Patient-Facing AI Phone Calls Market Map: Patients dialing robots?

This is part of Elion’s weekly market map series where we break down critical vendor categories and the key players in them. For more, become a member and sign up for our email here.

Despite being inefficient, costly, and prone to errors, phone calls are still one of the main ways patients and providers communicate in healthcare. Until recently, call centers and manual phone calls were the only way to accomplish the task, but with cost overruns and an increased focus on HCAHPS, more health systems are looking at implementing solutions for Patient-Facing AI Phone Calls.

Some of the key use cases targeted for interacting with patients include:

• Appointment scheduling

• FAQ for hours, location, parking, etc.

• Prescription Refill requests

• IT Helpdesk for patient-facing IT

• Department and Provider Search

Given the focus on talking to a wide range of patients across different backgrounds, what will separate good products from great products will be how well they accomplish tasks without frustrating patients. The factors we’ve identified for success here are:

• Fluid conversational ability for a more natural-sounding conversation, including graceful handling for patient prompts as well as low-latency responses

• Quality of data source, including integration with scheduling systems, well-structured answers to FAQs, department and provider data, or integration with IT knowledgebase.

• Fallback support with human agents when the AI isn’t getting the job done

• Analytics capabilities to help track success rates, errors, and unknown patient prompts.

Some of the vendors we’re seeing trend for patient-facing AI use cases include Assort Health, Syllable, Hyro, and EliseAI. These solutions are starting to break into health systems, especially for the scheduling use case.