Regina Maria patients benefit from conversational support for digital symptom checking and appointment scheduling

Making healthcare an end-to-end digital experience.

Today’s consumer is more connected than ever before, accustomed to, and eager for smooth, seamless, and fast digital experiences on a daily basis. Today’s consumer is no longer satisfied by a traditional relationship with the brands he consumes.

The experiences he has with each individual brand become the measure of his satisfaction and determine whether the relationship with the brand will continue. Today’s consumer is also today’s patient: more knowledgeable than ever, he seeks support and information via digital channels at his convenience and expects a seamless, spotless experience with each interaction. How healthcare is delivered is changing, as is the interaction between healthcare providers and patients. While trust remains paramount in health services, patients demand more flexibility to manage their medical data and journey on multiple digital touchpoints.

Technologies like conversational AI assist health providers in keeping up with the dynamic rhythm of patient demands and putting the latter more fully in control of their health experience, from scheduling an appointment to meeting the doctor and making the payment online. Creating a positive, consistent patient experience in this manner is how healthcare systems worldwide can distinguish themselves as we begin to establish a new normal of expectations beyond the pandemic.

The Challenge

In their quest for convenience, speed, and ease of access, patients today have lost the patience of calling a call center or scheduling an exploratory discussion with a medical practitioner to get answers to their questions.

More often than not, they reach for the mobile phone that is never too far away and attempt to solve their problem independently. In today’s world, Google has become the first resource people turn to for answers to health-related questions, accounting for 5% of all searches on the platform. The problem is that this process rarely produces the most accurate information, leading people to schedule appointments with the wrong specialist. Even before this project, Regina Maria was well on its way to becoming one of the most digitized health service providers in the region. On the other hand, its interactions with patients were hampered by these erroneous appointments, which resulted in wasted time for both patients and doctors and significant frustration on both sides. As a result, the network began to wonder whether conversational AI technology could not produce a solution to optimize how well-informed patients were when selecting the specialty they needed to visit.

The Solution

Regina Maria’s current need was met through a conversational business application developed by DRUID based on the technology platform for symptom checking of Polish company Infermedica. The resulting intelligent virtual assistant, available to Regina Maria patients for free on the company’s website and mobile app, creates an engaging digital experience for patients by directing them, quickly and efficiently, to the appropriate medical specialist for an appointment.

The process is simple: once online, patients are guided to answer a series of questions that allow the conversational AI assistant to assess their symptoms and risk factors using a solid database of over 720 conditions. Based on the results of this analysis, using a fully automated and digitized process, the AI virtual assistant then connects the patients with the appropriate medical services and guides them to make an appointment. DRUID’s proprietary conversational AI technology fully supports the patient conversation, allowing complete flexibility and integration with a wide range of other technology solutions. Thus, the new AI virtual assistant integrates with Regina Maria’s MyAccount functionality to identify the patient correctly, then connects to Infermedica’s database for the initial symptom assessment, and finally to the medical software and contact center to schedule the appointment. Appointment options are available for patients in both physical clinics and the Virtual Clinic, with the latter allowing appointments to be set up much more quickly, saving the patient’s time, and allowing patients to see the right doctors without unnecessary delays.

DRUID created the conversational AI assistant with Infermedica’s API, a technology that allows for flexible access to all the platform’s features. The platform is a complex toolbox of advanced medical technologies that includes an AI-driven Inference Engine and a Medical Knowledge Base with thousands of clinically validated medical concepts. So far, it has supported over 10 million digital health checkups worldwide, and this number will only grow as Regina Maria’s five million patients use it regularly. This project represents DRUID’s first symptom-checking use case. It demonstrates DRUID technology’s incredible adaptability to integrate tech innovations from other suppliers to build the best solution to meet the client’s needs..

Learnings

Patients increasingly want to be in control of their healthcare journey, and healthcare providers realize that this journey does not cover only what occurs at the point of care. Instead, the journey includes everything from when the patient first considers seeing a doctor to payment, post-appointment care, and follow up.

Cloud adoption, AI, and IoT are actively contributing to the digital transformation of healthcare by establishing the right culture, tools, and processes to allow healthcare providers to closely accompany patients at every stage of their patient journey. Conversational technology in healthcare has numerous advantages, including lowering costs, putting less strain on healthcare professionals, and allocating resources more efficiently. The single most significant benefit, however, is improved patient outcomes, which translates into keeping them healthy, happy, and loyal.

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