Call Center Scheduling Featured Article
Royal Philips and MedChat Partner to Bring AI Chatbot Services to Philips Patient Navigation Manager
Throughout the world, health care providers’ call centers are busy places. Health-related calls tend to be complex, which drives up the time it takes to resolve patient inquiries. Added to that a global pandemic, and many healthcare call centers are finding themselves overwhelmed. Many have turned to AI-driven solutions that help them automate the more routine calls, and prescreen calls to determine the best agent to route the calls to, speeding up the pace of call resolution. AI-driven technologies can also automate some of the requirements of patient follow-up.
Health technology company Royal Philips (News - Alert) and MedChat have struck a deal to integrate MedChat’s live chat and AI-driven chatbot services into Philips Patient Navigation Manager, helping improve call center efficiency and speed the time to resolve patient inquiries. With the combined offering, Philips now enables its customers in North America to create automated communication workflows that function seamlessly alongside patient access and call center operations. Hospitals and outpatient clinics can also digitally navigate patients from the time an order is placed, to when it is scheduled and completed through follow-up.
Patient Navigation Manager automatically guides patients through their care journey using HIPAA-compliant SMS, email, and voice messages. With the new MedChat capabilities, patients are able to perform complex tasks by linking directly with live agents using MedChat’s advanced chatbot services. Medchat’s natural language processing (NLP) reads and understands patients’ messages, while its machine learning algorithms adapt over time to provide the most relevant information. It’s symptom checker and triage bot – now embedded within Patient Navigation Manager’s core communications technologies – evaluates 125,000 evidence-based references to diagnose patients and recommend the appropriate care setting.
Since being introduced a year ago, Philips Patient Navigation Manager experienced widespread adoption among health systems in the United States, generating early success for customers including an 86 percent reduction in same-day cancellations, a 45 percent reduction in patient no-shows, and a 30 percent increase in referral conversion efficiency.
“By combining MedChat’s technology with Philips Patient Navigation Manager, we can help healthcare enterprises deliver streamlined diagnostic workflows that meet the quadruple aim of better patient outcomes, enhanced patient and staff experiences, and lower operational costs due to the elimination of burdensome manual outreach task,” noted Brent Berthy, General Manager of Precision Diagnosis Solutions at Philips.
Edited by Luke Bellos