents
Streamlining appointment scheduling and reminders
Most healthcare systems around the world are taxed. With ever-increasing numbers of patients (many with chronic conditions) there is a growing administrative challenge that clinicians must face.
One of the most overlooked factors in patient outcomes is getting a patient in need direct access to care. While fundamental, often the care process breaks at the stage of actually scheduling an appointment. AI phone agents are built to solve this problem.
Where many patient care facilities lack the staff to handle inquiries and scheduling, AI phone agents offer unlimited scalability in the amount of patient conversations that can be conducted simultaneously. Wait times can be virtually eliminated using this approach.
Additionally, understaffed healthcare organizations (most) lack the ability to be proactive about patient care. Reminders are rarely sent out. AI phone agents address this challenge as well. Based on records, agents are able to reach out proactively for scheduling, or respond and adjust to patients whose schedules have unexpected conflicts.
Coordinating follow-up care and instructions
After a procedure follow-up care is another avenue for complications and reduced patient outcomes. Outside the clinic, many patients struggle with processing the influx of information provided that addresses their post-procedural responsibilities.
AI phone agents shine when it comes to delivery of centralized information. A phone agent trained on a "knowledge base" of information for a specific patient can answer questions and summarize relevant information.
Follow-up Information Gathering
Oftentimes medical professionals don't hear back from a patient after a procedure has completed. The system is currently designed to address only if the patient is experiencing negative effects (and decides to call in and complain). Because of this there is often a huge gap in the understanding of a procedure's success rates and potential side effects a patient experiences.
Follow-up calls address this need, but are rarely conducted by overtaxed clinicians. AI phone agents can handle this labor intensive process with ease. Integrating into a care system, dynamic follow-up calls for feedback and information gathering from patients could have a massive impact. AI technologies have enabled phone agents like Bland's to conduct conversational surveys that would typically require human intelligence to complete effectively.
Challenges with AI Phone Agents in Healthcare
The top of mind issue with artificial intelligence systems is data privacy and security. In the healthcare industry, this concern is even more pronounced. AI Systems have the capability of integrating with multiple sources of data in order to achieve their purposes. If some of that data is patient related, an additional compliance burden exists. HIPAA compliance is essential for many use cases, and data privacy laws for specific regions like the EU can create additional work for those implementing solutions.
Future Possibilities of AI in Healthcare Organization
Insurance Billing
Even small practice healthcare providers are forced to employ staff dedicated to managing insurance claims. Complexity of claims has only increased, and often multiple steps are follow-up are required to see the completion of a single claim. Dishonesty and unethical business practices by insurance companies makes this process all the more difficult.
AI Phone agents could provide a far more effective system for insurance claim follow-up if armed with the right information. An AI system to manage a claim, read relevant insurance policy documents and respond intelligently to insurance operator's requests could be a powerful ally for most medical professionals that rely on insurance based income for their services.
Mental Health Monitoring
AI phone agents are far more capable than simply booking appointments or providing basic after-care information for patients. They are also capable of picking up context within a conversation. While symptomatic diagnosis based on pure artificial intelligence has not reached regulatory approval yet worldwide, the Bland team strongly believes that the industry will see some form of continuous monitoring of patient sentiment with AI in the near feature.
Phone agent technology already possesses the capability of this level of sentiment detection, including Bland's agents. However regulatory approval for this type of application will take some time and additional work.
Healthcare AI Phone Agent Implementations
There are several steps necessary if you're considering implementing AI phone agents in your healthcare organization.
1. Perform an assessment of your use case, and identify any regulatory gaps
Identify what type of information will be collected by and passed to the phone agents. This will dictate your regulatory strategy for implementation.
2. Speak to Blands team for a consultation
The Bland team is standing by to help you wrap your head on an AI phone agent solution. They'll listen to your current structure, and propose elegant solutions for implementing agents.
3. Build and train your solution
The feedback loop between designing your AI phone agent system and refining it is crucial to an effective roll-out.
4. Gradual roll-out and evaluation
The beauty of AI phone agents from Bland is that they are completely scalable solutions. Whether you choose to send one call per day or one thousand, the agents will perform in the same way. This gives your company the ability to evaluate the efficacy of your AI phone system as meticulously as necessary.
Take the First Step
This article has barely scratched the surface of what operational workflows can be handled by AI phone agents. Bland's team is here to help you assess your organization's current situation, and build a powerful solution.
