Health IT

AI chatbots are helping providers with everything from referral management to team building

Society likes to predict artificial intelligence coming to healthcare in the form of all-knowing robot doctors. But two companies — Avaamo and Saberr — are utilizing the technology in a simpler form. Their AI-powered chatbots are built to assist with referral management, team building and more.

AI, artificial intelligence, chatbot, bot

Futuristic predictions of artificial intelligence in healthcare depict robots serving as doctors and nurses.

But that fantasy is far from what’s possible today. Even Mayo Clinic CIO Cris Ross said as much at HIMSS this year, noting that AI is “still pretty dumb” and comparing it to a 2-year-old.

Still, the power of machine learning in healthcare can be leveraged in simpler ways outside the imaginative wishes of society.

One startup called Avaamo is bringing AI chatbots to the space.

But founder and CEO Ram Menon was careful not to lump his Los Altos, California-based company into the chatbot craze.

“We don’t do chatbots in the traditional sense,” he said in a phone interview, instead opting to use the term “conversational AI.”

The difference, Menon noted, is in the abilities of the technology. Unlike chatbots in the original sense, conversational AI is able to understand complex phrases, dialects and mispronunciations. While a chatbot can easily help one find a yoga teacher, for example, it may get confused if someone asks about the post-operative deductible for a kidney procedure.

Avaamo’s technology touches multiple verticals aside from healthcare, including banking and telecommunications.

Within healthcare, it abilities can assist both patients and providers. The scheduling assistant bot helps consumers set up and remember appointments, and the diabetes manager tool reminds patients to take insulin and maintain a healthy diet. Another chatbot serves as a navigation tool for a hospital’s website.

For providers, Avaamo has a referral manager bot as well as an on-call assistant solution, which helps nurses quickly locate a certain department’s on-call physician. Its home care assistant bot gives providers the right information before going to visit a patient at home.

The conversations are fairly straightforward. With the referral manager chatbot, a physician can type, “I want to refer a patient for orthopedic surgery.” The bot will ask, “Do you prefer to work with a specific surgeon in the orthopedic surgery department?” The user can request a certain surgeon, and the bot will check his or her availability. The interaction continues with the provider filling out relevant patient information and the bot confirming the referral.

The startup operates on a software-as-a-service model. It can make its chatbots available on the web or on an organization’s existing portal.

One of the main goals is to tackle the situation with a pragmatic approach in an industry where most things are complicated.

“Let’s fix the repetitive problems at the edge of the network that deliver meaningful cost benefits first, then solve the bigger problems,” Menon noted.

Across the Atlantic, London-based Saberr is also capitalizing on the growing interest in AI chatbots. A self-dubbed “people analytics company,” it utilizes technology to improve team dynamics in the workplace.

In September, the startup officially launched CoachBot, an AI-powered team coach. A web-based application, in simplest terms, it is a computer that can understand text-based messages and respond accordingly.

During a phone interview, Saberr founder and president Alistair Shepherd said the purpose of CoachBot is to provide learning in a way that fits into the average workday. Rather than going to offsite meetings and workshops, a company’s employees can improve their team in a convenient manner.

The bot’s capabilities focus on six aspects of a team: productivity, roles and responsibilities, goals and purpose, relationships, network and decision-making.

Shepherd described the process as threefold.

First, each employee completes a survey about the team they’re on and how it’s performing. It includes questions like “Do you reflect on how you work as a team?” Users can select a response such as “Yes, frequently and we take action based on these reflections” or “Very occasionally, ahead of reviews, etc.”

After all team members finish, CoachBot determines the areas where the team is excelling and where it should focus going forward. Finally, it creates a tailored learning plan and gives the group the tools it needs to act on the recommended areas.

This plan includes exercises, challenges, and games that seek to help. In certain situations, a team can also connect to a human to gain insight. For example, if a team had trouble with trust, CoachBot could link them up with a real person (either inside the company or externally) to learn how to improve.

The technology also adapts its approach and stays current as the team makes progress.

Saberr developed CoachBot with assistance from multiple academic institutions, as well as more than 35 organizational psychologists, executive coaches and professional team coaches.

Its capabilities make it particularly useful in smaller team environments, where teams work together toward a shared goal. It’s hard to think 50-plus-person groups using the technology, though Shepherd noted that at that level, there are likely subteams within the larger crew.

The company offers CoachBot under a SaaS model, similar to Avaamo. It’s priced at £8 (or about $10.66) per person per month.

Currently, the chatbot is being utilized by 11 organizations from across various industries, including Unilever, a consumer goods company, and Logitech, a technology company. But the company is dipping its toes in healthcare too.

Hertfordshire Partnership NHS Foundation Trust, which provides mental health and learning disability services, has embarked on a 12-month pilot of CoachBot.

“The product offers an exciting opportunity for us to explore how we can support health and care professionals with new technologies like AI,” Stacie Coburn, principal advisor at the Eastern Academic Health Science Network, said via email. “The teams work across a large geography with various shift patterns, and using CoachBot means HPFT can provide team coaching without taking long days out of service for courses, maximising the time they spend with service users.”

EAHSN is one of 15 Academic Health Science Networks with a goal of spreading innovation and management protocols to NHS organizations. It set up the relationship between Saberr and HPFT.

Although the pilot program at HPFT has just begun, Coburn anticipates it bringing increased satisfaction to employees. Additionally, she noted that CoachBot will only get smarter as time goes on. The technology currently contains information more than 100 academic articles, and the pilot program involves building up the bot’s dataset.

Shepherd echoed Coburn’s sentiment.

“Imagine CoachBot was a real human,” he said. “We’re able to create the most experienced executive coach in the world. That’s the exciting thing about using AI in the coaching space — the ability to bring in learning from all these environments and make it available to the next team.”

In the long run, utilizing CoachBot will leave more time for HPFT employees to aid patients, hopefully resulting in better care.

“Because [healthcare] is such a fundamental service to humanity, it comes under a lot of strain,” Shepherd said. “One of the things that can add to or reduce strain is the environment in which professionals are operating. Team environments … have an enormous impact on your ability to deliver your work.”

Photo: Jull1491, Getty Images

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