More Than a COVID Chatbot: Memorial Health System Sees More Uses Post Pandemic

Implementing digital health technology to help during the COVID pandemic was necessary. Leveraging those technologies beyond their COVID use-cases should now be a priority for healthcare organizations. Memorial Health System in Illinois is doing just that with their chatbot from LifeLink, to the delight of both staff and patients.

Jay Roszhart, President of MHS Ambulatory Group at Memorial Health System (MHS) and Greg Johnsen, CEO of Lifelink Systems, makers of a conversational patient engagement platform recently sat down with Healthcare IT Today. We talked about their collaboration during COVID and how they are now expanding the solution to other areas of MHS.

Patient Triage

MHS faced the challenge of standing up three respiratory clinics as triage points during the pandemic. That was a significant enough undertaking in and of itself, but throughout the process, it occurred to Roszhart that there could be a better way of automating the flood of phone calls they were receiving.

The high volume of calls was putting a strain on the MHS staff. Most of the calls were about the same topic with the callers asking the same handful of questions. Roszhart recognized that this repetition was a good candidate for automation and collaborated with the Lifelink team to develop a screener chatbot that could quickly route these routine calls to the appropriate MHS respiratory resource without burdening the call center agents.

“The chatbot helped people get the information they needed in a friendly, easy to follow format,” said Roszhart. “They could even get connected to arrange for testing, a virtual visit, or an in-person visit.”

During the pandemic, over 80,000 COVID-19 tests were conducted by MHS with many of them being initially triaged through the Lifelink platform.

Automating in order to scale

“What we have seen at MHS and other clients is that people don’t like to do rote, repetitive tasks,” stated Johnsen. “That’s robotic work which is perfect for the kind of automation that we offer. If you can take the robot out of the human, what you are really doing is scaling human capacity.”

Johnsen’s last statement is interesting. There has been a lot of handwringing in other industries about robots taking jobs away from people. If you peel back the layers of those stories and look at what tasks those robots are actually doing, you’ll find that in many cases it is the repetitive type of work that is being eliminated – the type of work that people hate to do.

What Johnsen is saying is that by eliminating this work, you free up staff to focus on higher level issues and more complex challenges which is much more stimulating and fulfilling. This helps reduce turnover and allows you to scale up capacity so that more people can be served without over burdening staff.

The staff at MHS have loved their experience with Lifelink’s chatbot, because it breaks up the monotony of their day. The repetitive information that they had to take in and hand out to each patient took a lot of their time, but not a lot of their brain power. “You don’t want to tie up valuable, highly cognitive smart humans with lots of administrative work,” noted Johnsen. “We should be elevating their game to allow them to do more complex stuff – showing empathy, understanding gray areas and dealing with exceptions.”

Roszhart echoed that sentiment: “I really wanted our team to refocus on forward-thinking work rather than just being reactive and robotic.”

Expanding to other areas

The success of the chatbot during COVID was significant. The engagement rate was high and there was a 70-80% completion rate (ie: started the interaction with the chatbot and went all the way through to the appropriate endpoint). That level of success is one of the reasons Roszhart is actively working to expand the use of the Lifelink platform at MHS.

One of the ideas that MSH and Lifelink teams are working on is using the conversational AI platform to help reduce readmissions.

“In the middle of a hospital stay, when a patient is scared and not in the best state of mind, staff try to teach them what they need to do to take care of themselves when they get home,” lamented Roszhart. “It’s been proven that half the time patients don’t remember anything at all. What if they had a conversation AI chatbot that they could talk to 2hrs after arriving at home, or 5hrs, 1 day, 3 days, or anytime they needed. It could answer their questions, review what they need to do with them and even send them videos that showed them what to do.”

This level of sophistication is only possible if the chatbot is tightly integrated with the EHRs so that it has access to the detailed clinical information about the patient. Only then would the chatbot have the context to know what prompts and answers to use in a conversation.

“The integration of the chatbot with clinical systems is a superpower,” said Johnsen. “That would give the AI more context, more information that can be used to improve the patient experience as well as outcomes.”

MSH is also planning on rolling out the Lifelink platform to help make referrals more frictionless for both patients and providers.

“Our system can handle many different interactions as part of an overall workflow,” said Johnsen. “It’s more than a lightweight, triage-only solution. Ours is built to automate processes.”

Watch the video to learn more about:

  • The phenomenal engagement rate that MSH achieved with its chatbot during COVID
  • How electronic forms and chatbots could spell the end of waiting rooms
  • How to get started implementing conversational AI

Learn more about Memorial Health System: https://www.choosememorial.org/

Learn more about Liflink Systems: https://www.lifelinksystems.com/

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About the author

Colin Hung

Colin Hung is the co-founder of the #hcldr (healthcare leadership) tweetchat one of the most popular and active healthcare social media communities on Twitter. Colin speaks, tweets and blogs regularly about healthcare, technology, marketing and leadership. He is currently an independent marketing consultant working with leading healthIT companies. Colin is a member of #TheWalkingGallery. His Twitter handle is: @Colin_Hung.

   

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