The real stories of how Conversational AI makes your company smarter

Joe Nieto highlights how the healthcare sector uses Conversational AI to transform patient experiences with automation.

Today’s modern enterprises are embracing a new technological solution: Conversational AI. This isn’t a simple chatbot or even ChatGPT, it’s much more than that, as explored in our previous blog.

Interacting with Conversational AI feels as natural as chatting with another colleague. Imagine effortlessly completing tasks, answering complex questions and streamlining operations, all through intuitive, conversational interactions.

But is Conversational AI just a buzzword, or does it hold real-world value for large companies? We’ve decided to delve deeper into the technology, showcasing powerful success stories where organizations harnessed the technology’s true potential.

Streamlining vaccine verification with
Conversational AI

Texas Children’s Hospital provides comprehensive pediatric specialty care to infants, children, teens, and young adults from birth to age 21. With 973 beds, the hospital stands tall as the largest children’s hospital in the US and serves mostly the Southern United States region.

In the face of a resurgence of COVID cases in mid-2021, Texas Children’s Hospital needed to efficiently verify the vaccination status of over 13,000 staff, without burdening personnel already stretched thin caring for patients. More importantly, the verification process would need to limit any impact on the hospital’s efficiency and be completed within a tight timeframe of 60 days.

The hospital had to act fast to reduce the risk of COVID-19 cases, particularly as the global pandemic heightened the urgency of embracing innovation. It therefore turned to conversational AI technology to streamline the verification process and prioritize patient care. 

Partnering with Druid AI and Element Blue – a Tquila Automation Company, the hospital co-created an Conversational AI-powered virtual assistant to facilitate the vaccination verification process. The results brought about a series of transformative outcomes, including:

• 95% reduction in staffing requirements for verification
• 100% compliance rate for the process within a two-month deadline
• 50-70% reduction in costs owing to the digital nature of the process

The AI-powered assistant was simply integrated into the hospital’s existing IT infrastructure and conveniently enabled staff to submit vaccination documents in multiple languages too. The adoption of Conversational AI significantly improved efficiency but notably, human resources dedicated to the verification process were reduced by x25, showing the transformative potential of Conversational AI in healthcare.  An intuitive User Interface (UI) engineered by Element Blue supported fast adoption and required zero training for the user to complete their tasks. 

Providing better care in telemedicine

The rise of telemedicine in recent years has created new challenges for healthcare providers. For many patients, virtual visits are a convenient alternative to traditional in-person appointments. Yet, those attending a virtual appointment still require identity verification, insurance validation, and often a short questionnaire before seeing the provider.

A US hospital, with an array of clinics, saw many patients requesting a virtual visit versus an in-person clinical visit for convenience. With limited staff, this process often led to delays, frustrated patients and a heavy technology debt trying to accommodate the change. 

Each clinic within the hospital had set up its own process, followed its own protocols and typically required one or more Medical Assistants (MA), Physician Assistants (PA) and any number of providers. The process was flawed and often failed to collect all the necessary information from patients, leading to additional work for staff further down the line.

Conversational AI helped the hospital address this by creating a virtual rooming assistant through a combined solution utilizing the Druid AI and UiPath platforms. This assistant conducted preliminary steps like verifying medications and obtaining blood pressure and temperature readings before virtual visits, ensuring the providers had all the information they needed, leading to a more standardized and efficient virtual visit experience. 

Now, smaller, specialty clinics can expand their patient offerings without a commitment of extra staff or technology. Conversational AI also provides an additional revenue stream for the hospital, as virtual appointments are now covered by most US health insurance plans.

Real-time appointment setting using Conversational AI

Yet, Conversational AI offers so much more than that. 

From VIPs and members of royal families to ambassadors and sports celebrities, everyone needs medical care in a highly confidential manner. At a prestigious acute care hospital that provides care for high-profile patients across Europe, the Middle East and Asia (EMEA), a virtual intelligent assistant provided a specific market with premier, high-value services in an exclusive setting. 

This virtual assistant became the front door, readily available 24/7 to answer questions about the hospital’s premier services, schedule appointments and communicate crucial information – all in the client’s native language with pinpoint accuracy. VIPs can inquire about treatments and schedule consultations at their convenience, regardless of time zone differences. 

But the impact goes beyond convenience. Conversational AI acts as a powerful data collection tool. By analyzing interaction data, the hospital gains valuable insights into customer profiles and origins. This feeds into targeted marketing campaigns, allowing them to promote specific services to the right audience effectively.

In essence, Conversational AI is more than just a virtual assistant, it’s a bridge connecting the world with medical care, all delivered with cultural sensitivity and unmatched efficiency and accuracy.