British healthcare provider Somerset NHS FT increases employee efficiency with a Virtual Assistant

Somerset NHS Foundation Trust (FT) shares a mission to deliver outstanding care to its patients, caregivers, colleagues and communities through a culture of listening and learning. It provides joined-up community, mental health, and acute hospital services. Managing outpatient appointments for multiple services is an integral part of this work. 

Post-pandemic, the Trust faced an appointment backlog that increased pressure on its staff. “The phone lines were jammed, patients were waiting in long queues trying to get through and sometimes even miss their appointments,” explains Kim Hale, Digital Change Lead at Somerset FT. 

The Trust needed to resolve this quickly, which meant finding a solution that would work with its existing IT infrastructure. Somerset FT reached out to The Access Group, who provide their Rio electronic patient record system, and EBO, a Microsoft partner that helps organizations have exceptional conversations with patients. EBO leverages Azure Cognitive Services to bring human capabilities to AI-based Virtual Assistants (VA). Since EBO and The Access Group shared a collaborative working relationship, the Rio Virtual Assistant Alex works seamlessly as part of the Rio EPR used by the Trust right from the start.

Last year, EBO and The Access Group deployed this solution to the booking teams for three of the Foundation Trust’s outpatient services, Podiatry, Musculoskeletal Physiotherapy and Orthopedic Assessment Service. Alex offers patients around-clock-accessibility to manage appointments without speaking to a human agent and increases employee efficiency via automated workflows. 

Offloading employees’ workload

Today, Alex conducts 1000 fully automated conversations monthly. Over 80 percent of interactions with Alex lead to completed conversations with patients. Since over 40% of these conversations take place outside office hours, patients now have more flexibility. “We wanted to make it easy for patients to call in and either confirm appointments or cancel if they can’t make it, without limiting them to a 9 to 5 window. We’re not wasting patients’ time or appointment slots since it is assigned to someone else,” explains Hale. 

According to Hale, Alex has smoothly integrated and automated multiple workflows within the Trust, leading to more flexibility over employee workloads. “Our booking officers absolutely love Alex as it helps collect useful information in advance and they can focus on the patient needs,” she says. “Over the last six months, Alex has helped save 24 hours of staff time per week.”

Deploying Alex entirely on Azure also means the workload is easier on the in-house IT team. They now have continuous monitoring and capacity management, as well as high availability and simple management of the environment. 

Ensuring human-like interactions

Unlike most solutions in the market, Alex can have human-like interactions with patients. Its unique conversational skills and understanding of context allow Alex to convey empathy. It can also detect sentiment and determine when a call should transfer to an agent. “Alex is friendly and approachable, so patients feel comfortable interacting with it, even though they know it’s not a real person,” explains Hale.

Alex’s ability to learn and adapt is what sets it apart. Alex integrates with the RIO EPR, to extract relevant patient data for use during conversations. It also updates patient electronic files with any new information and collates patient history so that booking agents have more of the data they need during callbacks. 

For Somerset FT, language was a key factor when developing Alex. EBO and The Access Group worked with the Trust to ensure patients could use their natural language when speaking to Alex. “Our callers come from diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds, so we ensured Alex could understand all our patients and the different ways they communicate,” explains Hale.  

Due to the resounding success, Somerset FT plans to introduce improvements in the next phase by adding more features, functionality, and automation.  This will empower the staff to provide patients with the quality of care they need and deserve while helping to manage employee workloads more efficiently. “Patients are at the center of it all. Our goal is to make things easier for our patients and improve how we communicate with them, both on the phone and in person,” says Hale.