Digital patient engagement has evolved significantly with wearable healthcare devices monitoring vitals and providing real-time feedback. However, generative AI is now taking patient engagement to the next level. This advanced technology leverages deep learning models trained on vast datasets to generate realistic text, images, and speech. As a result, we are witnessing a transformation in how patients interact with their healthcare providers.
Imagine a generative AI-powered digital companion, available 24/7, providing patients with answers to their questions, personalized guidance, and emotional support through empathetic responses. These AI tools don't just respond; they actively engage with patients, encouraging healthier choices and maintaining a continuous connection to health management. This seamless interaction ensures that patients feel supported and informed at all times, fostering a deeper commitment to their well-being.
What is Patient Engagement?
Patient engagement means actively involving patients in their own healthcare through shared decision-making, self-management, and collaboration with providers. This is crucial for value-based healthcare, which aims to improve care quality while enhancing governance, policy-making, and reducing costs. However, the complexity of modern healthcare and low health literacy often leave patients struggling to understand and communicate basic health information, hindering their participation in their own care.
Traditionally, patient engagement has relied on in-person interactions with providers. These visits, while essential, are often limited and overwhelming, making it hard for patients to retain information or ask questions. Medical jargon and healthcare complexity add further barriers to effective patient involvement. To address these challenges, patient engagement must extend beyond traditional methods, offering continuous, accessible support. Leveraging technology and innovative strategies can empower patients, leading to better health outcomes and more efficient care delivery.
The Demand for Personalized Patient Support
Studies show engaged patients achieve better health outcomes, highlighting the need for more accessible support. Nearly 50% of Americans already use technology for health management [Updox], and over 80% prefer digital communication with providers [NICE]. This demonstrates a strong demand for personalized patient engagement technology that offers on-demand support. Generative AI addresses this need by allowing providers to offer continuous, personalized support through digital tools throughout the patient's health journey, not just in clinical settings. This empowers patients to actively participate in care decisions and self-management, which are key aspects of value-based healthcare.
Personalized Health Information and Education
Generative AI solutions can act as a patient engagement tool with personalized health information and educational materials tailored to each patient's needs. By analyzing patient data, such as medical history, lifestyle, and preferences, generative AI can generate customized content that is both informative and engaging for patients, empowering them to take a more active role in their health management.
For example, a medical center partnered with Quantiphi to develop a successful AI-powered virtual platform specifically designed to assist cancer patients in navigating clinical trials. This multichannel platform, accessible via chat, text, or phone, was seamlessly integrated into the medical center's clinical trials webpage, offering patients 24/7 access to informational responses. Nurses could leverage the platform to follow up with patients about potential trials based on their preferences, and in the absence of a nurse, the system would ensure patients received a callback with complete context and personalized trial suggestions. This innovative solution effectively enhanced the patient experience by providing continuous support and streamlining access to crucial information.
Self-Service Patient Portals
Quantiphi's virtual assistants, PAM (Post-Procedure Assistant Manager), and CORA (Clinical trial Outcome & Reporting Assistant), leverage generative AI to offer 24/7 self-service patient portals. These digital patient engagement platforms integrate seamlessly with existing healthcare systems and can be trained on specific historical health records, lab reports, appointment data, discharge summaries, immunizations, and healthcare provider notes. This empowers healthcare providers to deliver a highly personalized patient experience by allowing patients to easily access appointment alerts, scheduling, cost estimates, medical insights, and emotional support from any device, anytime.
Quantiphi empowered Summa Health with a continually evolving virtual assistant powered by generative AI. This intelligent tool addressed patients' questions, starting with comprehensive COVID-19 information and expanding to encompass Summa Health's service lines, Epic MyChart navigation, appointment scheduling, and ultimately, COVID-19 vaccines. To ensure accuracy, a Content Management System allows Summa Health's experts to seamlessly update information. Additionally, a real-time evaluation framework fueled by Google Data Studio analyzes conversations, providing actionable insights into patients' evolving concerns. This empowers Summa Health to proactively address their patients' most pressing needs.
Symptom Screening
Generative AI-powered solutions offer invaluable advantages in symptom screening playing a crucial role in the early detection of serious diseases like diabetes, cancer, obesity, arthritis, etc. By analyzing data from X-rays, medical images, reports, and patient responses, these technologies identify patterns associated with the onset of these conditions. Moreover, wearable bands integrated with generative AI enhance healthcare by continuously monitoring patients’ vitals alerting physicians, caregivers, or patients themselves about potential health conditions. While it doesn’t replace professional medical evaluation, it guides patients toward appropriate actions and ensures timely medical intervention while reducing anxiety by providing timely information.
