healow Genie showing the way to better communication
Medical practices spend lots of time and effort to attract and retain patients, but how can they make sure those efforts succeed? It largely depends upon great communication, but the technological tools practices rely upon to connect with their patients too often are disappointing.
They can cost too much, be difficult to use, and force patients to navigate long phone menus or clunky websites in search of clear answers to even the simplest questions.
There is a better way: healow — Health and Online Wellness — marked its 10th anniversary during the 2024 eClinicalWorks® and healow® National Conference in Grapevine, Texas. And it did so with a splash, debuting healow Genie, an AI-powered contact center solution that aims to broaden access to healthcare information and resources.
In simplest terms, Genie’s purpose is to more easily connect patients to the records, information, lab results, and providers they need.
Four modes that make the basics of healthcare easier
Genie’s genius, so to speak, begins with a multimodal design that combines the speed and power of artificial intelligence with the care and empathy that only humans can bring to the healthcare experience.
healow Genie’s four modes cover every scenario for your patients:
- AI Agent offers patients a self-service option for getting answers to basic questions via voice, text, chat, or chatbot. Whether patients need to know your hours, manage their appointments, or pay off a balance, Genie can help, instantly answering calls and eliminating on-hold time.
- Intelligent Assistant is available for those calls that require escalation to a human being. Patients may be seeking a medication refill, a referral, or medical advice. Backed by Genie’s resources, agents provide the help patients need, including having a provider call them back.
- Automated After-Hours Service extends care 24/7/365. Whenever your office is closed or your staff can’t answer the phones, Genie routes calls to your designated on-call providers and creates call summaries for your providers to use during follow-up care calls when your office reopens.
- Conversational Smart Campaigns automatically generate outreach calls to patients. Your practice decides whom to reach, and Genie does the rest, engaging patients in natural-language conversations for reminders and procedure prep, helping improve compliance and outcomes.
An emerging, unified healthcare IT system
But Genie’s aim is far greater than what a traditional call center can do. By making access to basic information simpler, Genie can clear the way for practices and patients to engage in the more sophisticated interactions that can make a real difference for both.
For patients, Genie can help them gain access to the resources they need more quickly, allowing them to replace frustration with their providers to getting the care they need quickly and easily.
For practices, Genie can mean faster workflows, less time on the phone, deeper insight into what patients want and need, and lower operational costs — adding up to a more sustainable business model.
Taken together, those outcomes can point the way to a medical future that places holistic and preventive care ahead of the red tape, delays, and miscommunications that so often overwhelm those on all sides of the healthcare system.
Does Genie pass the (Turing) test?
As promising a vision as Genie offers, it is understandable that some patients will be hesitant. Getting basic information from an AI agent may be OK, but can that agent truly understand them? Can it avoid sounding cold and robotic? Will its answers be accurate? Can it really do work that has traditionally been done by human beings? And will it know enough to transfer the caller to a human when necessary?
The short answer to all those questions is “Yes, it can.”
To understand how and why Genie will achieve those goals, consider a bit of history. In a famous 1950 paper, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” English mathematician and computer scientist Alan Turing asked whether machines can think. The Turing test asserts that a machine can be said to think if a person interacting with that machine cannot reliably distinguish its answers from those that a human being would give.
Today, thanks to the development of the internet and large language models (LLMs) that are trained on massive amounts of data, AI chatbots such as ChatGPT easily pass the Turing test by exhibiting realistic, humanlike behavior.
Some patients will always prefer to speak to a human being. But for most, the bottom line is simple: If the answers are fast and accurate, they are perfectly happy to deal with a chatbot. Doing so for healthcare is not, after all, that different from what so many of us do every day when we rely upon internet search engines to look up a fact, order a meal, arrange for a ride, invest their money, or buy and sell merchandise.
healow: Innovation throughout the EHR and beyond
To be sure, healthcare is a much more serious and personal matter than finding the best price on airline tickets or getting a copy of the latest bestseller delivered to your door tomorrow morning.
And it is precisely because healthcare is so important that even while Genie enjoyed the spotlight at this year’s National Conference, healow has been hard at work on many other products and services, each of which plays a vital role in a unified healthcare IT ecosystem.
- The healow No-Show Prediction Model estimates the likelihood that any given appointment will be kept, allowing practices to adopt strategies to keep their schedules full, such as by making open slots available to patients on an ASAP or waitlist.
- healow Insights now offers a Value-Based Care score that allows practices to identify gaps in care and monitor progress toward closing them; it also uses Johns Hopkins ACG System Markers to display potential conditions for evaluation and associated ICD codes, offering options to physicians for their medical decision-making.
- Version 12.0.3 of the eClinicalWorks EHR offers full integration with healow Payment Services and healow Statements, allowing practices to collect full balances or create payment plans for their patients.
- A healow CHECK-IN™ dashboard lets practices see a list of all patients who have checked in for their appointments while identifying those who need to provide additional information.
- healow’s marketing services offer a full range of services to help practices promote themselves, including a basic website, informational handouts, and configuring waiting room TVs with educational information for their patients.
- healow Prime+ gives patients an easy way to shop for the best price on prescription medications, showing them which pharmacies in their area can provide them with the medications they need and at what price.
The coming together of AI and humans
The release of healow Genie next March does mark the culmination of ten years’ worth of innovation and growth. But it is also the opening chapter for a new era of innovation that is likely to see the integration of every aspect of healthcare IT.
Physicians and patients in 2024 make use of technologies that were undreamt of just a decade ago. Another 10 years is likely to see still further advances. Chatbots will only get better. Data analysis will continue to improve. Patients will enjoy ever more powerful tools for taking charge of their own health.
The day is coming — perhaps sooner than anyone thinks — when AI will inform every area of healthcare and offering patients and providers ever-deeper insight and ways to improve medical outcomes. By largely solving the science of medicine and healthcare delivery, AI has the potential to allow humans to pass the greatest test of all — perfecting the art of medicine.