How AI Agents can help healthcare providers focus more on patients

How AI Agents can help healthcare providers focus more on patients

According to a study published by the American College of Physicians, many healthcare providers spend two hours on administrative work for every hour they spend with patients. That’s right: Providers can spend twice as much time on paperwork than they do seeing patients. While administrative tasks are vital to keeping a healthcare organization running, they shouldn’t take time away from patient care.

What if that number was reversed? Imagine a healthcare organization where providers could see more patients and provide personalized care simultaneously. Think of what an organization could accomplish if it had administrative support that could easily scale with the number of patients.

More and more healthcare organizations are looking to artificial intelligence to do just that.

What is AI in healthcare?

Artificial intelligence, or AI, has been a hot topic over the past few years. The use of AI is becoming much more common, transforming many industries — and healthcare is no exception. In a healthcare context, AI refers to the use of machine learning and natural language processing to improve healthcare experiences for both providers and patients alike.

Currently, healthcare providers use AI to transcribe provider notes, interpret radiology data, and create personalized care plans for patients.

Another example of a great use of AI in healthcare comes from one of Jotform’s very own Enterprise customers: Alex Tellez of Sterling Administration. Tellez uses a combination of AI and Jotform Enterprise to help assess older patients’ risk of falls.

He devised a system that allows users to upload a video of someone walking to an online form, and then that video is sent to Google Cloud using an API. Then an AI tool Tellez created can measure and assess their fall risk by analyzing their gait and other factors.

“In 3–4 minutes, we can output an AI-generated report that includes that individual’s risk of falling, exercise recommendations, and diagnoses codes that care providers and physical therapists can use to inform treatment,” says Tellez.

Tellez says the combination of AI and Jotform Enterprise allows his team to assess fall risks faster than ever: “A full gait analysis from an orthopedist can take 2–4 hours. Using Jotform Enterprise and our AI model, we can generate a similar report in 3.5 minutes.”

AI tools like this can create better patient outcomes by allowing your organization to offload mundane tasks and focus on more complex work. Artificial intelligence is already helping medical professionals make incredible strides in diagnosing patients and creating treatment plans, so why not use AI in other parts of healthcare?

How to use AI Agents in your healthcare organization

One way healthcare providers can take advantage of AI is through AI agents: AI-powered customer service representatives that can be trained and customized to meet your organization’s needs. With Jotform AI Agents, you can delegate repetitive, time-consuming tasks to an agent, saving time and improving patient outcomes.

Here are just a few ways to use AI Agents in healthcare.

Schedule appointments

Jotform Enterprise has always offered an efficient way to schedule healthcare appointments. With AI Agents, you can automate this process to make it even more efficient. AI Agents can schedule appointments over the phone or via a chatbot or WhatsApp — whichever your organization prefers.

If your organization already uses Jotform Enterprise for patient intake, employing an AI agent to schedule appointments can be an easy way to not only automate processes but also consolidate your organization’s tech stack.

Consolidating tech stacks happens to be a Jotform Enterprise specialty. For example, Body Brave, an eating disorder treatment center in Ontario, Canada, was able to reduce the number of software tools it uses from five to one by switching to Jotform Enterprise.

If you want to reduce the number of software platforms you use and automate patient scheduling, consider employing a Jotform AI Agent. Agents can collect basic patient information, integrate with Google Calendar, and even offer alternative times if a patient’s preferred appointment time is booked.

Streamline patient intake

Asking patients to complete intake paperwork online before their appointment can be a massive time saver for an organization.

Jotform Enterprise has already sped up patient intake at OrthoIllinois (and many other organizations like it). Business development manager Bill Coller says he was able to build a more efficient intake form in 15 minutes.

“I opened a trial account, and in 15 minutes, I created a form that worked better than the one we had been working on for almost 10 years,” says Coller.

You can streamline your organization’s patient intake process even further with AI agents. An AI agent can act as a virtual assistant to guide patients through the intake process and ensure they have submitted all the necessary information. AI agents are available to help 24-7, so your patients can get help with forms whenever it is most convenient for them.

Collect patient feedback

Regularly collecting patient feedback can be a powerful way to improve patient outcomes. An AI agent can consistently collect patient feedback to help busy healthcare administrators save time while still learning about their patients’ needs.

Using Jotform Enterprise to collect patient feedback has been a boon for medical practice One to One Health, allowing it to provide more targeted care.

“Jotform Enterprise helped us expand our capacity to serve large-scale employers and government agencies,” says David Kinzler, CEO of One to One Health. “Additionally, we can leverage broad and targeted patient satisfaction surveys for specific programs and use cases to learn what’s going on while we deliver care in a near real-time fashion. It’s super valuable.”

