What You Should Know:
– Banner Health deploys a first-of-its-kind virtual waiting room using LifeLink’s mobile chatbot technology to interact with Banner patients for both in-person and telehealth appointments.
– Conversational mobile technology supports COVID-19 social distancing guidelines and allows patients to safely access care across a network of 1500 physicians.
Banner Health, one of the largest nonprofit health care systems in the country, today announced the successful deployment of a next-generation virtual waiting powered by LifeLink. Leveraging LifeLink’s mobile chatbots, Banner Health will interact with patients in a conversational style to help complete digitized intake forms, provide education, and enable remote check-in capabilities for all telehealth and in-person visits. This is part of Banner Health’s initiative to re-imagine the care delivery experience in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Enable Virtual Waiting Rooms for Telehealth & In-Person Appointments
LifeLink chatbots welcome patients for telehealth virtual and in-person visits with their primary care physicians and specialists. The chatbots interact with patients on their mobile device or computer using automated conversational messaging to remotely accomplish a number of tasks that were previously handled in-person, including:
– Appointment reminders and updates
– Intake form completion and approvals
– Telehealth technology instructions
– Informing patients when to go directly to their exam rooms
Availability
Especially as COVID-19 social distancing guidelines remain in place, health systems are increasingly turning to AI-based technology – like chatbots – to redesign functions and socially distance in a post-COVID world. This is crucial to protect healthcare workers in addition to keeping patients safe.
The virtual waiting room technology is live and rolling out across Banner Medical Group, a network of 1,500 physicians across 300 clinics that cover more than one million patients across Arizona, California, Colorado, Nebraska, Nevada, and Wyoming.
“The healthcare industry must rapidly innovate in order to ensure all patients can see their doctors again through safe, private, and convenient channels,” said Jeff Johnson, vice president, Digital Business at Banner Health. “The traditional pre-visit process of walking into an office, filling out paper forms, reading instructions and then waiting for an exam room had to change. LifeLink chatbots have already helped hundreds of thousands of Banner patients navigate Emergency Room visits so the concept of digitizing regular doctor appointment visits with a mobile, virtual waiting room chatbot assistant was a natural extension of the technology.”
At Banner Health, a previous intake automation initiative that was focusing on Medicare Annual Wellness Visit appointments for Seniors resulted in a 70% reduction in appointment cancellations and practice process efficiency. Patients have also shown preference for chatbots as a workflow digital assistant through high satisfaction ratings.
