The Challenge.
- The triage process is a series of questions asked by a vet technician to assess the severity of a patient entering the Emergency Room.
- This is time that could be better spent by the technician caring for patients.
- In this clinic, there was little analysis or data gathered about ER traffic or which presenting problems were most common.
The Solution.
- Designed and built a chatbot to interact with patients arriving to the Emergency Room to ask a series of questions and assess the triage priority.
- Used NLP/NLU functionalities to understand free-text responses by the user and determine the relevant presenting problem.
- Integrated the chatbot with a mobile app so users can answer questions without being in the hospital in COVID-19 circumstances.
The Results.
- Reduced triage costs by saving ~20 minutes of time per consult by vet technicians.
- Collected data about patient traffic, common issues, and more that were used in future projects to improve the patient journey.
- Streamlined the process of information gathering in the ER by integrating the tool with the Emergency Medical Records system.