Virtual Health Assistants: Influencing Patient Behavior to Improve Health Outcomes
Patient behavior can be critical to health outcomes, but how can these individuals’ behavior be influenced to improve health care outcomes? Virtual health assistants, Thomas Morrow, MD, chief medical officer, Next IT, said during the second keynote at NAMCP’s Managed Care Forum on virtual health assistants in the health care industry, may be the answer and can ultimately transform how health care is delivered. According to Dr Morrow, applying this technology can reduce costs, improve population health, fight fraud, reduce waste, decrease abuse, and improve customer service.
A conversational interface that is a virtual health assistant in the form of an avatar called, Alme, was recently released by Next IT, a US-based technology company. The platform promises to extend health care professionals ability to deliver personalized interactions to users of their choice.
Alme has created a mobile health ecosystem that is built around the patient. The conversational interface provides the patient with multiple resources including preventative health, disease management, member services, remote monitoring of patient devices, and pharmacy services.
There are some reservations, however, about the efficacy of replacing a human with a virtual health assistant. Dr Morrow cited a study by Bickmore et al (Maintaining reality: relational agents for antipsychotic medication adherence. Interact Comput. 2010;22[4]:276-288.), which looked at how patients taking antipsychotic medications responded to an intelligent virtual assistant.
“The strong correlation between perceived relationship with the agent and system use indicates the importance of establishing a therapeutic alliance in automated mental health interventions,” researchers said. “Overall, these results indicate that relational agents may be an important technology to use for certain kinds of mental health interventions such as medication adherence.”
Dr Morrow suggested these results could be applied to multiple patients and therapies, not just mental health patients.
He ended the session by asking the audience, “Are there any other scalable, viable, affordable, acceptable options for improving behavior and adherence that has the potential of a virtual health assistant?"—Melissa D. Cooper
