Virtual Assistants Enable Hospitals and Health Plans to Securely Assess Symptoms and Provide Immediate Care Recommendations
SAINT LOUIS (March 30, 2020) – Perficient, Inc. (Nasdaq: PRFT) (“Perficient”), the leading digital consultancy transforming the world’s largest enterprises and biggest brands, today announced the availability of healthcare chatbot solutions intended to help reduce the spread of COVID-19, address consumer concerns, and alleviate inundated call centers and helplines.
As businesses around the world grapple with the impact of COVID-19, they must take greater precautions to quickly contain and control further contamination. Digital technologies, including chatbots and artificial intelligence (AI), offer a holistic, integrated alternative to traditional in-person clinical services, and give healthcare professionals more tools to treat and address patients’ needs. Perficient’s new chatbot solutions address these challenges by securely delivering healthcare intelligence and assessments to consumers at scale.
AI-Enabled Healthbot Provides Intelligent, Personalized Access to Relevant Services
The Microsoft Healthbot service is a cloud-based conversational AI platform purpose-built for the healthcare industry, featuring industry-specific templates to check symptoms, triage, and screen for mental health, among other uses. Through an integration with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Healthbot is also outfitted with COVID-19 pretrained scenario templates to support self-assessment as well as frequently asked questions and up-to-date metrics from the CDC.
“With the full impact of COVID-19 still being realized, digital technology has become a critical component to scale triage capacity and mitigate risk,” said Christine Livingston, AI Chief Strategist, Perficient. “The Microsoft Healthbot is an AI-enabled, intelligent platform that can interact with users, understand their concerns, and communicate complex topics that are unique to the healthcare industry and the developing situation with COVID-19.”
Using the Healthbot’s intuitive and straightforward interface, healthcare organizations can author their own situations and customize behavior to support their own needs. A certified Bronze-level Microsoft Healthbot partner, Perficient helps healthcare organizations blend custom scenarios with established CDC content to create secure, compliant, and intelligent instances fitted to their unique business requirements and developing COVID-19 response. Additionally, the out-of-the-box functionality makes the service easily adaptable for other industries to address the growing issues related to direct customer contact.
COVID-19 Chatbot Assessment Gives Recommendations for Populations At Risk, Fast
Perficient has also partnered with Drift to develop an assessment chatbot specifically for COVID-19. Designed for screening and care navigation, the COVID-19 Assessment is a decision tree outlining key components of a person’s risk for contracting COVID-19, including exposure, symptoms, and risk factor. The chatbot guides users through a series of questions leading to a custom message directing them on the next actions to take.
“We understand the difficulties healthcare organizations are experiencing during this time, and we wanted to develop an easy-to-implement solution that would help ease the burden for providers,” said Paul Griffiths, General Manager, Perficient. “This chatbot-led assessment, which can be implemented in a matter of hours, is designed for screening and care navigation, and gives providers a better way to interact with those who may be contacting a healthcare organization seeking guidance about symptoms, concerns, and next steps.”
Perficient is a trusted end-to-end digital partner with more than 20 years of experience delivering digital technology solutions to leading enterprises, including healthcare payer, provider, and pharmaceutical organizations. With a focus on the healthcare consumer experience, Perficient helps healthcare organizations design and implement solutions that enable interoperability, satisfy regulatory requirements, leverage key data insights, and improve quality of care.
In addition to developing chatbot solutions for the healthcare industry, Perficient is also partnering with Amazon Connect and Twilio to develop rapid digital solutions for customer care use across multiple industries. The digital solutions, including on-demand cloud contact centers and remote agent workspaces, help enterprises drive operations forward and deliver experiences customers need.
For the latest digital insights and services for enterprise action amid COVID-19, such as general solutions for contact centers and the role AI can play during the pandemic, visit Perficient’s dedicated COVID-19 response page and follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn.
About Perficient
Perficient is the leading digital consultancy. We imagine, create, engineer, and run digital transformation solutions that help our clients exceed customers’ expectations, outpace the competition, and grow their business. With unparalleled strategy, creative and technology capabilities, we bring big thinking and innovative ideas, along with a practical approach to help the world’s largest enterprises and biggest brands succeed. Traded on the Nasdaq Global Select Market, Perficient is a member of the Russell 2000 index and the S&P SmallCap 600 index. Perficient is an award-winning Adobe Platinum Partner, Platinum Level IBM business partner, a Microsoft National Service Provider and Gold Certified Partner, an Oracle Platinum Partner, an Advanced Pivotal Ready Partner, a Gold Salesforce Consulting Partner, and a Sitecore Platinum Partner. For more information, visit www.perficient.com.
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Some of the statements contained in this news release that are not purely historical statements discuss future expectations or state other forward-looking information related to financial results and business outlook for 2020. Those statements are subject to known and unknown risks, uncertainties, and other factors that could cause the actual results to differ materially from those contemplated by the statements. The forward-looking information is based on management’s current intent, belief, expectations, estimates, and projections regarding our company and our industry. You should be aware that those statements only reflect our predictions. Actual events or results may differ substantially. Important factors that could cause our actual results to be materially different from the forward-looking statements include (but are not limited to) those disclosed under the heading “Risk Factors” in our annual report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2019.