Health Tech of the Week: Talkie.ai – A Virtual Receptionist Instead of Queues on the Hotline and at the Clinic

In today’s entry from the „Health Tech of the Week” series, we will focus on Talkie.ai, an innovative startup that is changing the face of customer service in the medical sector through advanced AI technology. The breakthrough brought by Talkie.ai pertains not only to the way of communicating with patients but also to the efficiency and accessibility of medical services.

Talkie.ai was founded with the inspiration to solve the inefficiency problem of classic call centers, which too often negatively impacted patients’ experiences. Medical facilities are known for the difficulty in getting through to them. This limits the accessibility of medical services for many people: the elderly, busy individuals, or those with small children. In the era of growing AI technology capabilities, the startup’s founders saw an opportunity to automate telephone service, thereby relieving medical staff from routine tasks, which will allow them to focus on care and support for patients. According to Talkie.ai’s premise, everyone benefits from the automation of customer service in the medical sector – payers, medical facilities, doctors, and ultimately all of us as patients.

Virtual Receptionist

Talkie.ai’s solution is the so-called Virtual Receptionist – a bot based on artificial intelligence algorithms that can conduct conversations with multiple patients at once, handling matters such as scheduling appointments, ordering prescriptions, or managing examination dates. Thanks to the ability to understand natural language and medical terminology, the bot is capable of taking over most tasks that patients typically turn to health care facilities for. In more complicated cases, the bot involves a call center consultant or medical registration in the conversation. This eliminates the potential frustration of the patient, which would arise if he had to wait for a connection or could not get through at all.

What can particularly facilitate the work of medical facilities, compared to the solutions they have used so far, is support during outgoing conversations. The Virtual Receptionist can inform a group of patients about a change of appointment date, the absence of a doctor, or equipment failure. Similarly, the bot is capable of calling a selected patient base as part of a preventive or informational campaign, which will save time that the staff can spend on other activities.

Changes in Medicine After the Pandemic

During the COVID pandemic, it became more apparent than ever before that many patients do not need a „physical” visit to a facility, but only needed to: inquire about a visit, change the date, or place an order for a prescription. This experience showed that improving contact with the medical facility is an opportunity to genuinely relieve it. However, for this change to be real, all groups, including patients, must engage in it. Thanks to awareness campaigns encouraging patients to cancel appointments, there was an increase in responsibility for health care resources and shorter queues, which ultimately will result in a healthier society. As representatives of Talkie.ai say – within 12 months we see a significant change in the perception of confirming appointments as a responsibility of all participants in the health system – both medical facilities, which must ensure that their patients have a real possibility of contact to cancel an appointment in time, as well as patients, who have begun to perceive this issue as a personal responsibility. We are glad to be part of this change.

Plans for the Future

Talkie.ai is continuously expanding its cooperation with Hospital Information System (HIS) providers and their integration with the startup’s solution. The next step is expansion into the American market, which is a key element of Talkie.ai’s strategy. Adaptation efforts, such as integration with EHR systems specific to the USA and support for multilingualism (in addition to English, Spanish language support is also necessary), are already underway. We believe that the solution offered by the startup not only streamlines the management of medical data but also contributes to faster access to health services.

–

We invite you to continue following the „Health Tech of the Week” series, where we will discover more fascinating stories from the circle of medical technologies that are changing the face of healthcare. If you are leading an innovative project in the field of new technologies and medicine or want to recommend an interesting solution, please contact us at: [email protected].