AI agents can make collecting patient feedback even easier by automatically asking follow-up questions based on a person’s responses, allowing your organization to get more specific feedback.

To train an AI agent on how to ask follow-up questions, set up an Action under the Train tab in the Agent Builder:

Setting up an Action under the Train tab in Jotform AI Agent Builder

Now your organization’s AI agent can ask appropriate follow-up questions.

Ella Care Feedback Assistant asking follow-up questions

Offer automated phone support

Healthcare providers can spend more time on meaningful face-to-face interactions with their patients by training an AI agent to answer phone calls. An AI agent can answer simple questions like whether a provider is accepting new patients or what kind of insurance your organization takes. The receptionist can then focus on more complex calls and in-person interactions.

Additionally, paying for an after-hours answering service can cost larger providers hundreds of dollars per month. AI agents are ready and available to answer calls 24-7, so you don’t need to pay for an extra service.

An AI agent can also save your organization’s patients the hassle of navigating a complicated phone tree and waiting on hold to get an answer to a basic question.

To train your AI agent to answer questions about your organization, you can upload documentation or have the agent crawl a link to extract information. An FAQ page or a link to a services page are good sources to start with.

Entering a link on the Link section in the Knowledge Base tab, then clicking on Crawl in Jotform AI Agent Builder

Once the AI agent has learned about your practice, you can embed it as a chatbot into your website (just like you can with your forms).

Manage staff scheduling and time-off requests

You can also use AI Agents to ensure your organization is properly staffed to provide equitable patient care. Scheduling staff at a healthcare facility can be tricky, especially when that facility is open late or overnight. Why not make it easier and have an AI agent process time-off requests?

AI agents can send calendar reminders to managers about employees’ upcoming time off and help employees fill out request forms, capturing the responses in your Jotform account.

Check out AI Agents and train your own time-off coordinator today. 

Note: To access the AI Agent Builder in an Enterprise account, an Enterprise Admin must enable them on behalf of users from the Admin Console settings.

Onboard new staff

Onboarding is a necessary part of hiring. But the quicker a new hire can complete it and start work, the better.

AI Agents can help speed up the onboarding process by taking new employees through any forms, videos, or training materials that your organization requires.

When the employee is done with onboarding, the agent can automatically send an email to a healthcare administrator letting them know the employee is ready to start work.

Look up billing codes

Healthcare organizations have to manage thousands of billing codes, making it impossible to remember every single code off the top of your head. You can train your organization’s AI agent to serve as a billing code look-up tool that can answer questions about HCPCS, CPT, or ICD-10 codes.

Training an AI agent on billing codes can save time by giving you quick access to frequently used codes. Using an AI agent as a code lookup tool can eliminate the need for multiple coding reference books and extra seats for expensive procedure code lookup tools.

Train your AI Agent with a URL, then ask it questions about the codes to test it out. You can even train the agent to display buttons for frequently used billing codes that users can click on to get more information.

You can also use the Teach Your Agent chat feature in the Train tab to refine its responses just by chatting with the agent directly.

Using the Teach Your Agent feature in the Train tab in Jotform AI Agent Builder

Order medical supplies

Every healthcare provider needs medical supplies to deliver appropriate care. With an AI Agent, providers can streamline medical supply ordering by automatically providing employees with a list of vendors, helping them fill out the appropriate order form, and submitting it on their behalf.

If your organization uses multiple order forms, an AI Agent can ask your staff questions to help them figure out which form they need to fill out.

Check out the Medical Supply Order AI Agent to get an idea of how this works.

The future of AI in healthcare

Using AI in healthcare has the potential to reduce burnout in healthcare workers while allowing them to provide more personalized medical care. Looking to the future, providers are even considering using AI to forecast health risks based on current patient data.

Considering the amount of time many providers spend on paperwork, implementing AI is a great way to help organizations offload mundane and time-consuming administrative tasks, allowing them to focus more on patients.

With 24-7 availability, integrations with popular third-party platforms, and multiple channels for engaging patients, AI Agents for Jotform Enterprise can be a great way to hop on the AI train without completely overhauling your organization’s processes.

To ensure compliance with HIPAA, healthcare entities that collect and store personal health information (PHI) for patients should use software that offers HIPAA compliance features. Jotform offers HIPAA compliance features with its Enterprise plan in addition to the self-service Gold plan. Learn more about HIPAA compliance with Jotform Enterprise.

AUTHOR
Michaela is a content writer and technical writer specializing in SaaS and healthcare products. She co-authored Jotform for Beginners 1 and 2 and writes product tutorials, help guides, and blog posts all about how to use Jotform’s products. Michaela’s background as a technical writer has left her with a love of conveying complex information in the simplest way possible. You can reach Michaela through her contact form.

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