During the World Congress Patient Experience & Engagement Summit in Boston, I led a panel with these innovative health systems, discussing how they are using virtual health assistants (e.g. AI Chatbots, Voice) to increase efficiency in care delivery and enhance the patient experience.

Virtual Assistants in Healthcare

Consumers are demanding convenience and want to interact with companies any time anywhere. Companies across different industries such as retail, travel and financial services are responding with virtual assistant tools, enabling consumers to get answers and transact 24x7.

Within healthcare, innovation driven organizations are exploring how to empower patients with virtual health agents to access relevant care information (e.g. learn about how to prepare for a procedure, determine when to call the doctor following surgery), get tasks done (e.g. schedule and participate in a virtual visit) and get guidance on a care plan (e.g. reminders to refill medication, follow up doctor’s appointments).

The strong interest in AI driven virtual health assistants aligns with Accenture’s Digital Health Tech Vision 2019 trend #5 “MYMARKETS: Meeting customer’s needs at the speed of now”. The Accenture report explains “digital expectations have now evolved and a new opportunity to deliver better experiences is on the table: capturing moments. Technology has created a world of intensely customized and on-demand experiences, so healthcare organizations must reinvent themselves to find and capture those opportunities as they come”.

Value of Virtual Health Assistants

When you think about the gaps in healthcare efficiency today, you can envision how virtual health assistants can support patients and the care team.

There are many valuable use cases for Virtual Health Assistants to help patients prepare and manage their care, with reminders, education (e.g. health condition, procedure) and the capability to escalate to a care provider as needed.

On the clinical side, the care team can capture, monitor and communicate with patients. Instead of making outbound calls trying to reach patients, staff can see which patients are in pain, have questions/concerns or are in need of immediate care. 

Panelist Virtual Health Assistant Use Cases

When presenting their use cases for Virtual Health Assistants, panelists shared their specific business goals such as decreasing readmissions/ED visits and costs, increasing service utilization, improving care plan compliance and enhancing the patient experience. All panelists view these virtual health assistants as an “extension” of their care delivery.

Boston Children’s Hospital (BCH): In 2018, BCH teamed up with Seattle Children’s on an Alexa skill, Flu Doctor, providing parents with answers to questions about the flu which are “personalized, science-backed data and recommendations”. Panelist Devin Nadar, Senior Partnerships Manager, Innovation and Digital Health Accelerator discussed a more recent Alexa skill -“My Children’s Enhanced Recovery After Surgery (ERAS)”, which is part of the program for all cardiac patients undergoing specific surgeries at BCH.  Built on the Amazon platform, this skill to desgned to capture information from the parent about how the child is doing after the surgery and indicate if there is a follow up appointment scheduled. “We know that parents really don’t want to come back to the hospital after surgery”, Devin adds.  After accessing “My Childrens” through the Amazon Alexa Store, the parent begins to “check in” the day after the patient is discharged and receives pertinent information for that day.” Before this tool, it was “like a black box” about what happens while the patient is recovering. Now BCH can focus clinical resources on patients with priority needs.   

Dana-Farber/Brigham and Women's Cancer: “Earlier this year we developed and are planning to launch an Orbita powered health assistant to support prostate cancer patients who are on a “lifelong journey” with ongoing PSA testing” shares Rich Boyajian, NP Program Director, Virtual PSA Monitoring, Radiation Oncology. This chatbot will send a link to the patient to engage via text and/or voice on their phone. It is designed to  “onboard” him into the program, present the closest lab, deliver good PSA test results and enable him to request contact with a care team member. “Patients can select the modality for this follow up contact by email, a call or even a virtual visit”, explains Rich. “It was easy for me to write the virtual health assistant script (i.e. questions and answers) to engage with the patient since I do this all the time. We selected the Orbita platform because we can put this content in one time and it be accessed by the patient through their preferred modality”.

Northwell Health: In 2018, Northwell launched Health Chats, an AI text chatbot powered by Conversa Health, which empowers patients to stay connected to their care navigator through recovery. This gives the staff visibility into what is really happening when the patient leaves the hospital. “We selected Conversa Health because it is easy for the patient who doesn’t need to download an app. Instead the patient receives a chat notification through an email or SMS text message and simply clicks on the link to start the chat through their mobile phone”, explains Hallie Bleau, ACNP-BC, AVP Transitional Care Management, Health Solutions. The Health Chat engages the patient post discharge to “self -assess and manage symptoms”.  Since Northwell Health integrated the Health Chat into their care management system, the information that the patient types in (problems, pain level) is feed into an algorithm to flag the patient on the nurse’s dashboard for an immediate contact. The patient can connect with a nurse through the Health Chat application at any time.

