With the lockdown and restrictions in place due to the COVID-19 pandemic, many people found it difficult to meet their doctors or have appointments scheduled. This forced patients to contact their physicians, therapists, and pharmacists remotely via messaging platforms as healthcare facilities were inundated with COVID-19 cases. Moreover, people with pre-existing health conditions were designated in the high-risk category for COVID-19 susceptibility. Hence, such patients had to adopt to messaging platforms for their physician-patient consultations.
Were Consultations Smoothly Managed?
• Patients trying to reach out to teleconsultants were waiting in queue due to the overwhelming inflow of calls
• Calls were re-directed to other teleconsultants when it did not pertain to their field of expertise
• Patients would face challenges with booking appointments, tracking reports, and pharmacy support
Technology is driving the future and innovative solutions are helping businesses function effectively. Conversational ai is one such solution that can enhance customer support processes in healthcare more effectively.
How Can the Health Care Sector Benefit from Conversational ai?
Conversational ai is not just a mere chat bot. A regular chatbot will respond to only the pre-defined questions. Any query out of the scope cannot be effectively handled by the chatbot. What makes conversational ai unique is that this platform understands the intent of the message/query. The platform will respond to the query, otherwise it will redirect it to a specialized human agent.
• The intelligent chatbot engine would assist in suggesting the relevant specialist a patient may require, book an appointment and get advance approval from the insurance provider. All seamlessly done over messaging.
• On the date or prior to the date of appointment, patients can transfer their periodic lab reports to the healthcare facility through the last conversational thread. The BoT can collate lab reports, patient insurance cover, prior drug dispensation for the treating physician to have a clearer perspective about their patient's current condition. At the slated appointment a video call is deployed between the patient and their physician for the consultation to begin.
• As in a regular consultation the physician can assess the symptoms of the patient's vitals through live readings at the patient's end through conventional medical devices such as BP apparatus, glucose monitor, oxygen saturation meter etc like in the triage. This would be truly a contactless real-time patient-physician engagement that can be billed by any healthcare facility.
• The patient is guided through secure e-payment channels to pay for the consultation. Upon receipt of payment the Billing Bot transfers the conversation to the Pharmacy for drug dispensation.
• Upon payment settlement, the pharmacy packages the patient medicines and sends a pickup note to the last mile deliverer. The patient is updated as well as to when they can expect their medicines to be delivered.
• COVID-19: With regards to query related to the vaccine or isolation rules, the conversational ai can effectively handle it without an enormous amount of human interaction. In this way, the query of the customer is quickly resolved without having to wait in queue to speak to the customer agent.
Through Conversational ai, the challenges of this new normal can be made devoid of mindless wait times. The healthcare facilities can facilitate services to their patrons more effectively from patient consultations to the last mile delivery of medicines.
