Massachusetts-based Nuance Communications has launched an AI-powered patient engagement virtual assistant platform to transform voice and digital experiences across the patient journey.

The platform integrates and extends the capabilities of the electronic health record (EHR), customer relationship management (CRM) and patient access centre systems so healthcare providers can modernise their digital front door and improve clinical care.

Patients are demanding the same conveniences from healthcare organisations that they enjoy from major consumer brands.

A recent survey revealed that consumers were ready for digital changes such as telemedicine options (44%), digital forms and communication (41%), and touchless check-in (37%). What’s more, 68% value a customised patient experience. In fact, a poor digital health experience caused more than a quarter of patients to change medical providers in 2020, up 40 per cent from 2019.

The platform leverages the same conversational AI technology that consumer brands such as Albertsons, Best Buy, Humana, H&M and Rakuten use to drive their consumer experience and healthcare information technology firms such Epic and Cerner use to power their provider facing virtual assistants.

“Nuance’s omnichannel patient engagement platform represents a new integrated philosophy for enabling healthcare’s digital front door and a well-thought-out, well-implemented and highly-practical solution for delivering an enhanced level of digital services to patients,” said Stephanie Lahr, chief information officer at Monument Health. “As Nuance has already demonstrated with its clinician-facing healthcare, the company is now bringing its AI technology to bear to help solve the pressing challenges that healthcare organisations face with patient engagement – improving the overall patient experience and driving better clinical outcomes while at the same time enhancing the financial performance of the organisation during these transformative times.”

The platform provides an array of capabilities and business outcomes including:

• Seamless, consistent and unified omnichannel experiences – It enables healthcare organisations to deploy a single unified virtual assistant or bot platform to manage patient engagement across voice, web, mobile, messenger, and smart speaker and IoT interactions.
• Integrates and extends capabilities of core systems infrastructure –The platform integrates into and extends the capabilities of the healthcare organisation’s clinical, financial, customer and telephony systems including the EHR, patient financial systems, CRM and patient access or call centre telephony infrastructure.
• Provides out-of-the-box do-it-yourself development tool – Clients can use pre-packaged applications that meet specific pain points around patient access, patient support, virtual care and messaging, work with Nuance to develop custom applications or use Nuance Mix to build their own DIY platform.
• Proven business outcomes –The platform has helped companies achieve a 42% reduction in agent handle time, 85% first contact resolution, and greater than 50% improvement in customer satisfaction.
• Unified data analytics – Enables organisations to monitor, assess and react to service performance metrics and identify improvement opportunities across channels.
• Runs on Microsoft Azure – Built on top of the Microsoft Azure Hitrust CSF-certified cloud platform.

“Our new omnichannel patient engagement virtual assistant platform takes a holistic approach to powering healthcare’s new digital front door, overcoming the shortcomings and inconsistencies of partial point solutions,” said Peter Durlach, senior vice president at Nuance. “By marrying the capabilities of our healthcare experience and the proven omnichannel customer engagement technology trusted by Fortune 100 companies worldwide, we can help address the urgent need of providers and patients alike to transform access to, and delivery of, care in the modern age of digital medicine.”