H-Bot: The technology that can revolutionise Patient Management System in Hospitals

Ajay Torgal, Executive Director, ATCS India opines on how the H-Bot technology is more efficient and interactive when dealing with patients at the front desk

The implementation of an effective patient management system is critical to the success of any modern-day hospital. The front desk of hospitals often gets overcrowded with hassled family members seeking information on bills, appointments, insurance claims, etc. Not only does it put additional pressure on manpower requirements of the hospital, but the long queues also lead to customer dissatisfaction. An adept patient management system keeps the budget in mind, improves productivity, patient safety and satisfaction without violating regulatory standards, energy mandates and hospital security.

To tackle this challenge, experts from tech and healthcare industries developed a bot for those in the hospital management business.

How H-bot technology can prove to be a game changer

The H-bot is a chatbot customised to suit the requirements of the healthcare industry. It interacts with patients and users over a kiosk and not only answers their queries but also allows them to send grievances and feedback. The new hi-tech experience for end-users can earn extra goodwill for hospitals without putting any additional resource constraint for the enterprise.

Technologies used to develop the H-bot

H-bot technology stack is a combination of Robotic Process Automation and Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning.

• Robotic Process Automation (RPA)
  Bots for hospitals are developed using BluePrism, one of the RPA tools. By communicating with internal applications such as database and mail servers and external applications like insurance providers API’s, the H-bot provides all the required information to its users.
• AI/ML techniques
  Regular bots know how to answer only pre-defined questions which are already fed to the knowledge database, but H-bot tries its best to answer other questions too with the help of machine learning. In case it can’t answer a particularly tough question, the bot guides the user to the respective department.
• Pattern Matching: Using AIML (Artificial Intelligence Markup Language), the text is grouped and the pattern is found to give appropriate responses.
• Natural Language Understanding (NLU): It helps H-bot to understand the context and expectations of the questions posed by the users.
• Natural Language Processing (NLP): Using this, the H-bot converts user input into structured data to search relevant answer from the knowledge database.

What users can do with H-bot

• Check billing information
• Check availability of doctors
• Schedule appointments
• Get information on lab services
• Check insurance related information and claim status
• Raise requests for bills
• Submit feedback

A number of other additional services can also be added to the H-bot with the emerging requirements.

How can H-bot help hospitals in Patient Management Process

Chatbots is one of the most cost-effective and productive solutions to minimise disruption even when the systems are under pressure or down completely. Chatbots can help healthcare facilities to comply with regulatory standards and quality metrics even under adverse circumstances.

1. Reduce manpower and improve efficiency: With a lot of information available in the H-bot system already, patients and their kith and kin need not reach the front desk or talk to the customer manager every now and then for information.

2. Reduce paper usage: Billing and all other details are sent over email to patients, thus reducing paper usage.

3. Faster transactions and less waiting time for patients: With appointments and lab services availed through the H-bot, the billing team is relieved from additional workload, resulting in less waiting time for patients in the queue.

4. Claims administration: H-bot makes it easier for families of patients to check insurance claim status and seek health insurance related information. We are now refining the claim administration process further by integrating it with machine learning.

5. Patient grievance management: Feedback is always good, and it helps in improving a lot of facilities in the hospitals.

With the addition of newer technologies as well as processes in hospitals, H-bots are expected to be the key technology to handle the future of healthcare industry.