Panelist Insights on Virtual Health Assistants

Many lessons learned were shared by the panelists including considerations for both patient and staff engagement. One common theme was that the planning for these Virtual Health Assistants takes time. “We needed 6-8 months to get staff buy- in and patient consent”, admits Hallie.

Patient Considerations:

Determine fit with the patient’s current technology. “With our 65+ Medicare population at Northwell Health, we realized that one big barrier was some patients still have a flip phone which will not work with our chatbot”, Hallie explains.

Understand patient expectations. “In our Alexa skill, we ask if the caregiver would like the doctor/nurse to call. We know there are differences in how long the call back will take so we need to set the proper expectations for when they can expect a return call ”, shares Devin.

All panelists expressed an interest in learning from patients about their experiences. “We built into the Alexa skill ‘did that answer your question’ so that we can capture their feedback and make changes to our script”, Devin explains.

Patients have shared insightful comments about their virtual health assistant interactions. “Our patients at Northwell Health feel that someone is always thinking about them. In a 30 day period, we are able to increase the number of touches by 5-6 contacts”.  Hallie went on to say “we thought that caregivers would be more interested in seeing these digital conversations with mom. We learned some didn’t because ‘she doesn’t live with me’. Several seniors do not want to ‘bother their daughter with this information’. We have also learned that patients who are hard of hearing really like to use the chatbot because it is easier to communicate with the care team”.  

Staff Considerations:  

During the planning stages, panelists feel it is important to educate their staff. They need to feel comfortable with this new digital interaction, understand how to describe it to patients and have a clear picture how this will impact their workflow. Specific considerations include:

Extensive staff education. “We were surprised at the amount of time/education required with our staff. They needed to understand why and what does it mean for them”, admits Hallie.

Devin adds “we train with our staff, demonstrate the app and provide a cheat sheet for reference, which tells about them about our Alexa skill, how to open it, start it, stop it, what you can ask and what it is used for”.

Stage the implementation. “We have limited the roll out of the voice app to 5-10 per week because we did not want to overwhelm our staff at BCH”, explains Devin.

Success Measures & Future Virtual Health Assistants

Later in the year, panelists will be evaluating their program from an experience (patient, staff), operational efficiency and clinical perspective.

“At BCH, we want to see if parents are completing the questions and determining where they drop off so that we can build a better experience”, describes Devin.

“Our virtual health assistant is replacing the manual labor from looking up the nearest lab to calling cancer patients about positive test results”, shares Rich. “As an extension of our care, we expect to decrease the number of follow up in person visits which will free us up to care for more patients”.

“Our staff is seeing the fruits of labor… ‘we don’t have to call him’, ‘we can quickly get to the root of the problem”, adds Hallie.

Panelists expressed the need in the future to capture and place pertinent information from the digital health interaction into the patient’s electronic medical record.

Future Plans: 

Refine conversation based on role. “At Northwell Health, we are talking about tweaking the conversation for the caregiver”, explains Hallie.

Expand languages. “We currently offer our chatbot in English and Spanish but will add other languages”, Hallie shares.  

Add new capabilities. “We plan to add more symptoms to our health assistant to provide more information for our PSA monitoring”, explains Rich.

Extend the Experience. “We are working on expanding the digital conversation from 30 to 90 days so that we have more insight into their receovery”, mentions Hallie.

Connect into Virtual Care. “At BCH, we are thinking about triggering a virtual visit when the parent indicates that she needs to speak with someone”, shares Devin. 

Northwell Health is planning to continuously launch Health Chats across their organization given their strategic investment in ConversaHealth. “We have already launched Health Chats to patients with head and neck cancer and are getting ready to roll out them out in our cardiac surgery department” Hallie concludes.

The National Cancer Institute reports 2017 U.S. cancer care expenditures were $147+ billion, with anticipated increases from our aging population. 

According to Deloitte’s report in Evidence Based Oncology ( The American Journal of Managed Care publication), many organizations are exploring ways to control costs and enhance care quality for oncology patients (e.g. Patient Centered Medical Homes, CMS’ Oncology Care Model).

With many different types of cancer and treatment options, each patient embarks on a personal care journey.

Oncology patients often experience a long journey. Although some steps entail engaging with care staff at a hospital or clinic, most of the time patients are challenged with managing their disease on a daily basis away from the health system.

