Patient communications platform Artera has teamed up with healthcare AI startup Hyro to launch a new chatbot-style assistant for providers’ websites.
The AI assistant, named Artera Care Assist, became available to Artera’s more than 700 customers last week. Hackensack Meridian Health in New Jersey has already started using the tool on its website, according to the press release.
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Using the information already available on the provider’s website, the chatbot can answer patients’ questions 24/7. Some sample questions include “What are the office hours for the radiology department?” and “Where do I park for my visit?”
If the virtual assistant cannot answer a patient’s query based on the information available on the provider’s website, it will connect them to a live Artera agent for support, said Artera CEO Guillaume de Zwirek.
“We know providers are being challenged to address growing consumer expectations for seamless, digitized experiences and labor-related issues like staff burnout and workforce shortages. Artera Care Assist, powered by Hyro, will help providers address both of these challenges by helping deflect calls, increase patient engagement and offer greater patient access to care,” he declared.
Providers can deploy the product on their website in as little as two days, according to Artera.
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When the company was looking to create its new chatbot assistant for provider websites, it wanted an AI partner that was focused on healthcare, had a high-performing conversational AI engine, and prioritized useability and customer satisfaction, de Zwirek noted. Hyro checked all these boxes, which made the startup a “natural fit for a partnership,” he explained.
The Hyro technology powering Artera Care Assist “takes full advantage of GPT’s impressive generative AI capabilities” while ensuring HIPAA compliance and data security, said Hyro CEO Israel Krush. Hyro’s platform exclusively scrapes data from the provider’s website and other vetted internal sources to prevent irrelevant or inaccurate information from being relayed to patients and employees, he added.
“As data is added or adjusted across websites, databases, CSVs and more, our platform automatically updates its knowledge graph so that the information provided to end-users remains accurate. You can sort of think of it as a ChatGPT that only feeds on constantly updated, system-specific information and does not hallucinate or deliver misleading answers to your patients and staff,” he remarked.
The fact that Hyro’s platform only ingests information from the provider’s website and internal sources is what sets Artera Care Assist apart from other patient engagement chatbots, Krush pointed out. Most generative AI chatbots on the market “have zero control” over the data the models were trained on and therefore the answers they provide.
Krush noted that Hyro uses three central pillars to guide its deployment of AI-based communication in healthcare: controlling boundaries for data sources, adhering to compliance best practices that minimize liability and maximize patient trust, and ensuring that the AI has strong explainability.
“That means being able to identify and investigate the root cause of every single output, zoom in on knowledge gaps, and work with precision to sanitize internal data. Solving an error starts with knowing how to find the problem, and as spectacularly capable as chatbots like ChatGPT and Google Bard may be, that’s just one, out of many, things they can’t do,” he declared.
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