During the COVID-19 pandemic, Saint Luke’s Health System faced a 300% increase in call volumes and resource strain across its 18 hospitals and 130 primary care offices. To address this, they partnered with Avaamo to implement “MySaintLuke’s Assistant,” an AI-powered virtual assistant serving as their digital front door. The AI assistant now handles over 20,000 queries weekly, supporting 50+ skills and significantly improving patient care efficiency.
Successfully handled queries per month
Healthcare workflows automated by virtual assistant
Overall call deflection rate within first 90 days
The challenge: improve the digital front door
During COVID-19, Saint Luke’s Health System faced multiple challenges:
300% increase in call volumes.
Steeply rising costs for hard-to-find call center staff.
Exhausted resources who were shuffled to the frontlines to manage recurring Covid surges.
Further, their patients and staff members were spending time and effort on routine tasks such as activating MyChart accounts, answering Covid inquiries, and speeding up visits by collecting pre-appointment information. Saint Luke’s sought an AI-based solution that can deliver reduced wait times and faster resolutions for such routine tasks.
The solution: the “MySaintLuke’s Assistant”
Avaamo enabled Saint Luke’s 18 hospitals and 130 primary care offices to quickly stand up a multi-channel digital front door that offloads common requests from hundreds of thousands of patients – all with zero wait time and immediate scalability.
Available 24×7 via inbound phone and web, as well as outbound calls for reminders and data collection, these HIPAA-compliant virtual health assistants deliver responsive, personalized patient care at scale through seamless backend integrations with major healthcare and call center applications. As a result, the simple natural language interface supports 50+ skills and answers 20,000+ queries on a weekly basis.
“In the midst of Covid, we had tripled our call volume, so the question was how do we quickly ensure that our patients were getting the information they needed. With Avaamo, the soft launch was so smooth that we moved to a 24x7 full ‘Go live’ several weeks in advance.”
— Ashley Macmillan, Information Systems Program Manager, Saint Luke’s Health System
The difference: Avaamo conversational AI platform
Avaamo’s Conversational AI Platform is an enterprise-ready platform that combines expertise in natural language understanding (NLU) and machine learning to deliver relevant and precise answers to complex questions in real time.
“The customer service that Avaamo provides is unparalleled. Our team was not only supported, but having fun.”
— Ashley Macmillan, IS Project Manager, Saint Luke’s Health System