WELL™ ChatAssist AI: AI-Enabled Conversations for Healthcare

For healthcare providers, the cornerstone to creating a positive communication experience for patients is to effectively engage them. As a SaaS digital health leader, WELL™ Health has now advanced patient communications to the next level by launching WELL™ ChatAssist AI, an exciting enhancement for the WELL™ Health unified communication hub that upgrades patient interactions from simple automation to AI-enabled conversations. While chatbots can often be used to reduce staff burden, many of these products use rigid and impersonal automation that can cause frustration and inefficiencies for patients. On the contrary, using the conversational AI capabilities available in ChatAssist AI offers a better way for healthcare organizations to leverage the time-saving efficiencies of automation while also providing a meaningful interaction for patients.

What is ChatAssist AI and what does it do?

ChatAssist AI builds on the existing, top-rated, WELL™ Health platform and uses a sophisticated Natural Language Understanding (NLU) engine. NLU is a key subset of Natural language processing (NLP) and is the intersection of artificial intelligence, computer science, and linguistics. The field deals with machine reading comprehension and the ability of computers to interpret, analyze, and approximate human speech. Typical applications of NLU include speech recognition, spelling correction, optical character recognition, and many others. 

For health systems, ChatAssist AI can understand and respond to millions of diverse, unstructured patient responses, allowing patients to engage using their own words (in English and Spanish) in their preferred channels. Based on a patient’s response, the functionality responds just like a person would answer, enabling the patient to receive real-time, conversational answers from their provider. ChatAssist AI combines these natural language understanding capabilities with healthcare-specific use case capabilities to deliver reliable and cutting-edge solutions. 

In addition to the staff efficiency improvements provided by automation, ChatAssist AI allows WELL™ customers to now use more complex logic to build multi-step conversational automation based on unstructured responses to create a better patient experience. With ChatAssist AI, patients can respond the same way they would when talking to a family member or friend and ChatAssist AI will understand. For example, if a patient chooses to use a thumbs-up emoji instead of words to respond, ChatAssist AI recognizes the patient is saying “yes” to the question that was asked and can respond accordingly. This gives the patient a more personalized experience, exactly the way a staff member would provide but without the need to use staff which allows them to focus on other tasks.

What features come with ChatAssist AI?

This new functionality comes with several exclusive features: 

1)  Intelligent Assistance which uses conversational AI to interpret the patient’s intent and inform the ChatAssist engine to engage with the designed response. An example of this is illustrated above where a patient may respond with a thumbs-up emoji, instead of “Y” or “Yes”. WELL ChatAssist AI understands the affirmation and can share additional information with the patient.

2) Content Library features pre-built conversation templates that are available directly in the ChatAssist AI conversation builder so that healthcare providers can deploy ChatAssist AI-enabled conversations in a single click.

3) Custom Conversations empowers healthcare providers to build and tailor multi-step conversations that are unique to their patients and organizations.

4) Connect API enables healthcare providers to independently pull relevant data from ChatAssist AI conversations into other digital systems such as an Electronic Health Record (EHR). For example, healthcare providers can independently pull in relevant information related to clinical conversations with their patients such as how they are feeling after a procedure so that there is a record in the patient’s EHR.  Conversations that do not need to be saved such as ones regarding where to park or directions to the office can be excluded. Additionally, providers can tag and extract relevant patient information and feed this into other third-party vendors such as billing, pre-registration, or telehealth to initiate new workflows based on patient conversations.

5) Analytics with pre-built reports and dashboards to continually monitor conversation performance and operational impact, enabling providers to immediately implement workflow changes that improve the patient experience and enhance the value provided by ChatAssist AI.

WELL™ built ChatAssist AI to deliver a conversational experience to patients, incorporating industry-leading AI capabilities and configurable healthcare workflows and content to improve both patient and staff experience. ChatAssist AI is only the beginning – with the commitment to continuously deliver value to patients, staff, and healthcare systems, WELL™ Health will continue to expand on innovative capabilities through the use of AI and other technologies.♥ 

To learn more about ChatAssist AI, go to www.wellapp.com/chatassist-ai.