Collaborating with Virtual Assistants in Healthcare

Virtual assistant services has emerged as the most promising IT and Non-IT service providers of this

century with more than 25,000 virtual assistants globally consisting of individuals, entrepreneurs,

enterprises, firms and even corporate diving into the pool of virtual assistant services. In recent years,

virtual assistants have also leaped to work in mainstream businesses with the advent of VOIP (Voice

over Internet Protocol) services such as Skype to provide a wide range of services and business

products/protocols to both businesses as well as to end consumers. As such, the face of virtual assistant

service industry has changed quite dramatically with virtual assistant or VA services entering into various

business fields or sectors such as Administration, Secretarial, and Medical, Legal, IT and other core areas

of business activities.

As of now, there is a rising demand for virtual assistant is the field of healthcare in the United States

with the rolling out of the Affordable Health Care Act (ACA) that promises millions of newly insured ones

gaining access to the more health care amidst the shortage of doctors or physicians. Health care experts

are stating that there will be an increased waiting time for patients as well as physicians and by 2020;

this shortage may be of more than 90,000 doctors in the U.S. with each state facing varied challenges.

The shortage may become even worse in the light of ageing population and increase in life expectancy

and patient visits. This type of face off has now brought into the fore the use of available technologies

that can help in alleviating these problems and transform the patient care within the health care sector

to undergo with necessary adjustments smoothly.

With the Affordable Care Act or ACA roll out to improve the health coverage for an estimated 48 million

uninsured Americans, there may emerge a drift in the health care approach from emergency treatment

with proactive health maintenance and prevention. This approach would bring into forefront the new

ways to track, understand about the patients’ health data and the better way is to collaborate with

Intelligent Virtual Assistants or IVAs.

The rise of Intelligent Virtual Assistants is now not a luxury but an absolute necessity that is quickly

developing to aid doctors and patients in processing and to act on information with efficiency that

cannot be matched by the present system of in-office visits and voice mail follow-ups. For instance,

Alme for healthcare (under the aegis of next IT) is a virtual assistant for patients that focuses on disease

management and respond to common patient and customer requests using both text and voice

prompts. Using this tool, health care providers are able to create personalized health assistants for their

patients that are helping them to ensure that patients stick to a treatment plan and regularly report

their status.