Healthcare organizations need to closely monitor oncology patients to determine when care and support is required. To be proactive and stay aligned with patient needs, health systems must collect patient information (e.g. Patient Reported Outcomes/PROMs, Patient reported experiences/PREMs). This patient information can guide the care team to intervene, reducing hospitalizations and costs.  

Northwestern Medicine’s Oncology Program

“We wanted to take a holistic approach with our oncology patients; mind, body and spirit”, explains Dr. Martha L. Twaddle MD FACP FAAHPM HMDC, Medical Director - Palliative Medicine & Supportive Care, Northwestern Medicine, Lake Forest North Region. “We wanted to help our patients navigate their oncology journey, figure out their new normal and participate in their care”.

“A few years ago, we successfully used a patient engagement care tool with our palliative patients. Our palliative team is embedded within Oncology. Eighteen months ago, we introduced this telehealth type of application to our oncology patients. We felt it would be valuable to extend TapCloud to our general oncology patients because we had seen such a positive response using it for those with high symptom burden and advance disease. We believe many patients and caregivers will benefit from having this tool available to use”.

Patient Experience

How does TapCloud support the oncology patient? What is the patient experience?

Last month, Robert (not his real name), a 77 year old patient was diagnosed with prostate cancer. Dr. Twaddle and her staff worked closely with Robert through the onboarding process to provide an overview, demonstrate how to use TapCloud, help him download the TapCloud app onto his phone and iPad and discuss what symptoms they will manage to personalize the app for his specific condition.

The Nurse Coordinator explained “Robert, with this tool (TapCloud), we can think about you when you are not in front of us, get a sense of how you are doing and that we are on the same page”.  Robert was relieved to get a message from his Nurse Coordinator confirming that she can see Robert listed on the dashboard to keep a close eye on him.

Most of Dr. Twaddle’s seventy active patients using the TapCloud App are in their 60s and 70s, with a few in their 80s and 90s.

Through the TapCloud app Care Plan, patients like Robert are asked a set of questions. How are you feeling today compared with yesterday? Which of these meds are you taking? Which symptoms are you experiencing today? Symptoms that were selected the prior day are displayed bold. Patients can add symptom(s) which typically takes less than a minute to provide this critical information. 

Symptom tracking is made easy by using a word cloud. Each day, the patient sees a personalized word cloud containing symptoms.  This personalized symptom cloud incorporates his condition and medications and his list is continuously enhanced from machine learning. TapCloud’s predictive symptoms cover 100+ conditions and 14,000+ side effects.  The patient simply touches those symptoms he is noticing. Additionally, he views personalized education based on his journey stage (e.g. tips for managing chemo side effects) and what he is experiencing. He can also upload this biometric information (e.g. vitals, etc.).

How has Northwestern Medicine used the TapCloud tool to deliver better care to Oncology Patients?

Dashboard displays demo data only

• Prioritize Patient Outreach. The TapCloud platform analyzes all the patient clinical and self- reported data in real time.  Using advanced algorithms, patients with a clinical need are identified and alerts are sent to the care team. Patients are prioritized based on alerts, severity and risk. Nurses use the TapCloud Triage Dashboard to efficiently track, monitor and respond to patients requiring an intervention. Nurses can drill down on a specific patient to see how many days since check in, recent events (e.g. vitals, medication usage), pain and anxiety levels. 

• Intervene on specific symptoms: Instead of “fishing” for information about how a patient is feeling or having the patient end up in the ER, Nurse Terri can call the patient and say “I've noticed that you've had increased pain the past 2 days…”.  TapCloud can also be set up to send alerts for symptoms associated with a patient’s treatment. Patients can send a picture within the TapCloud app with a secure message about their concern.

• In the Patient’s Words: “We had one patient who didn’t feel pain but entered ‘yuk’. He selected that to communicate in his words what he was feeling. One of the features that I really like is journaling. A patient may share that today he is ‘discouraged by his illness’.  Although he does not expect us to respond, it gives us insight into how he is doing and the support that he may need from us”, shares Dr. Twaddle. 

• Stay Connected with patients who do not come in regularly: When patients are going through infusion treatment, Dr. Twaddle explained that her team sees them on a frequent basis. “However, when our patients are on oral chemo, we feel that TapCloud is especially valuable to give us a window into their experience. We risk losing them because they cannot tolerate the medications and stop without communicating to us.”

• Address Patient Needs with Right Resource: When patients are not in the Clinic or Hospital, it is important to understand what they need. “We may see in a patient’s journaling that she is feeling afraid which is not physical but may be best addressed through our psych- social resource. Or a patient may be ‘running out of her medication’ or ‘checking in on an upcoming appointment’, which can be managed by our Nurse Coordinator."

