WELL Health Launches ChatAssist AI: Enabling Conversational AI Between Patients and Healthcare Providers

SANTA BARBARA, Calif., July 29, 2021 — Well Health Inc., a SaaS digital health leader in patient communications and 2021 Best in KLAS winner in Patient Outreach, today launches ChatAssist AI to enable better communications between healthcare providers and their patients. ChatAssist AI builds on the existing, top-rated WELL™ Health platform and uses a sophisticated Natural Language Understanding (NLU) engine.

“ChatAssist AI automates thousands of conversations between patients and providers, and gracefully hands off to staff when human intervention is required,” said Guillaume de Zwirek, CEO and Founder, WELL Health. “ChatAssist AI can independently navigate complex, multi-step patient communications, resulting in a positive experience for both patients and staff. Patient satisfaction improves with a faster response time from providers and staff are freed up to focus on high-touch interactions that their jobs demand.”

Promising Pilot Results

ChatAssist AI is instrumental in helping busy healthcare providers. Epic EMR customer, Sansum Clinic, which serves 130,000 patients from 23 locations across California’s Central Coast, piloted ChatAssist AI for six months with a focus on:

• Telehealth
• Portal enrollment
• Insurance verification
• COVID vaccinations 

The ChatAssist AI pilot results showed: 

• 95 percent of the conversations were successfully completed without staff intervention,¹ among the ChatAssist AI conversations where patients responded. 
• 13 different ChatAssist AI use cases resulted in 35,000 fully automated patient conversations^2, totaling 546 hours of staff time saved³ (within six months of deployment).

“ChatAssist AI has been our Swiss Army knife for addressing the range of communication challenges we’ve faced over the past year, particularly in vaccine distribution,” said Karen Handy, Vice President of Operations, Sansum Clinic. “WELL ChatAssist AI improved our customer experience with personalized messaging while saving an incredible amount of staff time. We’re continuing to use WELL ChatAssist AI to address even more use cases and enable us to quickly and nimbly respond to our patients with the power of digital communications.” 

ChatAssist AI Details

ChatAssist AI can understand and respond to millions of diverse, unstructured patient responses on behalf of health systems, allowing patients to engage using their own words (in English and Spanish) and their preferred channels, and receive real-time, conversational responses from their providers.  ChatAssist AI combines these natural language understanding capabilities with healthcare specific use case capabilities to deliver reliable and cutting-edge solutions. 

ChatAssist AI is built to deliver a conversational experience to patients, incorporating industry leading AI capabilities and configurable healthcare workflows and content to improve patient and staff experience. WELL Health will continue to expand on these innovative capabilities through the use of AI and other technologies that deliver value to patients, staff, and healthcare systems.

ChatAssist AI includes:

• Intelligent Assistance which uses conversational AI to interpret the patient’s intent and inform the ChatAssist engine to engage with the designed response. For example, a patient may respond to ChatAssist AI with “Yeah, I do need more information” or a thumbs up emoji, instead of “Y” or “Yes”. WELL ChatAssist AI understands the affirmation and shares more information – such as portal enrollment details or preparation instructions for an upcoming procedure – with the patient. 
• Content Library features pre-built conversation templates – available directly in the ChatAssist AI conversation builder – so that healthcare providers can deploy ChatAssist AI-enabled conversations in a single click. 
• Custom Conversations empowers healthcare providers to build and tailor multi-step conversations that are as unique as their patients and organizations. 
• Connect API enables healthcare providers to independently pull relevant data from ChatAssist AI conversations into other digital systems – such as their Electronic Health Record (EHR). For example, healthcare providers can independently pull in relevant information related to clinical conversations with their patient such as how they are feeling after a procedure, but exclude administrative conversations – such as where to park or directions to the office. Additionally, providers can tag and extract relevant patient information and feed this into other third-party vendors such as billing, pre-registration, or telehealth to initiate new workflows based on patient conversations.  
• Analytics with pre-built reports and dashboards to continually monitor conversation performance and operational impact, enabling providers to immediately implement workflow changes that improve the patient experience and enhance the value provided by ChatAssist AI.

For more information on ChatAssist AI, please visit www.wellapp.com/chatassist-ai

About Well Health Inc. 

WELL™ Health is a SaaS digital health leader in patient communications and the 2021 Best in KLAS winner in Patient Outreach. The WELL Health intelligent communications hub is the only two-way digital health solution engaging patients throughout their entire care experience. WELL Health enables conversations between patients and their providers through secure, multilingual (19 different languages) messaging in the patient’s preferred communications channel: texting, email, telephone, and live chat. WELL Health helps 200,000+ providers facilitate more than 1.1 billion messages for 37 million patients annually. By unifying and automating disjointed communications across healthcare organizations, WELL Health reduces unnecessary provider stress and potential errors, while increasing patient visits and loyalty. 

Founded in 2015, WELL Health is based in Santa Barbara, California. WELL Health has been named No. 10 on 2021 Forbes America’s Best Startup Employers list, among the 2020 Best Places to Work by Modern Healthcare and ranked #170 on the Inc. 5000 list of fastest growing private companies in 2020. WELL Health recently announced $45 million in Series C funding, bringing total funds raised to $75 million since its founding in 2015. 

For more information, visit https://wellapp.com.

The Role of WELL Health in COVID Vaccine Efforts 

Since the COVID vaccine became available in the United States, leading healthcare providers have used WELL™ Health communications technology to:

• Facilitate nearly 7 million COVID vaccine appointments¹
• Send more than 39 million COVID-related messages, with 51% of those messages pertaining to the COVID vaccine¹.

¹Data set from 12/9/2021 to 7/13/2021, pulled by WELL Health Data Insights.

About Sansum Clinic

Sansum Clinic is celebrating its 100th year serving the healthcare needs of patients on the Central Coast of California by providing the latest innovations in equipment, technology, procedures and treatments. Sansum Clinic is the largest independent nonprofit healthcare organization between the Los Angeles Basin and the San Francisco Bay Area. With more than 220 affiliated physicians, Sansum Clinic serves more than 130,000 patients (800,000) annually at our 22 patient care facilities in south Santa Barbara County. To learn more, please visit https://link.edgepilot.com/s/00e10e51/R9DHxKix80yL66PBTxRWow?u=http://www.sansumclinic.org/.

¹Among the ChatAssist AI conversations where patients responded, 95 percent of the conversations were successfully completed without staff intervention.

² Among the total number of ChatAssist conversation Sansum Clinic deployed, 34,969 were successfully completed, without staff intervention.  

³ Estimated Sansum Clinic staff time saved during the six month pilot.