Before COVID-19, health worker burnout reached crisis levels, research from the National Academy of Medicine shows. More than 330,000 US healthcare professionals have left the industry by 2021, with many remaining workers considering leaving, according to a report by trade intelligence firm Definitive Healthcare.
For healthcare organizations, burnout leads to reduced productivity and increased recruitment and training costs. It is also the problem that a healthcare organization cannot deliver a superior patient experience if staff are exhausted and dissatisfied.
In today’s hyper-competitive market, where retail disruptors like CVS Health and Walmart Health are leveraging strong consumer-centric business models, the patient and member experience falls short. standards will cost payers and suppliers by reducing revenue and decreasing market share.
Patty Hayward is general manager of healthcare and life sciences at Talkdesk, a healthcare customer care technology and services company. She points to general AI as a tool to help solve some of these problems, namely ChatGPT.
Talkdesk is now using ChatGPT to help healthcare contact center agents operate more efficiently, she said. Combining AI with automation, she added, eases the burden on agents by removing tasks from their boards and helps create an effortless experience for patients.
We interviewed Hayward to talk about ChatGPT in healthcare, how Talkdesk as an early adopter has incorporated ChatGPT, the benefits of this universal AI tool, and where care organizations take health care must be cautious.
Q. What is it about ChatGPT that makes it particularly interesting for your healthcare IT sector?
ONE. We all know there are challenges to AI and generalized ChatGPT in today’s clinical environment. There are accuracy issues and the “hallucinations” that large language models can create that make the idea of a real “ChatGPT Doctor” far from reality today and possibly impossible. .
In healthcare, we’ve seen AI work best when assisting people, not necessarily replacing their decision-making and training. But even with decision support, there are patient privacy issues and a lack of governance that medical IT leaders currently have to address.
What’s exciting about our region – the contact center – it’s a natural space to both experiment with AI and deliver real value to healthcare organizations from day one. when doing so. Contact centers handle a lot of volume, and most of it is highly transactional – check claims, change appointments or request refills of prescriptions.
The healthcare industry has been trying to automate self-service in such areas for years, and generalized AI gives us the opportunity to provide more complex and tailored answers to patients. employees, while freeing up staff time for more complex interactions – because conversations on the other end of the healthcare spectrum are complex and require a lot of knowledge as well. like empathy from employees.
A poor contact center experience with a retailer can be frustrating, but a healthcare experience can affect health outcomes, adherence to a care plan, and even hurt for the patient or member to call or chat in times of need. So, generalized AI can act as a co-pilot for employees to receive answers and can be trained to make tone and wording suggestions to ensure employees can be employees. new – or those who may be overwhelmed – get the support they need.
Making these interactions more effective, accurate, and empathetic will help the patient and help the organization.
Q. You’ve incorporated ChatGPT into your contact center workflow. What do agents do differently?
ONE. Creative AI works best when it takes a specific input like a transcript or draft of a message and uses its knowledge of the language to reformat it into a different output. One of the coolest and funniest parts of ChatGPT can be asking it to take an idea and write a song or a poem about it.
In a healthcare contact center environment, there are actually many places where we need to manipulate written information – summarizing, aggregating, and personalizing it. Innovative AI is really helping us there.
The first place we really start is after the call or conversation is over – staff have to work after the interaction to send their notes and make decisions for the patient or member. We’ve supported live transcribing of calls and chats for years, so we now give them a summary of any calls they end up with with a single click.
Employees instantly receive a unified summary that they can edit as needed, or send it immediately to the records system with another click. Our AI can also suggest a course of action to the caller based on what is said. It has saved really valuable time after calls for agents.
We are also using AI to help manage and run healthcare contact centers. Even in smaller provider or payer organizations, you can experience a lot of complexity around facilities, departments, teams, and similarly complex processes that patients or members go through. over to reach the best people or resources.
So we’re using generalized AI to automatically recommend templates and support content to admins who want to stay up to date, without having to read a lot of tech support documents or contact their team. I. We are also using generative AI to suggest chat responses based on context and knowledge base articles.
In any case, an overarching theme is using general-purpose artificial intelligence to turn employees into experts in no time – whether that’s during or after interacting with consumers or in middle management. contact center.
Q. How does ChatGPT help? What are the benefits of using this type of AI in this way?
ONE. Innovative AI can go beyond rule-based configurations and static variables to present personalized answers and information to consumers and employees in the best possible way. For example, most self-service processes today begin by taking a set of data, such as patient names, and the dates and times of appointments, and building various templates for presentation. show them.
This can take time to set up and optimize, and often results in patients having to “learn” the bot: They need to ask questions in specific ways and enter information in a specific order. With generative AI, the same data can be used to build tailored, personalized answers to patients instantly, and without the need for staff to manage large numbers of samples.
For patients, that means we can deliver on the promise of true natural language understanding, and that the answers to their questions can be truly personalized to them – through information, health literacy, and their entire history of interactions with the healthcare organization.
Patients want to feel known and cared for at every step of the journey, not just seeing the clinician in person. Healthcare organizations often offer objective and formulaic experiences, and expect patients to be self-directed and continually reinterpret their needs, despite all the insights and information. that they have gathered from previous interactions.
Innovative AI can translate that information for staff or self-service instantly, so that ultimately this information can be leveraged in conversations with patients to save them time and reduce costs. less frustration.
Q. What should you be careful about when using ChatGPT? Many industry experts are concerned about AI, such as its accuracy or bias.
ONE. As I mentioned earlier, the current accuracy issues plaguing ChatGPT are an alarming sign in the clinical arena and rightfully so. This technology is evolving rapidly and I expect many accuracy problems to subside in the next few years or even sooner.
However, the technology itself is already ahead of the ethical and moral conversations regarding its use. Are there inherent biases in ChatGPT? Does artificial intelligence raise concerns about data security and patient privacy? It will be interesting to see if and when a regulatory framework emerges.
Innovative AI algorithms have limitations, but they will get better and more accurate. However, there is no reason to delay the implementation of transformative technology just because it has not yet reached perfection. Today, healthcare organizations can put ChatGPT to great use as a tool to improve patient/member experience while increasing operational efficiency and reducing staff burnout contact center.
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Healthcare IT News is a publication of HIMSS Media.