Measuring Success

Dr. Twaddle uses a set of quantitative and qualitative measures to evaluate the success for the TapCloud solution for oncology patients including:

1) Patient Engagement. How involved are patients in participating in their care?  How often did they check in with the app?  Which symptoms are most common? What are the new symptoms that have been added by the patient? 

2) Improved symptom management. Was pain successfully controlled (e.g. pain scores, pain direction)?  Were negative symptoms (e.g. fatigue, bloated, shoulder pain) managed in a timely and effective manner?

3) Cost reduction. How much money was saved by avoiding ER through interventions on symptoms? “When one of our cancer patient ends up in the ER, we explain that we may be able to help avoid the admission with a check in on the TapCloud tool. We had one patient with a side effect that we could have spotted and intervened since it was dangerous for her”.

“We have found that TapCloud is helpful both with cancer patients who have declining function (e.g. pancreatic, advanced lung, brain tumor) and with those that may be curable (e.g. head & neck, breast)", shares Dr. Twaddle.

AMITA Health’s Program will leverage TapCloud

AMITA Health, one of Illinois’s largest health systems is in the process of planning their program which will use TapCloud.

“When I first heard about TapCloud, I was on board immediately”, explains Dr. Robert O. Maganini, Breast Cancer Specialist at AMITA Health. “We have a compliance problem with our breast cancer patients. Although the hormone therapy treatment (e.g. Tamoxifen, Class Aromatase inhibitor) is for five years, some patients will stop after two years because of the side effects. Our working theory is if we have insights into where these patients struggle and when, we can do more aggressive interventions instead of waiting for their next appointment”.

“Our plan is to offer TapCloud to all 200 patients who want to use it, from newly diagnosed to those in year two when we experience a drop in treatment adherence”.  After describing his patient population – mostly women 40-75 years old, Dr. Maganini expects a high opt- in rate since it is “ideal for them because it enables faster and more convenient access to their provider”.

Like Dr. Twaddle, Dr. Maganini is planning to use a patient- centric approach when introducing TapCloud, ensuring that patients understand why they are using TapCloud, how to use it, and when to use it. 

Dr. Maganini plans to introduce TapCloud to patients at the time of diagnosis. Nurses (e.g. NPs, Navigators) will get patients set up and show them how to use the digital health application. “Since surgery is typically the first step, we plan to use as a follow up with discharge instructions. For those in going through chemo treatments, we will monitor their symptoms. We want to get our patients accustomed to using TapCloud and then they will be using it for the long run with hormone therapy”.

As part of the planning process, Dr. Maganini is working with his team to define the list of side effects including the words that these patients use to describe them. He is leveraging his own and his nursing staff’s patient experiences to devise the TapCloud  symptom list in “patient speak”. This is helpful to patients who often struggle to describe their symptoms and feelings.

From this program, Dr. Managini expects to learn about the top side effects, interventions and the effectiveness of the interventions. He will be looking at different success factors – “increase in the therapy completion (3, 4, 5 years) and longer term (beyond the 2 years) hopefully a decrease in mortality rate and reoccurrence”.

“With a program showing demonstrative effectiveness, we envision scaling this to the AMITA Health 2.0, 19 hospitals”, concludes Dr. Managini.

It all started with a simple question one day, and grew into a trusted health relationship a few short months later. Sarah was very busy at work that crisp fall morning and had only a few minutes to log in and ask about her daughter’s diabetes medication. Sarah was comforted by the response and a bit intrigued when her Health Assistant Harriet introduced herself and explained that she is a resource to help her and her family with any of her health questions or concerns. They began a conversation about her daughter’s condition and a trusted relationship began.

Later that week Harriet made a follow up call to see if Sarah was able to pick up her daughter’s medication and asked how everything was going. Sarah mentioned that she finally got her daughter’s pills and confided that she was completely overwhelmed. Sarah shared that she was recently diagnosed with breast cancer and that her husband was often unavailable as he traveled constantly for work. She explained that she had a hard time getting to her treatments. After their call, Harriet explored and evaluated resources, and scheduled transportation to help Sarah get to her next appointment. Harriet put the appointment confirmation into Sarah’s patient portal and set up a reminder, including date and time, about the ride to her next treatment.

This may sound like fiction in the current healthcare environment, where services are siloed and patients are burdened with making their own decisions around healthcare – often complex and costly. Sarah is relieved to have this service today. She first learned from her employer about the Accolade platform and health advisor service last summer. It wasn’t until she reached out with a simple question to her health assistant that Sarah experienced the true value of having a healthcare advisor on her side.

