Conversational AI for COVID-19: Insights from Hyro’s Virtual Assistants Across US Healthcare Systems

Introduction:
On March 19th, 2020—on the heels of the World Health Organization (WHO) officially declaring the coronavirus a worldwide pandemic—we launched our free COVID-19 Virtual Assistant for healthcare systems. With a global market size expected to grow to $15.7 billion by 2024, Gartner suggests that conversational AI has been adequately validated as a solution for scaling digital services and experiences. At Hyro, we tailored our own conversational AI technologies for COVID-19, aiming to clear up much of the misunderstanding surrounding the coronavirus, and to alleviate the strain on overloaded healthcare professionals and support centers. Coupled with those capabilities came automatically-collected conversational insights which afforded healthcare professionals pivotal, accurate visibility into their patients’ current needs and concerns, effectively operating as a barometer for patient behavior during the greatest public health crisis in over a century.
‍
The following report is based on the analysis of a random sample of 2,000 patient conversations across active COVID-19 Virtual Assistants, providing impartial and pointed insights into patient engagement with their health providers during the COVID-19 crisis.

Findings in this report include:

• Top keywords, categories & patient queries regarding COVID-19
• Growing interest and demand, as well as confusion, surrounding the topic of testing with 55.8% constituting all COVID-19 conversations
• Frequently asked patient questions as indicators of current patient priorities & activities

• Patients’ response to hospital policy changes and disruption of ongoing medical care
• Full segmentation of Risk Assessment reports, according to age groups, symptoms, and degree of risk
• Telemedicine, scheduling appointments, billing, and other services unrelated to COVID-19 that patients are looking for online