Over the past several years, healthcare organizations have been adopting voice assistants and other conversational AI technologies. In fact, over the past few years, the pace of adoption has gone from gradual to frenzied, according to new research from Voicebot.ai.
In 2019, Voicebot found that 7.5% of US adults had used a voice assistant for a healthcare need. Last year, however, the number shut up to 21%, researchers said. But another way, voice assistants were used in healthcare use cases by just under 20 million US adults as of mid-2019, but by 2021 the user base had shot up to 54.4 million.
During the period between 2019 and 2021, the number of people interested in using such tools climbed from just under 50% to 56%. Forces fueling levels of interest include consumer interest in gathering information about illnesses (including COVID-19), along with greater efforts by providers to offer voice-enabled features.
Even given how marked this jump in voice assistant usage is, my guess is that the increase in use and development of new voice assistant tools would have extended a great deal more if the pandemic hadn’t hit.
I was reminded of this when I looked back at articles written about a few years ago. In mid-2020, for example, I wrote an item describing how Epic was working closely with Nuance to put its Hey Epic! Voice assistant technology front and center in its desktop EHR. Using the Hey Epic! tool, clinicians were given the opportunity to conversationally navigate the Epic system to place orders and search for information such as lab results, patient records and visit summaries.
These efforts followed Epic’s previously having put the virtual assistant technology into its Haiku and Rover mobile apps.
While voice assistants seemed like a very big deal back in 2020, the question is whether they’re still as important as they seemed at that point. Clearly, the public has become very interested in using voice assistants to navigate and gather health information, and that’s a good thing, but it’s not clear whether we need them in enterprise IT just yet.
It’s not clear to me that the approaches hospitals were experimenting with should still be top of mind. Back in 2019, when Sutter Health announced plans to pilot test an AI-powered voice-enabled digital assistant with its doctors in Northern California, this was a timely idea.
Today, on the other hand, it seems less clear to me this technology is going to drive us forward in tackling the big pandemic problems we’re dealing with today. We need tools that will help manage a sprawling network of COVID-19 care sites in an efficient and effective manner, a problem that will demand that we be much better at managing and communicating with patients remotely.
I’m not suggesting that voice assistant technology isn’t valuable or doesn’t have a place in IT infrastructures of the future. I’m just saying that if it’s going to be valuable to those caring for pandemic patients, it’s going to need to offer practical hands-on tools optimized for COVID care. Yes, that’s a tall order but that’s the order we’ve got to fill.
