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Facilitating an excellent patient experience is paramount for telehealth providers. Those who fail to meet modern patient expectations, which include accessibility, convenience, and personalization, risk having patients seek services elsewhere.
Statistics show that patients who have reported a negative experience are three times more likely to leave their provider than those whose expectations were met. As a result, many telehealth providers are turning to artificial intelligence (AI) to increase their capacity to meet today’s expectations.
“AI brings technological advancements to the telehealth space that allow providers to streamline operations while also elevating the overall patient experience,” says Josh Thompson, CEO of Impact Health USA and Impact Health University. “It gives providers enhanced capacity for making care more accessible and tailoring telehealth solutions to each patient’s individual needs.”
Impact Health USA is a ground-breaking national telehealth platform offering primary care, mental health support, and obesity medications. It brings together expertise in business, technology, and entrepreneurship to empower better healthcare access in all 50 US states while also providing opportunities for entrepreneurs to launch their own healthcare clinics. Through Impact Health University, Thompson advises clinic owners on launching and running successful healthcare businesses.
AI is profoundly impacting the entire business landscape, empowering companies to reach new heights of efficiency and productivity. In telehealth, companies are exploring a number of ways AI can improve the quality of service they offer to patients without compromising security or violating regulatory requirements.
Improving telehealth outcomes with AI-powered data analytics
AI significantly amplifies a company’s capacity for data analytics. By leveraging that capacity, telehealth providers can rapidly and accurately transform data into valuable insights.
“AI’s ability to analyze large datasets can facilitate a number of enhancements in telehealth, including data-driven personalized treatment plans,” Thompson says. “AI can also enable more accurate predictive analytics, which can be crucial for preventive care, chronic disease management, and other critical services.”
Predictive analytics can leverage data to forecast how health conditions could evolve for a particular patient, allowing telehealth providers to fine-tune the treatment they recommend. It can also be used to identify patients who are at high risk for certain conditions, allowing providers to facilitate early interventions and decrease the likelihood of conditions progressing undetected.
For example, AI can improve accuracy and speed during patient triage and diagnosis, making the process more efficient and less taxing on patients. AI can also facilitate more effective self-diagnosis, allowing patients to gain insights derived from their unique medical history and current conditions rather than general information.
“AI-powered data analytics can assist telehealth providers as they pursue better resource allocation and greater cost efficiency,” Thompson shares. “Predictive analytics driven by historical data analysis can predict fluctuations in patient volume, which allows providers to practice more reliable resource forecasting. By using AI to facilitate more precise staffing, providers can save money in a way that does not have a negative impact on the overall patient experience.”
Enhancing patient experience with AI-powered chatbots
The combination of natural language processing and generative AI has empowered the next generation of chatbots, which hold great promise for enhancing telehealth services.
“AI-powered chatbots and virtual assistants are one of the most exciting solutions being utilized in telehealth today,” says Thompson. “They empower immediate patient support day and night, answer common health questions in an easily understood way, and even perform initial assessments in a manner that streamlines the triage process. AI chatbots have the capacity to do a lot of the heavy lifting in the early phases of the patient journey, making it easier for doctors and other healthcare professionals to leverage their expertise and experience to provide the best possible patient care.”
AI chatbots also have the potential to increase healthcare accessibility, addressing needs that human providers are not able to attend to due to a lack of resources or knowledge.
“In the future, AI could be leveraged to address the problem of accessibility in underserved communities,” Thompson says. “By increasing the sophistication and reliability of remote diagnostic tools, AI can be the innovation that bridges gaps in healthcare delivery for those in low-resource settings.”
Guarding telehealth processes from the dangers of AI bias
Addressing AI bias is one of the challenges that threatens the effective use of AI in the telehealth space. Bias in the data used to train AI leads to bias in AI’s output, which can cause dangerous distortions in the diagnoses and recommendations AI offers to patients and healthcare professionals. To prevent those biases from negatively influencing patient care, telehealth providers must make sure training data is free of biases and AI-derived results are monitored by human agents who can confirm their validity.
“AI bias is one of the most troubling risks for those who are seeking to leverage it for telehealth,” Thompson reports. “When underlying data is flawed or drawn from a population that does not match those being served, it can lead to inequitable care. As providers implement AI-driven solutions, they must provide careful oversight.”
AI’s capabilities provide the potential to reshape the telehealth space by empowering greater efficiency and an enhanced patient experience, but they also introduce new risks that must be addressed. To utilize AI to its fullest potential, telehealth providers must establish a healthy balance between technological innovation and patient safety.
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