Quantiphi's collaboration with EyecareLive perfectly illustrates this potential. They co-developed a digital vision care platform featuring a sophisticated, chat-enabled virtual assistant (VA). This AI-powered assistant streamlines the process by effectively triaging complex eye symptoms, assisting with eye tests, and scheduling appointments. Designed specifically for EyecareLive, the VA personalizes the experience for patients by recognizing returning users and skipping repetitive questions. Importantly, it can also flag emergencies and guide patients on the necessary immediate steps. Additionally, integrated data analytics empower EyecareLive to assess the VA's performance and continually improve its capabilities. This collaboration exemplifies how generative AI can empower patients with self-monitoring tools while simultaneously improving healthcare delivery for providers like EyecareLive through early detection and efficient care coordination.
Personalized Treatment Plans
Generative AI can assist healthcare providers in developing personalized treatment plans for patients. By analyzing patient data and medical research, generative AI can generate treatment recommendations that are tailored to the individual patient's needs and preferences. This leads to more effective and efficient treatment outcomes.
Generative AI can be embedded within electronic health records (EHR) to provide real-time, actionable insights at the point of care. When integrated with EHR systems, generative AI can continuously analyze patient data, identify patterns, and suggest personalized treatment plans directly within the clinician’s workflow. This integration allows healthcare providers to make data-driven patient engagement strategies quickly and accurately.
Illustrating this potential, Quantiphi devised a predictive classification model aimed at categorizing oncology patient encounters as either relevant or irrelevant to cancer recurrence. This model uses both structured and unstructured EHR data, including medical profiles, physician notes, pathology reports, and lab reports, to identify features indicating recurrence. Utilizing Google BigQuery and Dataproc, a scalable data aggregation and augmentation pipeline was built, along with a patient timeline to track feature occurrences relative to cancer recurrence. Natural Language Processing techniques, such as keyword search and TF-IDF, structured the text data, enhancing the predictive model's accuracy.
Personalized Automated Outreach
Personalized healthcare recognizes that each patient has unique needs and preferences, and a generative AI-powered patient engagement platform can help address this. By automating and personalizing outreach, healthcare providers can optimize the method, content, timing, and frequency of interventions for maximum impact. Utilizing data analytics and machine learning, the platform analyzes comprehensive patient data, including medical history, lifestyle factors, and treatment responses. This allows for the delivery of tailored health education, reminders, support resources, follow-ups, and treatment plans, ensuring that patients receive relevant information about managing their conditions and preventive care measures in a way that resonates with them personally.
Quantiphi's collaboration with a leading American virtual care company exemplifies this approach. We co-developed a proof-of-concept chat and telephony-based virtual agent that facilitated patient intake and clinical encounters. This AI-powered agent empowered patients with self-service capabilities and navigation tools, streamlining access to the appropriate services. Furthermore, by leveraging Google Cloud's generative AI capabilities, Quantiphi enhanced the company's existing chatbots. These improved chatbots provided patients with accurate and efficient responses to their queries, offered integrated care guidance and advocacy, and ultimately, contributed to better health outcomes. This collaboration highlights how generative AI personalizes patient outreach, empowering patients and improving healthcare delivery for providers.
Why Generative AI is Key to Optimizing Healthcare Experiences
Generative AI holds the potential to significantly enhance patient engagement by providing personalized, continuous support that extends beyond traditional healthcare interactions. By leveraging deep learning and data analytics, it can empower patients to actively manage their health with empathetic interactions and tailored educational resources. From customized treatment plans to real-time symptom screening and automated outreach, generative AI-driven platforms may improve healthcare delivery, elevate patient outcomes, and enhance communication between patients and their healthcare providers.
For healthcare organizations looking to explore the capabilities of generative AI, Quantiphi offers extensive expertise in AI and seamlessly integrates generative AI into healthcare technology and systems. With over a decade of experience in AI and a proven track record of over 2,400 successful AI projects across various industries, including healthcare, Quantiphi aims to provide effective solutions tailored to specific needs. As a trusted partner of technology leaders like Google Cloud, Amazon Web Services, and NVIDIA, Quantiphi ensures access to cutting-edge, secure, and responsible HIPAA-compliant solutions. This collaboration positions Quantiphi to potentially deliver improved, personalized, and efficient healthcare experiences.
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