Consider this situation. Two 60-year-old women live in Washington, DC, 10 miles apart. They all took beta-blockers for high blood pressure, all had a family history of type 2 diabetes, and they all missed the most recent annual check-ups. What should their care plan look like? Should they be different?
Clinically, they are spitting at each other. However, a piece of data—their zip code—can greatly tilt this equation. It turns out that they face very different life expectancies (63 years vs. 96 years), just based on their geographic differences. This 33-year life expectancy gap can be attributed to income level, education level, and the opportunity to buy fresh food in grocery stores.
The hospital EHR system can tell the complete story of patient care, and we have built advanced tools to understand all of this: clinical decision aids, population health segmentation tools, and automatic billing and coding assistants.
However, the never-ending quest to create clinical data models concealed a fatal fallacy: clinical data cannot tell the whole story.
If the patient cannot understand the label, it is not important to prescribe the correct dose of blood pressure medication. If the only source of food is corner shops and fast food restaurants, monitoring blood sugar levels will not help. If it takes two hours and three buses to reach the clinic, then appointment reminders are meaningless.
These factors determine 80% of the patient’s overall health. If we cannot get patients to the starting line, then the best evidence-based care plan will not work. This is a reality that existed before we heard of Covid-19.
Participation, connection and communication are the key first steps
Providing solutions to a fair healthcare environment for everyone is not easy. The investment required will be huge and will take time. However, people generally recognize the seriousness of the problem and make it a priority, bringing a certain degree of new hope.
In the final analysis, technological innovation needs to be the core of the next generation of healthcare and must serve everyone. For decades, the industry has been slowly innovating, but the pandemic has raised the urgency to a new level and finally proved that virtual care is indeed effective, more efficient, and patients enjoy it.
The Achilles heel of healthcare innovation has never been a lack of functionality. There is a lot of robust and powerful IT. The problem is that not enough patients use digital tools because most technologies are inaccessible or too “intensive” and complicated for most people to use.
Although more than 80% of American adults own a smartphone, patient adoption rates for healthcare applications still hover in the 10% range. Excellent applications alone are not enough, and healthcare IT designers have greatly overestimated the extent to which consumers are willing to endure.
To overcome adoption friction, a new mobile technology is emerging that uses conversational artificial intelligence to attract patients. Users don’t need downloads, usernames, passwords, and complicated menu trees, just communicate via smart messages on their smartphones. Language is the user interface.
The example we are seeing now is that the patient participation rate of the conversational chatbot is 80%, the workflow completion rate is 95%, and the satisfaction rate exceeds 90%. Banner Health is launching a virtual waiting room to replace the physical space that patients do not pay attention to, and handle all pre-appointment registration through a conversational digital assistant. Every year, hundreds of thousands of patients in the Banner network bypass the waiting room while seeing a doctor. Healthcare is changing.
Digital assistants enter disadvantaged communities and help where they are
As healthcare virtualizes and removes barriers to high-volume, high-satisfaction digital participation, the opportunity to adjust and leverage these solutions in disadvantaged communities becomes more feasible than ever. Today’s mobile technology can cover and attract a wider range of people. Patients no longer need a PC, email account or high-speed internet. They only need a smart phone.
It is no longer true to assume that individuals from underserved communities cannot use modern digital tools. Many hypotheses have been debunked. The reality is that most people own smartphones, including underserved Medicaid people.
If the goal is to improve access and attract underserved communities where smartphone penetration rates exceed 80%, the way forward is mobile. At the same time, advanced conversational artificial intelligence is breaking down barriers of complexity and promoting better participation.
Through smart phones, patients can almost complete a lot of work. With the help of conversational AI, it is possible to connect and guide patients to complete countless often arduous management tasks in the comfortable bedroom, thereby eliminating key barriers to participation. Digital assistants can also register, follow up, recommend, and educate in the language, voice, or personality chosen by the patient. All this can be done in the comfort of your home, or even on the bus.
Importantly, these digital experiences do not require a large human team to execute. The interaction is automated and is designed to run on a large scale across all patient groups. Digital assistants will not replace important person-to-person interactions, they just enhance the human team by handling redundant, time-consuming, and often complex tasks, so that the interaction of the nursing team can focus on the important things—— The patient’s health.
Good software code alone cannot overcome the series of healthcare challenges faced by people living in the wrong zip codes. But good intelligent communication is a basic starting point. Conversational artificial intelligence is mature enough to start creating a level playing field.
