A Modern-Day Revolution: How AI Could Transform Healthcare

This article originally appeared in VentureBeat.

Healthcare: If any industry or vertical landed on the map more than ever this past year, it was healthcare. We’ve talked to more healthcare customers than any other vertical during this time, and it makes sense why: healthcare has touched all of us in some way or another this past year. Whether someone has been ill, needed checkups, or is now getting vaccinated, it has or will touch all of us.

Effective communication is a continual challenge for healthcare providers. Communication challenges amongst patients, payers, and providers are frequently linked to inefficiencies that result in unnecessary costs, care delivery errors, and of course negative patient outcomes. Enabling providers, payers, and patients the freedom to effectively collaborate and share information using the devices and services that are most convenient at any point in time is critically important to solving these issues across the healthcare enterprise and to provide meaningful solutions in areas such as:

Open telecommunication architectures enable integration with leading healthcare application vendors. Architectures such as Avaya Aura™ enable electronic health record and revenue cycle management systems to be augmented with state-of-the-art contact center and telecommunication solutions, simplifying interactions between patients, business users, and clinical professionals. Their unified communication capabilities assure reliable and secure messaging across the user community regardless of an individual’s role or responsibilities.

Today, closed-loop, synchronous communication solutions are increasingly used for notification, messaging, and information access. By assuring information is received and acted upon, they make an important contribution toward reducing revenue leakage and improving service delivery in areas such as:

Healthcare mergers and acquisitions are forcing providers to develop cohesive approaches to managing the patient journey. Attention is increasingly being given to ways in which seamless access to information for both patients and providers can be accommodated for the purpose of streamlining patient access services and care delivery processes. As the consolidation trend continues (healthcare M&A was at a record level in 2017 and continued through 2018), the need to establish highly effective patient/provider communication services is increasingly important – especially when you consider the amount of money that is lost due to communication inefficiencies.

The position of healthcare providers and their interactions with patients throughout the patient care journey are evolving rapidly. Technology-savvy consumers accustomed to self-service and digital interactions expect healthcare providers to supply easily accessible, interactive patient services 24/7/365. The increasingly complex healthcare provider landscape is compounding the problem as medical facilities look for new ways to attract and support patients and to drive efficiencies and revenue in areas such as patient scheduling, referrals, wellness management, and payments.