The Challenge

With call centers and access specialists operating at over capacity due to recurring COVID-19 surges as well as industry-wide challenge of keeping up with hiring needs, the Duke Health System sought a way to deflect calls for common patient requests such as confirming, canceling, and rescheduling appointments, resetting MyChart password, getting test results and scheduling a vaccine appointment.

At the same time, Duke Health’s internal staff were looking for ways to more efficiently manage the influx of questions around onboarding, transfers, payroll and benefits, new manager training, and streamline recruiting. In addition to the patient-facing solution, Duke Health also wanted to deliver additional capacity and faster resolutions with reduced wait times to patients and hospital staff for these wide ranges of inquiries.

The Solution

Avaamo provided a multi-channel digital front door that offloads common requests for patients and staff at Duke Health Systems – which is critical for greater scalability at an innovative organization with 25,000 staff handling 5 million outpatient visits per year for their 250,000+ patients

Available via inbound phone and web, these HIPAA-compliant virtual health assistants deliver responsive, personalized patient care at scale through seamless backend integrations with major healthcare and call center applications. Avaamo also integrates with Duke’s internal Sharepoint and external website, to accelerate the automation of common staff queries like employee onboarding, payroll and benefits, manager support, and recruiting. As a result, ­the simple natural language interface supports 30+ skills and answers over 150,000 queries on a monthly basis.