5 Ways Conversational AI for Healthcare Improves the Patient Experience

It's no secret that two years of a global pandemic have put  a strain on the global healthcare industry. Resources are stretched thin, but patient expectations are higher than ever. When it comes to providing a superior patient experience, the healthcare industry needs to embrace new solutions to help them manage the new current reality. And one solution that can help reduce strain on your healthcare call center operators is conversational AI (artificial intelligence).  

Conversational AI is an essential tool for healthcare contact centers looking to scale their workforce and better manage interaction volumes. In this article, we’ll explain how automated and intelligent tools like healthcare chatbots can provide a better patient experience while optimizing contact center efficiency.  

What is conversational AI? 

Conversational AI is next-gen technology that uses natural language processing and a smart user interface design to provide an intuitive, automated service experience without the need for human intervention. This technology can be patient-facing, like UJET's Virtual Agent, which offers advanced chatbot features and dynamic conversation routing, or agent facing, such as UJET's Agent Assist, which helps automate routine tasks and make live agents more effective.  

Conversational AI seeks to eliminate common causes of patient frustration, including long wait times, inexperienced agents, and patients having to repeat themselves while being transferred to different departments. With intelligent automation and chatbots, those in the healthcare industry can offer a better patient experience without drastically increasing the size of their workforce. 

How healthcare and conversational AI work together

Due to the often-transactional nature of healthcare patient support, conversational AI can be a powerful tool to get patients the help they need quickly. Though AI solutions aren’t a replacement for human agents, these tools can help differentiate your practice from your competition and free up time for your live agents to focus on more complex issues. 

Let's look at five ways conversational AI for healthcare can improve patient care and make your practice more efficient: 

1. Collect information more quickly

A medical chatbot can help your team screen patients for symptoms, collect patient details like insurance information, and understand why they're contacting you in the first place. All of the info the chatbot collects is saved directly to your CRM so when the patient connects to a human agent, they can quickly pinpoint the issue and find a solution.

Behind the scenes, AI tools can automatically search for a patient's closest clinic location based on phone metadata or search through internal databases for patient information and trends. UJET's Agent Assist gathers this information to provide agents with step-by-step assistance throughout the call. That dramatically improves call and chat resolution times and prevents those all-too-familiar awkward pauses when agents must go digging for information on another screen. 

2. Route conversations with predictive intelligence

Conversational AI can eliminate the frustration patients often feel when trying to connect with the correct department. There's no need for complicated and time-consuming IVRs or transferring calls between agents. Instead, a chatbot or conversational interface gathers the necessary information upfront and then routes the conversation to the best agent for the job. This automated workflow reduces patient effort and speeds up resolution times. 

3. Automate routine support tasks

Agents are often responsible for repetitive, manual tasks like filing away tickets, copying notes into a CRM, sending out transcripts, and other time-consuming, laborious post-call work. That not only drains your operational efficiency but also adds the potential for human error to your data entry workflows. Conversational AI can support agents by automatically storing conversation details and tagging and organizing call data. Intelligent systems give your agents their time back while ensuring your patients' records are always accurate and up to date. 

4. Offer quick responses to frequently asked questions

A healthcare chatbot can relieve the pressure from your human agents and give your patients and clients a high level of care by providing answers to common questions that don't require a human touch. Conversational AI makes this interaction feel natural and intuitive rather than robotic. Patients don't need to wait to get help when a chatbot can easily retrieve information or documentation for them. 

5. Analyze traffic and improves contact center efficiency

AI can be a contact center supervisor's secret tool. Without it, managers must manually monitor wait times and constantly be on alert for trending issues and traffic spikes. With contact center AI in place, KPIs get monitored in real-time, and the AI can instantly divert traffic to reduce wait times and get patients the help they need faster.   

Contact center AI can also improve the quality of your reporting. Data gets organized and analyzed as it's collected, which delivers deep dives into analytical trends without the need to crunch the numbers manually. AI can build trend analysis reports that help supervisors process data and act on it in minutes.  

Explore UJET's conversational AI solutions for healthcare

UJET's contact center software integrates intelligent automation and AI features along the patient journey. From Virtual Agent collecting patient details and providing quick answers to Agent Assist helping agents offer the best possible care, conversational AI can be the superpower your contact center needs. 

Learn more about how healthcare providers can improve operational efficiency while maintaining the quality of patient care with UJET's CCaaS 3.0 for Healthcare.