Painstaking attention to detail has made rollout of an Alexa voice recognition tool seamless, enhancing patient access to care.
“Alexa, make me a doctor’s appointment.”
That request is becoming a reality for patients across the country as more health systems begin to tap voice recognition technology to streamline patient access to care. The technology, which is still in its nascency, is said to hold promise for helping to find urgent care centers or retail clinics that can tend to patients’ health needs and even refer patients to clinics that have shorter wait times.
At Henry Ford Health System, deploying an Alexa voice recognition system back in June meant expanding patient access to care while delivering on a better patient experience and leaning into its history of health technology innovation.
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“A lot of systems are talking about utilizing voice recognition, but only a few have really introduced a product and market for patients to use in an effort to help access health care or manage their healthcare,” Ara Telbelian, director of marketing at Henry Ford, told PatientEngagementHIT.com in a recent interview. “Whenever we look at the patient experience, we look at what technologies are out there that we can help utilize to bring to patients so that their patient experience is enhanced.”
About a year and a half ago, the Michigan-based health system looked into how voice recognition was poised to disrupt the patient experience industry. While next to nobody in the healthcare space was using voice recognition, at least for patients, Telbelian and his team knew there was a market to be tapped.
Over 50 percent of adults living the US had a smart speaker at home, Telbelian reported, and of those adults, 72 percent use the speaker daily. Looking forward, about half of all searches next year will be done by voice, Telbelian said, citing media analytics firm Comscore.
How could Henry Ford bring this consumer-backed tool into the healthcare space?
Looking at its existing systems, developers at Henry Ford identified patient care access as a key place to start integrating voice recognition. The health system already had a program called Need Care Now, which still helps patients access primary care by calling the health system, viewing its website, or simply walking into the clinic.
“In that realm we said, how about helping patients find the closest walk-in clinic or urgent care in an effort for them to be able to access Henry Ford primary care,” Telbelian said.
“Approximately 77 percent of voice devices in houses were the Alexa device, followed by Google, and then some of the other competitors,” he added, outlining the rationale for partnering with Amazon. We decided to move forward based on those statistics and developed what is called the Amazon Alexa skill.”
A skill is Amazon Alexa speak for an app that one might download onto her device. A skill is a set of programs that can be enabled on an Alexa device, and in the case of Henry Ford, helps navigate patients to the nearest walk-in clinic or urgent care center.
The skill also offers patients wait times. Using capabilities from Experity Patient Engagement, formely Clockwise.MD and a longtime Henry Ford partner, the skill can direct patients to a facility that will ultimately get them care most quickly, even if that means going to the second-closest clinic that might have a shorter line.
The Henry Ford team built the skill by looking at its systems that are already successful. Prior to developing their Alexa integration, the health system had an online listing for all of its walk-in clinics and urgent care centers that, again, integrates wait time estimates and the capability to save spots in line.
“And so taking a look at the digital technology that we already had on that platform, instead of building something from scratch for the backend of the skill to tap into, we had those components in place and tested and ready to go,” Telbelian stated.
There was also the process of ensuring the skill would actually create a satisfactory and seamless user experience. There are countless stories of Alexa goofs during which the device did not understand a user’s request or delivered bad information. Telbelian and his team wanted to prevent that from happening.
“As for the voice technology itself, we took our time and developed what’s called the mind map for developing the skill. That charts out the entire patient journey in this voice recognition world and especially for the urgent care skill,” Telbelian said.
“We developed over 400 ways of asking the questions that patients would be asking, in order to get a successful result or outcome out of the voice technology,” he continued. “That was the painstaking part of developing the skill.”
But it was also the most fruitful, Telbelian pointed out.
Since Henry Ford rolled out its skill in mid-June of 2019, patients have enabled it 219 times. There have been 178 sessions by 84 unique customers, which means the skill has repeat customers.
In total, users have asked 387 questions as part of their interactions, and thus far the skill has only failed twice. That data is a testament to all of that “painstaking” work, Telbelian said.
“I would recommend anyone who’s interested in such an opportunity to really take a step back. Put themselves in the patient’s shoes and interact or think about how patients would interact in this voice environment,” he suggested. “That’s how we came up with over 400 ways of asking the questions. That’s everything from the way you pronounce certain city names, the way you pronounce roads and addresses to how you would access Henry Ford and the skill.”
Despite their hard work, getting their skill approved by Amazon was not always easy. For one, Telbelian and his team were not able to get the triage capabilities they badly wanted included on their skill.
A triage system could ensure patients were getting the right kind of care at the right facilities. A patient explaining what could be heart attack symptoms would be referred to the emergency department, for example.
“As much as we would like and have thought about building a triage, the Alexa platform is not HIPAA compliant and Amazon will not allow you to get into that world,” Telbelian said.
Telbelian and his team also could not integrate functionality that would save a patient’s spot in line, like their online clinic-finder can. Again, Amazon cited HIPAA compliance in rejecting this function. And while Telbelian applauds Amazon for prioritizing patient privacy, he said the health system still believe a tool that can save a patient’s spot in line is secure.
“There isn’t any protected health information going back and forth other than the patient’s first name and the first initial of their last name and a reservation to be waiting in line at a walk-in clinic or an urgent care,” he said. “But Amazon is very cognizant and very protective of their voice users and will not allow anything that may not be considered HIPAA compliant.”
Going forward, Henry Ford plans to continue monitoring these new functions. While they have thus far been received quite positively, the health system aims to perfect the functionality and ensure a seamless patient experience.
To that end, Telbelian and his team plan to investigate more ways they can serve the patient using voice recognition.
“As for the technology itself, we’re still in discussion on how we bring additional patient experience and patient journey models using voice,” he concluded. “We don’t have anything in place yet. There’s opportunity to learn from our working with Amazon, working with the developer, and looking at the patient journey to what are some of the other opportunities going forward.”
Date: September 23, 2019
Source: PatientEngagementHIT