Amazon looks to ease patient communication for hospital

Amazon Web Services will offer hospitals three new ways to make communicating with patients faster, easier and more efficient, according to a news release on Monday.

Health systems will soon be able to automate outbound calls, texts and emails with patients via Amazon Connect without the need for third-party integrations with other systems. That could make it easier for health systems to send appointment reminders and market to consumers, the company said.

“A large hospital healthcare network can send texts and emails to ask patients to confirm upcoming appointments, and then automatically call all patients that fail to respond,” the news release said.

AWS will also allow providers to verify a caller’s identity based on their voice through Amazon Connect Voice ID, potentially eliminating the need to screen each caller manually and speeding up customer service calls.

Keep up to date on the latest healthcare issues from the industry’s most trusted news source. 

In addition, Amazon Connect Wisdom can automatically detect patients’ issues and give customer service representatives access to real-time information from in-house databases or third parties using speech analytics to help them resolve patients’ problems.

Lapcorp plans to take advantage of the new services, according to the news release.

“We will be able to better manage our agent queues spanning clinical questions, billing activities, and appointment scheduling; provide end-to-end visibility into tasks; increase agent performance; and produce actionable analytics for us to advance our customer service experience,” Lance Berberian, chief information and technology officer at Labcorp, said in a news release. “Amazon Connect Voice ID will deliver real-time voice authentication for our clients and agents to provide a frictionless experience that’s more secure, saves time, reduces fraud and improves customer satisfaction.”

Amazon has ramped up its healthcare efforts by taking advantage of its immense computing power and logistics and customer service expertise to offer new products and services at scale. The retail and cloud-computing giant has invested heavily in telehealth, genomics pharmacy and other growth areas in the healthcare market. While not all of Amazon’s efforts have been successful, the company is banking on the $4 trillion industry to help grow its nearly $1.7 trillion market cap.