Speech Technologies are Poised to Disrupt the Patient Experience, According to Recent Survey

LumenVox and SpinSci State of Healthcare and Innovation Survey Findings highlight overdue shift in healthcare investments in AI, speech technology, and security with the patient experience at the forefront.

LumenVox, a leading provider of speech and voice technology, and SpinSci, a patient digital engagement and workflow efficiencies company, recently announced the results for the State of Healthcare and Innovation Survey.

The new survey is based on data gathered from 226 respondents in five healthcare settings: Community health systems (41.59% of survey respondents), academic medical centers (32.74%), Critical Access Hospitals (CAH) (27.43%), ambulatory care centers (20.80%) and community hospitals (12.39%).

Results show there is a significant “voice” disruption within healthcare, as more and more providers seek to invest in Artificial Intelligence (AI), speech recognition and voice biometrics to improve and better streamline patient contact-center services and security.

The role of contact centers is increasingly important to providers, as it gives them a direct voice in patient interactions and is critical to delivering a strategic and differentiating experience.

Contact centers in healthcare are small, made up of approximately 1-20 agents across the five healthcare settings. These small teams spend more than 55% of their time resetting passwords for patient applications and portals (i.e., Epic MyChart) – with each reset taking three or more minutes to complete. Password resets for internal IT applications account for approximately 53% of the agents’ time. Some 90% of agents currently provide password reset self-service capabilities available for their patients and employees. In addition, IT deployments range from approximately 44% on-premises and 35% cloud-based, to 21% on-prem/cloud hybrids.

When asked about future planning over the next 1-3 years, respondents’ top-10 contact center considerations include:

• Artificial intelligence (40%)
• Voice biometrics (35%)
• Cybersecurity (33%)
• Speech recognition (28%)
• Outbound notifications (SMS) (26%)
• EHR integrations (22%)
• Machine learning (19%)
• Password reset (18%)
• Interactive Voice Response (IVR) (18%)
• Cloud (15%)

See a breakdown of the results: