MUDr. Young tried the “Voice of Emma” service first, and now it is already in operation in three offices. At first, Dr. Young had considerable concerns about the idea of a robotic telephone assistant.

“Like the nurses and doctors in our country, I was initially skeptical whether the voice robot could even work at a level that would be applicable to both us and our patients. We already had experience with an answering machine, which was very time-consuming to operate, so I did not want a more expensive solution with a similar result. Therefore, I was surprised to find out with what credibility the robot can already speak Czech - in the sense of pronouncing a given text in advance. The understanding is also at a surprisingly good level.”

The service works on the principle of natural dialogue between the calling client and the robot. The call is guided by the robot based on a pre-prepared scenario, and thanks to human speech processing and language analysis based on artificial intelligence, the robot understands what the caller is saying and can respond appropriately. The output is then transcribed to the Emmys as another received request.

Here is a typical output from the transcript of the patient's request:

“I would like to ask you to issue an electronic memory card because since Friday I have symptoms of covid-19 on Friday it started so I was shopping on Saturday morning the results came back positive since Friday I have a fever of forty and I have already agreed with my employer that from today I am on sick leave”

The voice robot was put into operation on December 16, 2021 in the first office. The impact in terms of phone availability is clearly positive — the voice robot is always available during office hours and can handle virtually unlimited calls in parallel. This means that the time when the office had up to 250 unanswered calls per day was finally over for Dr. Young.

Statistics for the first full month of operation (January 2022) in the first office are as follows:

• Number of calls received: 962 (average 46 per day)
• Number of completed calls: 486 (51%, average 23 per day)
• Percentage of “urgent” calls (which are linked to the doctor's office): 20%

It follows that out of 46 incoming calls per day, only about 5 per day end up as “urgent” calls and are transferred to the staff in the office. In Dr. Young's practice, approximately 85% of patient requests come through Emmy (online application) and 15% via “Voice of Emma”. The office evaluates the first experience positively (“Nurses can not imagine a return to the previous state, when the phone rang all day!”) and intends to continue to do so. But it will probably allow patients to contact the staff directly during about 20% of the office hours, within defined time blocks (e.g. every day from 9 am to 10 am and similar in the afternoon).

Do you want to know more? Contact us at podpora@sestraemmy.cz!

‍

‍

‍