How Can Artificial Intelligence Help You Acquire More Patients?
This article discusses how chatbots can be used to amplify the impact of your patient recruiting efforts in healthcare.
Syllable worked with Seattle Reproductive Medicine (SRM), https://seattlefertility.com/, a leading fertility clinic to deploy a chatbot that improves egg donor recruitment.
Medical practice marketing
As a modern medical practice, you most likely have a website and have used or considered using digital marketing methods to promote your practice.
Many medical practices have a small marketing team and are looking for solutions to improve the effectiveness of their marketing efforts.
We have worked closely with Seattle Reproductive Medicine (SRM) to understand the challenges its marketing team faces and how we can address them with a chatbot.
The challenge: website marketing is insufficient, and phone calls are time-consuming
SRM generated most of its leads through social media campaigns, which brought prospective egg donors to its website. Egg donation is a complex process, and even the most well-thought-out website can be challenging to navigate because of the sheer amount of information a potential egg donor has to understand.
For many prospective fertility clinic patients, reading information on the website was typically not sufficient in itself for them to make a final decision.
Most prospective egg donors call the clinic to learn more about the process. Phone calls for prospective patients of a fertility clinic can take up a lot of time from the call center or marketing team.
In the case of egg donation, a typical phone call could last forty-five minutes, putting a significant burden on marketing teams and preventing them from taking other calls with existing patients. It also could constrain the overall ability of the clinic to serve urgent cases.
Most clinics report that they are unable to follow up with all of their requests.
How could a chatbot help the process?
A chatbot on a website looks very much like the “Live Chat” button on many customer services sites. However, the conversation is conducted with artificial intelligence rather than a human agent.
The value of artificial intelligence is its availability to answer questions, even after hours, and its ability to deliver personalized content without requiring a live person to respond.
For SRM, we deployed a chatbot on the egg donation page, where most prospective egg donors landed from social media sites.
Compared to a static website, chatbots have the benefit of engaging the prospective egg donors in a more natural way through a conversation.
Information is delivered to the user one message at a time, similar to how we communicate with friends and families over text messaging.
Instead of a long list of text, content can be presented in two ways:
- as a guided flow of short text messages, images, and video
- as a natural conversation with questions and answers
A guided flow is where predetermined messages are programmed in a sequence and delivered as they are intended to be received by the user. The user has to acknowledge each step in order to continue by clicking on a button called a quick reply. Sometimes multiple quick replies are presented to the user, and this provides an opportunity for the user to acknowledge to the artificial intelligence that he or she has understood the content.
Similar to a conversation with a live support agent, the chatbot can also respond to questions from the user. The artificial intelligence is trained on the topic through a process called machine learning. Machine learning transforms snippets of text, such as question and answers, into machine-readable vectors that can be compared in real-time as the user is interacting with the chatbot. This allows the computer to understand what users are asking and how to respond.
SRM’s egg donation chatbot was trained on a small number of questions and answers, as well as relevant fertility medical terms in the order of four hundred text snippets.
Even though this is a small dataset, the artificial intelligence is able to discern different phrases that are similar. For example: How do I give myself injections? How do I do the shots?
What we learned
The exciting aspect of launching a chatbot is the ability to collect and analyze all the questions that users ask.
Within two weeks, nearly two thousand messages were exchanged between the chatbot and visitors on SRM’s site.
We also monitored the behavior of users who interacted with the webpage versus users who interacted with the chatbot.
While the typical visit length on the web page was six minutes, it increased to seventeen minutes with the chatbot: the chatbot tripled website visitors’ engagement length.
“the chatbot tripled website visitors’ engagement length.
This is consistent with independent studies we have done to determine the efficacy of delivering information through a website versus a chatbot.
Why is this important?
Healthcare information can sometimes be complex and hard for patients to navigate.
Chatbots enable patients to learn about complex topics in an interactive way, allowing them to ask questions and learn through discovery.
Does the chatbot replace humans?
Artificial intelligence used in communication cannot replace human interaction.
Chatbots are only a component of your team, not a substitute. Chatbots have a long way to go in terms of understanding a user’s intent, and in healthcare, this is even truer.
Chatbots can and often do fail, and it is important to provide users with a means to connect to a human.
When our chatbot cannot answer a question, it provides the option to contact a human, your marketing team, for example, or to someone in the call center.
Chatbots offer a scalable way to amplify your communication and an effective way to augment your patient education.
Chatbots offer a scalable way to amplify your communication and an effective way to augment your patient education.
Together with SRM, we were able to engage with more potential egg donors and engage with them for longer, efficiently finding potential qualified and willing donors without requiring a large time investment from the SRM team.
What transparency do chatbots offer?
While the chatbot is answering questions 24/7, all conversations are recorded and securely stored in a HIPAA-compliant way, and the SRM marketing team is able to log and review all prospective egg donors’ interactions and their questions.
The artificial intelligence is able to classify unanswered questions for the SRM team, enabling them to prioritize where they want to spend their time.
Prioritizing answering of certain questions helps with expanding the abilities of the chatbot in a time-efficient way.
How do I add a chatbot to my website?
Each practice has unique content, and we work with the marketing team to develop the initial set of information to train the chatbot effectively.
Documents explaining medical services, visitor guides, or frequently asked questions and answers can be sources of information for training chatbots, and Syllable chatbots can be customized to address specific requirements for a medical practice.
The chatbot is listening and learning!
I hope this article has shown how a chatbot can help amplify your patient-recruiting efforts.
Even though the technology is still new and advancing rapidly, it is straightforward to implement and can scale to meet your patient engagement needs.
If you want to learn more about chatbots, follow us on Medium.
