Tag Archives: Amazon Alexa

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Some Use Cases For Alexa In Healthcare – Part 2

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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

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

Some Use Cases For Alexa In Healthcare – Part 1

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There is no doubt that the introduction of the vocal interface with devices such as the Amazon Echo/Alexa and Google Home is revolutionizing many industries.   This trend also includes healthcare.  As you know, developing Alexa Skills is one of my hobbies in retirement.  A good number of them are focused on health.  I thought I’d state a few use cases over the next few posts, and invite readers of this blog to suggest others.

One use case I think worthwhile is using Alexa to gather some information from the patient at home before their visit to the doctor.  In addition to the usual information, I think it could include information about the patient’s support system as far as the closeness of friends and relatives, and their short-term and long-term goals.  I think such a conversation would be more conducive to gathering this kind of information rather by answering questions on a computer screen.  My rationale for including this information is that it would help build a personal relationship between physician and patient.  Given the pressure on physicians to see as many patients as possible, there is less time to probe for this kind of information during the office visit.  If they are already available for the physician to read in the electronic medical record, then they would be able to, at the very least, acknowledge them at the visit.  When I practiced medicine many years ago, I was able to take the time to find out more about my patients rather than just their physical findings.  I truly enjoyed that aspect of practicing medicine immensely.

I’ll be looking forward to your comments and suggestions for other use cases.

Thanks,

Dr. Bob

Alexa Skill Follow Up

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So, Alexa reads part of my post in a Flash Briefing, but only a small part of it, not even the first paragraph!  Welcome to programming of Alexa skills!

I want to see how much of this will be spoken.  If I understand it correctly,  This post should be read first, followed by the one I wrote earlier.

We’ll see!

Dr. Bob