Conversational AI in healthcare & every where else has really taken the front stage. Lots of excitement at the prospect of what AI can achieve. Of course there are enough people who are rightfully apprehensive about the unknowns. Use cases around Patient engagement, clinical workflow, customer service or call center automation, decision support and of course documentation seem to be the immediate contenders for attention.
Use of text messaging as a communication channel had already grown in terms of patient preferences and with interactions becoming less mechanical, and more human-like, chat messaging via chatbots is absolutely the next frontier. In this study, chatbots generated quality and empathetic responses to patient’s medical questions. Next steps are to study effectiveness in reducing clinician burnout, improving responses and outcomes.
Big Tech including Google and Microsoft are starting to develop healthcare specific large language models. HIPAA and other security aspects are a work in progress as experts truly understand the scope of what AI can accomplish and how best to ‘box’ things for safety.
Patient experience can absolutely be improved from a customer service perspective as being discussed here, wherein we incorporate best practices from other retail environments.
At illuminate.health, providing better access to care is critical for that human connection, with technology being an enabler. Hence, adding to the patient experience we offer via our mobile App and desktop tools, we are pleased to announce the launch of Luc-E, our patient chatbot. Luc-E can help answer medication related questions for patients 24/7.
Per illuminate.health’s advisor, Dr. Ron Parton, “The illuminate.health AI driven chatbot is a great way for patients to get easy access to accurate and timely information, with the option to consult with a pharmacist as needed for more personalized clinical care.” For patients, it is ease of use and access to care in a timely manner. For pharmacists Luc-E enabled them to focus on the more clinical side of patient care. Speaking from a background in senior care and health plan pharmacy perspective, Jay Patel, also an advisor says, “The illuminate.health chatbot is a robust option as healthcare companies contemplate the myriad of potential use cases for Generative AI. Apart from medication education, the bot can provide customer service for mail order and other pharmacies too”
This particular chatbot is a conservative way to leverage AI in a human-like conversational capacity as we better understand AI guardrails and other safety aspects of AI. Illuminate.health is excited at the prospect of our chatbot Luc-E helping achieve the quadruple aim in terms of better access and patient experience, improved clinician workload at reduced costs.
Varun Goyal
Co-founder & CEO