Vitalchat furthers touchless concept with voice commands.

A few weeks ago, Vitalchat tossed the proverbial gauntlet to Alexa and Google (ok, it was more like a bouquet of flowers and an offer of dinner, but things change.)

You can read the full blog here, but the basic gist was that the potential to leverage either company’s voice activation technology would mean a significant advance for telehealth. Unfortunately, neither company has opened up their environment to allow 3rd party vendors —a huge loss for patients in both the hospital and home setting.

The convenience of these technologies has grown more and more apparent in so many other aspects of our daily lives, but in healthcare they represent a critical opportunity to improve quality and satisfaction. Here are three reasons why:

• Patient requires little interaction. This is especially important with elderly populations or critical access communities where technology proficiency is often low. Add in sickness, disorientation or challenges such as memory loss, and the need skyrockets. 
• Reduces need for staff resources. With a voice activated, or touchless experience, staff in hospitals, senior living and home health are relieved from managing the visit on behalf of the patient. This means more frequent, meaningful interaction and allows staff to focus on giving care, not managing devices. 
• Device itself is low maintenance. The devices require very little in the area of upkeep…meaning they will work when they are needed.Look, we love Alexa and Google, but with the current need for rapid and drastic improvement in the telehealth space, we decided we couldn’t wait around for them to accept our proposal. To continue the dating metaphor just a bit further—what we realized was that we had to work on ourselves.

And now we are ready to get back out there because, guess what? We built out voice activation ourselves. 

With Edna, patients can use healthcare specific voice commands that are highly integrated with existing systems. For example, patients can call for help audibly instead of fumbling for a pillow speaker. Vitalchat is already deploying this functionality through one of our partners, West-Com Nurse Call Systems. This includes customized, voice-enabled routing to meet the needs of the patients and hospital system through existing workflows. 

Of course, the possibilities don’t stop at nurse call. Edna makes it possible for patients to order food, change the lighting, or initiate a call with their friends or family. And all of this gives patients more control over their care and relieves nursing staff so they can focus on care. 

In the home environment, existing voice activation technology can function as a home assistant—with Edna, this means access to medical-grade telehealth with a few voice commands. 

Vitalchat is committed to innovating touchless virtual care. And while we still have our eye on the Googles and the Alexas of the world—we are certain Edna will knock our client’s socks off.

If you’d like to learn more about how our girl can make your patients’ and staff lives better, schedule a brief demo.