A Stroke Patient’s AI Receptionist Failure Is a Wake-Up Call to Businesses
The story showed how technology can fail patients, but also risks teaching the wrong lesson.
EXPERT OPINION BY TOMAS GORNY, CO-FOUNDER AND CEO, NEXTIVA
A 71-year-old British woman recently said that after her stroke, she attempted to book a doctor’s appointment five times, but could not get past the medical practice’s AI receptionist. As a result, the office has “decommissioned” the tool. The story makes “AI receptionists look like a bad idea,” Digital Trendsreports.
It’s a story getting attention around the world — and business leaders are at risk of learning exactly the wrong lesson from it. In reality, well-designed AI receptionists could be the solution to this problem. How can that be? Here’s what we know.
Clogged phone lines plague health care
Missed phone calls are a big problem in every sector, and the stakes are especially high for health care companies. Of course, their answering services virtually always tell patients to call emergency numbers for medical emergencies, so these missed calls should not be a matter of life and death. But they do affect people’s health. When patients have a hard time getting through to their providers, studies find they’re less proactive about things like scheduling appointments.
Even in this high-tech era, people are still most likely to pick up the phone to contact health care providers, rather than turning first to a digital tool. Those calls need to be answered, and quickly. Nextiva’s research shows that people hang up on all kinds of businesses after several minutes on hold.
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Every time that happens, it hurts the bottom line. Earlier this year, the Medical Group Management Association (MGMA) lamented that “phones are still a bottleneck costing medical practices time they can’t afford.” Most health care practices “still run phones as a real-time switchboard,” the report said. Staff “act as a human intake engine: Capture the request, clarify it, document it, route it, and often resolve it. That’s hard enough when fully staffed; it’s crushing when you’re not. And every missed call has cost implications: No-shows and missed appointments are estimated to cost the health care industry around $150 billion annually.”
What’s tying up the phone lines? Largely, common tasks like ensuring eligibility and authorization, scheduling, and gathering patient intake information. Much of this can and should be handled by AI receptionists.
A top-rated agentic voice can ask the right questions, gather the necessary information, and process the data faster than any human could. All this can be done with HIPAA compliance in the United States, and similar compliance in other countries, ensuring the privacy and security of patient information.
Source: www.inc.com
