Thomas Morrow MDAuthor of

Tomorrow’s MedicineManaged Care

Virtual Health Assistants in Specialty Pharmacy

The Maasai Warrior in Kenya has better access to data and communication than President Reagan!

Disclaimer

Dr. Morrow:

• is a full time employee of of a large biotech company but no company products will be discussed during this presentation. The opinions expressed during this discussion are his alone and do not reflect the opinions of his full time employer.

• has created this talk from his research concerning VHA for an article published earlier this year in Managed Care and again in Forbes

Natural Language Processing + Conversational Interface:Keys to Artificial Intelligence

Artificial IntelligenceThe ability of a computer or other machine to perform actions thought to require intelligence.

Natural LanguageHuman written or spoken language as opposed to a computer language.

Top Companies:

– Next IT: focusing on the patient activation– Nuance/VirtuOz: focusing on medical records– Creative Virtual: no obvious medical focus– IBM Watson: No commercially available products, Oncology/Cardiac

physician decision support

Medical Decisions Occur in a Minute by Minute Basis

• Patients spend a few hours per year with their physician for a “specialty pharmacy” disorder.

• They spend 5000 hours per year making literally thousands of decisions that affect their health

• They need day to day decision support

• Natural language- driven virtual assistants can fill this need

Without a Relationship, There is no Influence

We know that advice and guidance is much more influential coming from someone with whom you have a trusting relationship

The Virtual Health Assistant:Technology that extends the patient/provider relationship

• A New Definition of High Touch• Fulfillment Needs• Patient Education• Disease Treatment Management Programs• A New Level of Data Collection: Virtual Head-to-Head Trials

Reach and Influence Patients the other 5000 hrs.

Virtual health assistants go far beyond reminders, and have been proven to make an emotional, social, and visual connection with patients

Characteristic Traditional IVR Traditional Web Chatbot Next IT’s Multimodal Virtual AssistantInput Voice and DTMF tones input via

keypadText Text, Talk, Tap

Language Processing Decision Tree with limited FAQ based interactions

Searchable FAQ Stochastic NLP engine with an intent based language model

Logic Model Linear with branchesTypically 4x4 or 5x4 model

Silo singular answer based Human Emulation – The model is a combination of decision tree, FAQ and intent model which also incorporates context like a human does.

Channels Phone Web Phone, web, SMS Text, mobile, kiosk, social media

Output Voice Text and sometimes voice Voice, Text, Navigation often simultaneously based on channel

Contextual Awareness Minimal: Based upon account, user profile

Minimal Based upon account, user profile

or General Answers

Page AwarenessConversational Awareness

User ProfileEvery question is taken in the context of the entire conversation as well

as other data sources

Proactive Engagement None None Multiple options, dynamic, personalized

language model size 4x4 to 5x4 200-300 in a basic FAQ mode 10s of thousands of intents in a single model

Where placed in organization

IVR’s can be set up to support specific tasks in an organization

Usually isolated to a section of a web site, not the entire site.

Across the entire web site/portal and across multiple channels as well.

Breadth/ Depth minimal on both since a human listening to the phone can only

remember a small number of options

Typically limited to either broad OR deep but not both

Able to cover a very broad domain of knowledge while also having a great deal of depth where applicable.

End Point Simple task General Answer to simple questions Truly conversational

Cost to Build $$ $$ $$$How built Voice Recognition Search Based Chat Recognition

Future enhancements Limits reached Limits almost reached Virtually infinite

Overall Long Term Value $ $$ $$$$$

Monthly Operational Cost to Organization

$$$$$(based on need to divert calls to Live

Agent)

$$$$$(based on need to divert calls to Live

Agent)

$(Virtually all calls can be handled by Virtual Agent limiting the number of

live agents needed)

Automated system choices available to an organization