Three Ways Conversational AI Improves Healthcare Operations for Patients and Agents
In a world where state-of-the-art smart phones, watches, and even self-driving cars are the norm, why are patients expected to put up with the clunky IVR menus that healthcare providers have used since the 90s?
Long hold times and confusing directions to “press 1” for this or “press 5” for that lead to caller frustration and call abandonment. Patients and their families should be able to quickly access care or schedule an appointment. Contact centers should be able to manage call volumes without employee burnout. When hospitals and clinics upgrade call management systems with conversational AI, caller experience improves, operational expenses decrease, and patients have easier healthcare journeys.
Here are three ways that conversational AI works to transform the delivery of patient care:
1. Improve Patient Access by Handling Routine Tasks with AI
For example, “What are your hours of operation?” or “I need directions to the endoscopy clinic,” don’t require the support of a highly trained agent. Human effort is best reserved for complex patient inquiries. While websites and portals usually offer patient information and answers to frequently asked questions, it’s difficult to find what you need if you don’t know where to look, and many healthcare consumers continue to use the voice channel. Self-service solutions, such as intelligent virtual assistants (IVAs), allow callers to ask routine questions and receive answers without waiting on hold. The result is faster resolution for callers and reduced call volumes for agents.
2. Minimize Effort for Appointment Scheduling with AI
Appointment scheduling is a crucial operation in healthcare and the biggest driver of revenue, but it’s also one of the most time-consuming tasks for patient access center agents. While most patient portals offer appointment scheduling, they are often avoided by many segments of the population. Seven out of ten patients still use the phone to make an appointment with their healthcare provider. Parlance IVAs successfully engage with the majority of our customers’ calling communities, handling tasks such as appointment confirmations/cancellations and patient verification. Parlance leverages caller ID and electronic health record (EHR) data, in addition to clinic and hospital outbound call/text lists, to predict patients’ needs. We then offer probable options to address the reason for the call. This reduces caller effort and enables live agents to have more time for patients who need complex support.
3. Reduce Agent Burnout by Automating Redundant Tasks with AI
Time is money. An agent’s time is not well spent conducting a COVID screening, verifying contact information, or providing directions to a hospital or clinic. When Parlance IVAs automate this tedious work, agents operate at the top of their skillsets and use more of their time to attend to patients without feeling rushed. This removes stress from the contact center team and reduces employee burnout and turnover.
AI Optimizes Agent Effort to Improve Performance, Operations, and Caller Experience
The goal of conversational AI is not to replace human agents in healthcare, but to relieve them of the routine burdens that prevent them from operating as efficiently as possible. With this assistive technology at our fingertips, patient access centers shouldn’t settle for anything less than a call management solution that facilitates peak agent performance, improved first call resolution (FCR), decreased operational expenses, and excellent caller satisfaction.
At Parlance, we have always believed that callers deserve friction-free, voice-driven access to the right resources inside large enterprises. Our expertise enables health systems nationwide to feel confident taking advantage of industry-leading technologies. As a trusted partner, we are committed to delivering the most valuable combination of technology and service to our customers. The Parlance solution combines our proprietary phonetic names database with AI/Natural Language Processing and integration into EHR systems to deliver performance that is unrivaled in the industry.
By Nikki Ballinger
