Nuance Debuts 'Digital Front Door' for Patient Engagement in Healthcare

What is a “patient engagement virtual assistant platform”? It’s a way to use artificial intelligence (AI) to take an increasingly complex patient journey in healthcare and bring it together into a unified whole. It’s a way to anticipate that customers will use different media to interact with a healthcare organization, and that they expect those media to be unified.

Patients today are looking for the same type of digital experiences they can get as consumers in their healthcare experiences, according to the second annual Healthcare Consumer Experience Study conducted by Forrester (News - Alert) Consulting. The study is based on a survey of more than 1,500 American healthcare consumers, identifies the top trends, pain points and opportunities in the patient financial experience, including the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The survey found that, in part because of the COVID-19 pandemic, more and more patients are looking for telemedicine options (44 percent), digital forms and communication (41 percent), and touchless check-in (37 percent). What's more, 68 percent of patients said they value a customized patient experience. In fact, a poor digital health experience caused more than a quarter of patients to change medical providers in 2020 — up 40 percent from 2019.

This week, Nuance Communications (News - Alert), Inc. announced the launch of its new AI-powered patient engagement virtual assistant platform that will integrate and extend the capabilities of the electronic health record (EHR), customer relationship management (CRM), and Patient Access Center systems to enable healthcare provider organizations to modernize what some call the “digital front door” and improve clinical care.

The new patient engagement platform provides an array of capabilities and business outcomes, including seamless, consistent and unified omnichannel experiences; integration and extension of the capabilities of core systems infrastructure; "out-of-the-box" solutions and an advanced Do-It-Yourself (DIY) development tool; and advanced and unified data analytics, all of which can lead to improved business outcomes. The solution is built on top of the Microsoft (News - Alert) Azure HITRUST CSF-certified cloud platform for reliability, security and functionality.

"Our new omnichannel Patient Engagement Virtual Assistant Platform takes a holistic approach to powering healthcare's new digital front door, overcoming the shortcomings and inconsistencies of partial point solutions," said Peter Durlach, SVP of Strategy and New Business Development for Nuance, in a statement. "By marrying the capabilities of our healthcare experience and the proven omnichannel customer engagement technology trusted by Fortune 100 companies worldwide, we can help address the urgent need of providers and patients alike to transform access to, and delivery of, care in the modern age of digital medicine."

Edited by Maurice Nagle