Most people assume that the patient journey for all healthcare facilities is the same: The patient has a medical issue, be it an illness or injury. The person goes to the hospital or clinic. The doctor performs a treatment or prescribes medication, and the patient gets better.
Unfortunately, this patient journey is not true for everyone. In some cases, people must have extended stays in the hospital to treat and manage their condition. In fact, there is a whole cottage industry of medical institutions that focus on long-term care, including nursing homes, rehabilitation facilities, and chronic care hospitals.
Because people will stay at these facilities much longer than on your average trip to the doctor or even a stay at the hospital, the patient experience is even more crucial. One way to transform the patient experience is through Aiello, which offers an integrated solution that can improve such experience in several crucial ways.
Patients can focus on rest
If you are a patient confined to a healthcare facility for long-term care, the last thing you want to do is go on a scavenger hunt when you need assistance. But that’s essentially what these facilities require patients to do with their paging systems.
Patients must search through the pillows and sheets on their bed for wherever their pager is buried, press the button, and wait for a nurse or aide to come. If assistance does not come, the patient will have to go through the exercise again. While this activity ultimately requires little physical exertion, it does add unnecessary stress and friction to the patient experience.
With Aiello, in contrast, patients can issue their queries or requests directly to Aiello Voice Assistant (AVA), without having to worry about whether the request will be answered, or their needs met appropriately. For example, a mother suffering from severe postpartum depression could ask for extra blankets through AVA and there is no need to wait – twice – first for a staff to come, and again for the person (or someone else) to fulfill the request.
Furthermore, the request is routed to TMS Pro, Aiello’s Task Management System (TMS), where the manager at the long-term care center can assign it to an appropriate staff member and monitor its progress via a dashboard, ensuring it gets acted on promptly.
In short, patients can focus on rest instead of looking for a pager and playing the waiting game.
Facilities can develop a granular profile of each patient
When you go to the doctor for a check-up, he does not necessarily need to know about your dietary restrictions or other preferences. These tidbits, however, absolutely matter when a patient is staying long-term at a healthcare facility.
It would be a frustrating experience otherwise. Imagine being a patient at a rehabilitation facility, and every time you order food, you must remind the kitchen that you are allergic to peanuts. In case you forget to remind the staff, you may have to send back a meal that contains peanuts, such as a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.
This kind of patient experience is not only frustrating, but potentially dangerous – as in cases when a patient consumes food containing substances that may be potentially life threatening due to allergies. Healthcare facilities that provide long-term care should have a long-term memory of each patient – for matters big and small.
This level of patient understanding is made possible because AVA is powered by a conversation management system. A patient can speak with AVA using conversational speech, and this dialogue will be processed at high-speed using natural language processing (NLP) and semantics.
Once understood, the verbal request will be delivered to TMS Pro. This integration allows healthcare professionals to keep track of patient preferences and other important details pertaining to their treatment and lifestyle, so that the facility “remembers” these facts even across shifts, staff turnover, and other changes.
In addition, when discussing a patient, facilities can track internal meetings with Vocol.ai, a voice collaboration platform that has specific applications to healthcare. Vocol.ai can produce accurate transcription of meetings between facility members, along with AI-generated summaries and action items.
This documentation is especially useful in the context of dispute resolution. When a patient files a malpractice claim, or a billing dispute, the healthcare facility has a digital trail that they can use in their defense.
Patients can get the information they need on-demand and accurately
Outside of service requests, patients often must page staff to get answers to simple questions. These include matters related to schedule (i.e. when is the next group exercise slated for?), supplemental care (i.e. when can I avail of the hospital’s elective massage services?), or preference (i.e. what vegetarian options are there?)
In some cases, patients who need answers will play the buzz-and-wait game. Others, who may feel like they are bothering healthcare professionals by calling them for simple queries, may choose not to ask at all. Neither of these scenarios is ideal.
Aiello’s solution gives these guests a better way. They can ask questions directly to their AVA, which will respond promptly with an accurate answer. This impressive ability is made possible because, in addition to AVA’s AI model based on innovative multi-intent NLU, it can also be trained on a knowledge graph database specific to the healthcare facility.
This training will give AVA specific knowledge, such as schedules, services, personnel, and other important information that patients may want to know. Through AVA, they can now get any question answered on-demand and accurately. While this benefit may seem like a small one, it goes a long way toward empowering them in an unfortunate situation where they can often feel disenfranchised.
Enhancing the patient experience with technology
Instead of accepting the status quo of paging systems, healthcare facilities that provide long-term care need to focus on adopting more patient-centric technology.
When integrated together, Aiello Voice Assistant, TMS Pro and Vocol.ai are a winning combination for healthcare facilities that provide long-term care. Patients get the rest, care, and information that they deserve, and hospitals can protect their interests with documentation. This is a long-term strategy for success.