A 2016 Harris Poll reveals that 84% of working families placed a value on having a single, trusted resource to help support their healthcare needs. Busy families have limited time and resources so they appreciate having one place to go to help them understand their options and sort through their healthcare decisions. 

Personalized Patient Experience

With the Accolade Health Assistant as the single point of contact for her family, Sarah is able to reach out to Harriet for guidance all along her and her family’s healthcare journeys.  Accolade integrates high tech and high touch to deliver a superior patient experience with lower healthcare costs. 

Accolade Health Assistant Harriet accesses the Accolade platform to interact with and personalize her support for Sarah:

Preferred Communication: Harriet engages with Sarah and her family based on their communication preferences. Sarah likes phone calls and email through the Accolade online portal. Sarah’s husband Sam prefers secure text messages since he can send quick messages and follow up later during his business trips.  

Personalized & Proactive Experience: Harriet’s interactions with Sarah are driven by rich patient profile information, which contains contextual information, social determinants of health and service utilization. Sarah and her family’s profiles are updated with data collected over time and more than 150 data feeds integrated into the Accolade platform. The HIPAA-certified approach creates profiles that are continuously analyzed through sophisticated algorithms and health assistant reviews, which allow for personalized conversations around individual health needs, care gaps and obstacles.

A recent Accolade platform trigger prompts Harriet to reach out to Sarah’s husband Sam when she notices that he is still refilling this pain medication many weeks after his knee surgery.  Harriet sent a text to Sam to inquire about his knee surgery. After a text exchange, Harriett suggested that he see his doctor to discuss his persistent pain.

Patient Education & Connected Health: Sarah and her family can access educational information and recommended health apps. Before Sarah’s husband knee operation, Health Assistant Harriet texted Sam with a link to a video and suggested questions to prepare for his surgery and provider discussion. 

When Harriett spoke with Sarah about her daughter’s diabetes appointment and care plan, Harriet informed Sarah about the Livongo mobile diabetes application available through her employer’s health plan. Together, they review the Livongo app, which can help Sarah and her daughter better track and manage her diabetes. With Accolade and Livongo, Sarah is able to share information from the mobile app with her daughter’s doctor, giving him insight into her problems with controlling her A1C levels.

Continuous Connection to Clinical Resources and Support:  Harriett asked Sarah if she would like to speak with an oncology nurse to help prepare her for her upcoming oncologist appointment. Margaret, an Accolade Clinical Health Assistant and RN, joined them on the line and offered empathetic support by asking more about Sarah’s diagnosis, where she was in her care plan with her doctor, whether she had a support network and what was planned for her next appointment. Margaret provided Sarah with questions to ask her oncologist and recommended a follow-up discussion.

Intelligent Engagement: Harriet and her Health Assistant team are continuously alerted by the Accolade platform. On an ongoing basis Accolade gathers, aggregates and models de-identified data to trigger alerts and guide Health Assistants in further personalizing their interactions with their clients.  Health Assistants are prompted to ask questions about health behaviors and emerging symptoms, applying specialized training and skillset. 

Patient Experience Success Measures:

Paul Csigi, Director of Benefits at Philadelphia- based Temple University Health System (TUHS), rolled out the Accolade solution in 2015 and has over 7,000 employees on the platform today.  “So much of healthcare is getting people to the right place at the right time. Accolade has created an experience where our employees build a relationship with an assistant that gives them what they need, when they need it. Accolade takes a single problem that the patient has called in about and creates a relationship to support the family on an ongoing basis. With all of the information about our employees, Accolade addresses the whole person, connects the patient with clinical resources, and continues to reach out. This helps treat our employees sooner, which is less expensive for our organization.”

In addition to financial measures, TUHS monitors qualitative feedback from employees. With the Accolade platform outreach (phone or online), TUHS is able to capture the patient’s experience engaging with their Accolade Health Assistant:

“I'd like to thank Temple for the Accolade program. We have been going through some really tough times…..my health assistants have been a big support and a big help to my family in helping to guide us to the right doctors to help with family issues and illnesses. I really appreciate this program. Without it, I'd really be lost.”

With two years of the Accolade solution under their belt, Paul Csigi and his team are considering new ways to support TUHS employees. “I have an employee population with diabetes and heart disease. I am interested in learning more about Accolade’s partnerships to bring patient data into the platform to support these populations.”  Csigi sees the benefit of bringing in data from patient devices and smart applications. Integrating this data with the patient’s medical record gives new insights to Accolade Health Assistants, empowering them to deliver even better support and drive improved outcomes.