FL Health System Adopts Conversational AI to Enhance Patient Experience

Baptist Health North Florida announced that it would implement conversational artificial intelligence (AI) company Hyro’s offerings to enhance patient and employee experience across its call centers.

Like many healthcare organizations, Baptist Health North Florida is turning to clinical intelligence and automation to optimize workflows and reduce repetitive tasks with low clinical value. The health system’s adoption of Hyro’s conversational AI aims to help address call center and service desk challenges, which the press release states are common across the healthcare industry.

Baptist Health North Florida faced an increase in call volume to its service desks earlier this year as it prepared to implement the Epic EHR across the health system, the press release notes. To address these challenges, Baptist Health adopted Hyro’s language-based AI assistants in its call centers, which use conversational AI technology to offload repetitive tasks such as password resets.

With these tasks delegated to AI, Baptist team members would then be free to focus on value-add services. The health system also plans to automate several other highly utilized workflows as part of its long-term digital strategy, according to the press release.

"We're constantly looking to enlist emerging technologies at Baptist that will allow us to optimize efficiencies while supporting team members and removing friction from patient access to care," said Aaron Miri, chief digital and information officer at Baptist Health North Florida, in the press release. "We found Hyro to be the right solution to scale automation across multiple channels and help us enhance service levels for our team members, medical staff and patients alike."

The health system’s automation initiative, known as Baptist Enterprise Linguistic Learning Environment (BELLE), will focus on scaling call coverage with omnichannel flexibility while aiming to limit costs. In the future, Baptist Health North Florida plans to expand into conversational AI and automation solutions for other areas, such as care coordination and patient engagement and education.

"To fit into our digital roadmap, we were looking for time to value, high quality and an omnichannel approach,'" said Julian Ammons, director of IT digital cloud development operations at Baptist Health North Florida, in the press release. "But the X-factor for us was Hyro's Conversational Intelligence – being able to point to qualitative and quantitative analytics and show that we've automated a certain volume of tasks and demonstrate the differences we're making organizationally. That's a game changer."

Baptist Health North Florida is part of a growing number of healthcare organizations using clinical intelligence, automation, and AI to improve operations.

Last week, California-based multi-specialty medical group UP Medical launched a partnership with clinical intelligence company Memora Health to leverage AI and automation for enhanced chronic care management, patient engagement, and patient-provider communications.

In July, HealthITAnalytics interviewed Todd Beardman, MD, chief medical information officer, and Kristen Guillaume, chief information officer, at North Kansas City Hospital to discuss the ways in which the hospital is leveraging intelligent automation to close care gaps and boost patient outreach.