Since my last post about a use case for Alexa before an office visit, I had some additional ideas and I also received some feedback from a few sources.

I thought a measure of loneliness might be useful and with a little research, I found the De Jong Gierveld 6-Item Loneliness Survey. I’ve added it to my demo Alexa Skill I’ve called Office Visit Prepper.  See a sample of the EMR page below:

Sample EMR Page

It shows the patient’s Goals, Barriers and Loneliness Survey responses requested by Office Visit Prepper.

There also were concerns from both patients and primary care physicians (PCP) regarding the lack of the physician’s access to specialist visit notes at the time the PCP office visit with the patient.  I believe Alexa could also help solve this issue but the process is quite a bit more complicated.  Let me suggest 2 approaches.  Each requires that Alexa has access to both the patient’s health insurance records and the PCP.s EMR.  Alexa could then determine what specialist visits occurred and whether the PCP’s EMR had those electronic records.  Then there could be a passive option to help solve this issue and an active one that would occur as part of the information gathering of a Skill like Office Visit Prepper:

1. Passive – The patient gets informed that records from some specialists are missing and Alexa asks the patient to contact the specialist offices to have them forward the information to the PCP.  Ideally, these would be in an electronic format.
2. Active – Alexa informs the patient of the missing records and asks the patient for permission to obtain them.  Once the patient approves, Alexa contacts the specialist offices to get the records sent to the PCP.

My plan is to post some more of my ideas for Alexa helping care delivery.  Next time I’ll talk about two use cases during the office visit.

I look forward to your comments about the uses cases I have posted and others you would like to see implemented in healthcare delivery.

To Your Health! – Dr. Bob