How harnessing the power of AI can help healthcare providers educate their patients more effectively in 2025
By Tina Campbell (pictured), Managing Director and Co-Founder of Healthily, and Paul Rilstone, Vice President Australia and New Zealand at Kore.ai
Does your team spend a significant proportion of each working week having a series of broadly similar conversations with patients?
Perhaps they’re phoning them before appointments to ensure they know what preparations to make, where to go and what to bring? Or checking in with them after they’ve been discharged, to make sure they understand their medication or have made an appointment with their GP?
If this sounds familiar, you’re in good company. Informing, educating and reassuring patients is an integral aspect of operations for health services of all sizes, from general practices to tertiary care hospitals and insurers whose client bases number in the millions.
Counting the cost of administrative burdens
But while contacting patients may be essential, it can also be expensive, particularly for providers that find themselves utilising skilled practitioners, such as nurses and allied health care professionals, to make the calls.
Having skilled staff manning the phones can be a sub-optimal use of resources, at a time when demand for healthcare services is outstripping supply in many parts of the sector.
Given Australia has an aging population – 16 per cent of us were aged 65 and over in June 2020, according to the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare – that’s unlikely to change any time soon.
Rather, we can expect to see healthcare providers stretched ever more thinly, as they strive to deliver the quality care Australians want and deserve.
Compounding the challenge is the issue of how to provide important healthcare information to the thousands of citizens and permanent residents who are not proficient in English, or whose digital literacy is limited.
Tools to lighten the load
That’s where Artificial Intelligence (AI) can make a vital contribution. Utilising AI-powered autonomous chatbots, rather than human beings, to make phone calls to patients is an effective and economical way to impart information, without compromising patient safety or degrading the quality of the patient experience.
Via tailored, reusable conversations, couched in everyday language, virtual agents can ensure patients have the facts they need, whether that’s to understand the healthcare system, engage effectively with a healthcare provider or manage their treatments.
And they can do so at speed and scale. Instead of a human employee spending hours on the phone each week telling several dozen patients the same few things, autonomous chatbots can reach out to them all simultaneously, in multiple languages if necessary, to have broadly similar conversations.
Pursuing better patient outcomes
In primary care this technology is being used to educate select cohorts of Australians about MyMedicare, a voluntary patient registration model that aims to strengthen the relationships between patients, their GP and their primary healthcare team. Patients are sent an SMS containing a link to digital content and, should they fail to engage with it, they’ll receive a phone call that runs them through the key points it contains.
Other potential use cases include reaching out to older Australians who are receiving in-home support, and encouraging individuals to become more proactive about managing their health by enrolling in preventative programs.
Harnessing the power of AI to communicate in this way isn’t just an effective and economical means of educating and supporting patients. It’s also an efficient one. It can free admin employees up to perform other tasks and give precious time back to healthcare professionals – time that can be devoted to delivering quality care on the ground.
That’s a win for practitioners and providers and for the patients they serve.
Towards a smarter future
Intelligently designed and deployed, AI-powered phone calls can be a powerful tool for healthcare providers and practitioners, one that enables information to be delivered to patients cost effectively and at scale.
If that’s a priority for your organisation, it’s time to consider how you may be able to put this technology to work in 2025.
