Healthcare organizations are engaging technology solutions to keep up

The US is facing a physician and healthcare workforce shortage, anticipated to become exponentially worse in coming years. These shortages, the reasons for which are multi-fold and exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, are driven primarily by: 

• A lack of physicians choosing to practice primary care, instead entering higher-paying specialties that will conceivably allow them to pay off their medical school debt; 
• The increasing aging population in the United States, including the 52% of the physician population that will retire in the next decade; and
• Increasing clinician burnout rates. 

As the US healthcare system faces this challenge, "big-box" players like Amazon and Walmart are entering the healthcare space, creating novel competition for traditional healthcare systems and provider groups to recruit and retain patients, and applying pressure on their already thin margins. 

To keep up - or get ahead - healthcare organizations across the industry spectrum are engaging technology solutions to improve workflow efficiency, increase provider capacity, and build a distinct customer-centric experience like consumers receive across other industries.

Patients expect more from healthcare's current digital experience

Recent data shows that 36% of healthcare consumers do not have healthcare brand loyalty, with many patients rating their pre-care interactions as the worst part of their entire care experience. We know that consumers expect a seamless healthcare experience, with their “ideal” clinical interaction being one that feels like it has a "personal touch" with their healthcare team. Every patient wants to feel like their concerns are valid and their clinicians care about them. Patients do not want to be asked the same question multiple times; their time is valuable and they expect to be treated as a “customer” in a healthcare engagement. 

Consumerism of healthcare is more impulse-driven than in the past; patients will engage with a healthcare company with a strong digital presence, including convenient, easy to access booking and care navigation options, regardless of whether they’ve received care there before. While this data points to a lack of loyalty to a healthcare brand or provider, it offers healthcare companies a blueprint for how they can grow their market share, and how to keep their patients coming back for more. 

There is a solution 

Clinician capacity is decreasing, and healthcare consumer expectations are rising. To rise to this challenge, healthcare must adopt solutions that allow the front-end of the patient encounter to be initiated and completed by AI technology. Clearstep’s AI chat virtual triage process lays the groundwork for healthcare organizations.

With a seamless user experience designed to guide the patient through each step of their process for finding care, the Clearstep experience starts by letting a patient enter their symptoms in free-text, as they would explain it to a doctor. Our natural language processor (NLP) identifies their relevant clinical concepts and then proceeds to ask them a series of 15-20 multiple choice AI-driven questions similar to what a doctor would ask. This leads into a results page featuring scheduling options that can be prioritized by the patient’s insurance network.

Clearstep’s scheduling and intake process can be paired with API based integration to EMR and CRM patient records. Our product offers both patients and providers a solution for their biggest healthcare concern. Clearstep’s virtual triage suite of solutions leads to an improved patient experience - with a Net Promoter Score 4x the national healthcare average - while increasing provider efficiency and decreasing administrative burden by optimizing the clinician time in the patient encounter and lessening documentation requirements. 

Clearstep makes healthcare easier and brings systems more revenue (3x ROI) 

Clearstep routes your patients to the best care for their symptomatic presentation and underlying health factors. This service allows Clearstep customers to engage new and existing patients throughout their health ecosystem, producing cost-savings through care de-escalation, and generating a 3x return on investment in revenue by creating stickiness and patient loyalty to the healthcare organization. Clearstep gets patients to the ​​right care, in the right place, at the right time, for the right cost.

Our AI / NLP technology not only gets patients to the front door of your healthcare organization, but facilitates their initial steps through the door to an end-to-end personalized and integrated healthcare ecosystem. Our technology leverages AI chat to provide complete triage and intake patient data directly to the patient record via APIs in SOAP note format, allowing clinicians to spend more time with their patients, and less time in the EMR.

Want to learn more about how your organization can leverage Clearstep Virtual Triage to improve the patient experience, increase clinical capacity, and lessen your healthcare workers’ administrative burden? Contact us here.