This article is not about patient conversations with the practice or its chatbots. This is not about auto scheduling or finding appointments or patient searching for doctors. It is about a doctor’s practice responding to its authorized doctor via conversational interface. In other words a doctor speaking with his or her own practice to get status, schedules, and supplies.
Conversational interfaces and the future of healthcare.
Conversational interfaces and chatbots with AI are all the rage in the consumer world. Several solutions are being offered to cater to over 35.6 million Americans who are now using the voice assistants at least once a month. However, one of the most deserving demographics who needs conversational interfaces is the doctors. Gloves in both hands and a sterile environment make browser clicking or even smartphone touch interface impractical, expensive in cleaning from blood/saliva, time-consuming and cumbersome. According to a 2013 study by Rand Corporation and AMA, doctors feel that user interfaces don’t match their clinical flow.
Our product and domain research has shown that doctors want to know how their practice is doing or when is their next patient or figure out how to increase their production and maybe even automatically order their repeat order supplies without having to manually enter commands or data to accomplish that.
At Sikka Software Corporation we set out to implement an AI-based conversational interface for the practice. It is called Practice Insights and is now available on Amazon Alexa skills store and shortly will be available for the Google Home devices. Sikka Software focuses on retail healthcare so this solution is currently available for dentists, veterinarians, optometrists, audiologists, orthodontists, oral surgeons, and chiropractors. This skill is compatible with over 400 practice management and financial systems in US, UK, Canada, Australia, France and New Zealand. The backend supplies and ordering fulfillment continues to be done by doctors favorite distributor.
Practice Insights is available today for the retail healthcare market as noted above on Amazon.com. We know we are probably early in implementing this but have found real excitement among our doctor users. You can check it out here: