Rising to Meet the Expectations of an Impeccable Patient Experience

We live in an always-on world where people have become accustomed to having access to seamless, frictionless digital experiences at the push of a button. For today's consumer, the traditional relationship with the brands he consumes no longer suffices. Instead, the quality of his interactions with each brand is how he gauges his satisfaction and whether he will return to do business again.

This spells change for the global healthcare industry because today's digitally-savvy consumer is, at the same time, today's patient. More knowledgeable than ever, he seeks support and information at his leisure via digital channels, and he expects a seamless, impeccable experience with each interaction.

What Do Patients Want?

Therefore, the interaction between healthcare providers and patients is changing, as is the delivery of health services. While trust is still the paramount prerequisite for health service quality, patients increasingly demand the flexibility of digital touchpoints to manage their medical data and journey. Implementing conversational business applications in healthcare enables service providers in this field to keep up with the dynamic rhythm of patient demands. Simultaneously, it puts patients fully at the center of an exceptional user experience, letting them dictate the terms of the engagement and feel more in control of their healthcare interactions.

Patients increasingly want to have complete visibility into their healthcare journey. On their end, healthcare providers realize that this journey does not stop at the point of care. Instead, the journey begins when the patient considers seeing a doctor and ends with payment, post-appointment care, and follow-up. Conversational AI and RPA automations actively contribute to healthcare's digital transformation by establishing the right culture, tools, and processes to enable healthcare providers to closely accompany patients at every stage of their patient journey. 

The Healthcare Industry Is Under Pressure

The healthcare industry has long been under strain. The world's population is living longer lives, stretching existing resources thin, while expectations for quality and extent of service have constantly been rising. Because of this combination of factors, frequently, the sector has seen itself forced to choose between what it can afford to modernize and how to utilize limited resources to the best advantage. As we advance, the traditional healthcare model is no longer valid. Instead, the focus must be on transitioning to patient-centric models that improve the patient experience, and this can only be made possible using the right technology. Although this has been the reality for years, the pandemic brought it into sharp focus. Once things were forced to go remote, the need for digital instruments became pressing, accelerating the industry's openness to adopt conversational approaches.

Over the past 30 years, technology has consistently provided new ways for people to interact with one another, from emails to mobile telephony and, today, to always-on digital touchpoints. The next step will be using technology like conversational AI to bring forth the next generation of entirely frictionless interactions that are fully available and feel as natural as talking to a neighbor.

How Can Conversational Business Applications Support Tomorrow's Patient Experience?

Too often in the past, the healthcare interactions patients received were transactional in nature. In an age of more demanding patients, and when healthcare providers are increasingly measured against the same benchmarks as online retailers, on-off interactions are a terrible sign of satisfaction and loyalty. Transitioning to using Conversational Business Applications (CBA) can be a powerful tool to take the patient experience to the next level.

In fact, CBA can help:

Speed Access to Information

A complex conversational platform that connects to various databases and enterprise systems and uses RPA bots to make connections easier and retrieve the correct information faster can be a significant advantage for any healthcare provider. Whether collecting patient data, finding past information in health information records, or making the connections between the two, CBA can accelerate the process of offering a satisfactory resolution to the patient.

Enhance Patient Support 

Speed and ease of use are the defining characteristics of satisfactory patient interactions. Like in any other industry, patients are no longer content to wait. Instead, they want to connect to their healthcare providers at any time and from any location, schedule appointments, select the doctors they want to see or access their medical history. Using CBA in these contexts improves the visibility offered to patients and extends the services they can access online to even more complex instances like invoicing and financial support. Such automated workflows reduce patient effort while also shortening resolution times.

Streamline Internal Productivity

In today's day and age, many healthcare providers struggle with internal complexity, complicated organizational structures, slow internal processes, and an inability for teams to cut through the red tape and get valuable work done. Maintaining context while ensuring meaningful, dynamic collaboration flows is critical to rebalancing user experience and supporting workplace productivity. As a result, every line of business must concentrate solely on improving and simplifying workflows, particularly at the senior level, where the value-added they can bring directly impacts overall corporate performance. CBA uses the powerful combination of AI and automation technologies to go beyond pre-defined questions and answers and make complex correlations between information to generate end-to-end solutions and guide users to complete their tasks. They can provide healthcare workers with simple, straightforward, and intelligent responses that can result in significant time savings daily. Additionally, they can automate meeting and appointment scheduling for managers. They speed up and improve the efficiency with which managers can complete routine but time-consuming tasks such as leave requests, expense and budget approvals, contracts, and salaries.

Watch this video to discover how Element Blue, in partnership with DRUID AI, helped their clients gain speed in complying with CDC guidelines during the COVID-19 outbreak and reduce operational costs, offering employees and patients smoother and more qualitative interactions with their healthcare providers.

To Conclude

CBA eliminates friction by combining abilities, much like an army of intelligent virtual assistants capable of providing an infinite amount of conversational power to assist patients in navigating the administrative complexities of healthcare. It supplements, rather than replaces, human teams. Most importantly, it provides the scale of engagement that healthcare desperately requires.

Conversational AI is becoming a part of the healthcare experience in the aftermath of the pandemic. What started as a necessity to offer service is fast turning into the desired experience that patients come to expect as a minimum. The world of healthcare is taking steps toward a digital revolution, and it is just the beginning of an exciting journey.