Megi Health Platform: Optimizing patient care with an interactive chatbot built using Infobip Answers

One of the many challenges faced by organizations that provide healthcare services is how to make optimal use of their highly trained medical staff. With the rising cost of medical technologies and pharmaceuticals, and constantly evolving regulations, these institutions need to continually innovate to provide the same high levels of care to their patients. 

The Magdalena Clinic, a healthcare institution that provides unique and comprehensive cardiovascular care recognized that there was an opportunity to leverage technology to supplement the work of their staff. Tasks like gathering medical history, reminding patients to record measurements taken at home and to attend appointments were all candidates for automation. 

However, due to the sensitive nature of the information and the technical naivety of some older patients, the solution would have to be secure, easy to use, and win the trust of patients.

This is why the Megi Health platform was created. Rather than technology being another unfamiliar factor at an already stressful time for patients – the digital platform has the goal of easing anxiety and maximizing positive outcomes by providing round-the-clock support to chronic patients.

As education is a vital part of healthcare, the platform needs to be able to provide targeted and easily consumable information to patients, including those that are not tech savvy and find it difficult to navigate web pages to find material that is relevant to their own situation.

The best way of providing an interactive and supportive healthcare experience is by using the latest chatbot technology. Due to the widespread use of WhatsApp, it was the ideal channel for the Megi Health platform to use. 

Being a member of the Infobip Startup Tribe enabled Megi to accelerate their digital solutions and go-to-market by using their credits on our self-serve platform to build a virtual health assistant using the fully featured version of our chatbot building platform Answers. The proof-of-concept demonstrated that a chatbot could help achieve their objectives of elevating levels of patient care and providing a reliable source of quality data.

The chatbot’s key advantage is that it can facilitate the two-way exchange of valuable data and information. Patients can interact with the chatbot to provide details of symptoms and submit measurements of their key readings. It can then provide relevant support and information and can connect the patient with a doctor when the submitted readings indicate that intervention is required. 

This is made possible by using our People CDP (Customer Data Platform) to store and process data to ensure the highest levels of security without any impact on performance or patient experience.

The Magdalena Clinic was the first institution to work on integrating the chatbot into their patient treatment strategy.  They focused on covering four primary use cases for patients suffering from high blood pressure and hypertension:

The solution was built using our chatbot building platform Answers and is maintained by two developers. The chatbot is not intended to replace the role of medical professionals, but to supplement primary patient care by making the patient experience as supported and stress-free as possible.

When Magdalena Clinic went live with the Megi Health platform it had a positive impact almost immediately. When new patients book an appointment, they are now directed to start using the chatbot immediately to submit blood pressure readings. This means that by the time they meet with the doctor, there is already a body of quality data to refer to. This has resulted in a 65% reduction in the time taken to collect the data required to make a successful diagnosis.

With reminders from the chatbot, patients are more likely to submit regular results, not just when they experience a significant change. This helps doctors to identify small changes in blood pressure that may require adjustments to treatments – leading to better patient outcomes.

Just as important as the quantitative data is the positive impact on the overall patient experience. Patients have consistently commented that dealing with Megi is like speaking to a real person and mention the sense of comfort they get knowing that the service is always available and enables them to proactively take care of their health. As a result, the chatbot has received a CSAT score of 86% from users.

It is constantly being improved, with Infobip’s self-serve platform making it simple to make enhancements, test, and release updated versions. There are plans to upgrade the chatbot to use natural language processing (NLP) to achieve the highest quality of human-like conversation. The Megi platform is also working towards using AI to help provide more sophisticated analysis of patient data.

The Megi Health platform has shown that chatbots can play an important role in improving the quality of medical care. The benefits are amplified when the AI is underpinned by a data platform that ensures the chatbot has instant access to the patient’s live data record and can exchange information seamlessly and securely with the other systems that the clinic uses.   

Nothing can replace the role of highly trained medical professionals, but initiatives like the Megi Health platform can support their work and maximize successful outcomes by ensuring the highest quality data and reducing stress and anxiety for patients.