Press Releases

Designed to Improve the Patient Telehealth Experience and Accelerate Adoption

SOUTHBOROUGH, Mass. – (April 27, 2021) – Virtusa Corporation, a global provider of digital strategy, digital engineering, and IT services and solutions that help clients change and disrupt markets through innovation engineering, today announced HealthBot. Part of Virtusa’s HealthConnect platform, HealthBot is a digital self-assessment and self-scheduling tool that improves patient access to remote care while boosting patient acquisition and retention.

Patient demand for more affordable care, changing patient preferences, and the COVID-19 pandemic have dramatically increased the adoption of telehealth solutions globally. In doing so, it has made healthcare more accessible to all. 

Gartner research predicts that “by 2024, up to 80% of branded digital experiences will be delivered to consumers via virtual people.”¹

Virtusa’s HealthConnect is a telehealth solution that delivers patients secure, affordable, and convenient access to medical health experts through digital channels. With the introduction of HealthBot, the solution adds three main functionalities—triage, appointment scheduler, and insurance validation. Available through the web chat portal and Microsoft Teams, Virtusa Healthbot integrates with Microsoft Azure services including Power BI to unify data from many sources and create interactive, immersive dashboards and reports. Providers can analyze patients’ health conditions and behavior data through a clinical analytics dashboard, and hospital administrative teams can gain greater visibility into patient interaction insights.

Together, these capabilities quickly gauge the severity of the patient’s health condition using an adaptive questionnaire. Based on the answers provided, it then recommends the type of care needed and, when necessary, helps users book an appointment with the preferred doctor through the self-scheduling tool. If patients want to talk to a live agent, the HealthBot can easily switch to the agent mode.

HealthBot delivers the benefits that providers require in a Telehealth offering by: 

• Improving patient experiences with a hassle-free, self-scheduling tool that reduces the need for staff intervention and speeds up the appointment booking process.
• Allowing patients to access remote, 24/7 safe healthcare through self-service tools that help them understand their health conditions and book appointments virtually.
• Improving provider efficiency by managing trivial tasks like appointment scheduling and basic patient assessment with a virtual self-service tool at a reduced cost.
• Integrating with the provider’s electronic health record (EHR) using Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resource (FHIR) API so that all progress notes are seamlessly imported into the provider’s system.
• Decreasing paperwork digitization to free up staff from repetitive tasks and lets them focus on more critical activities like patient care and medical billing.
• Connecting providers to a vast network of specialists registered on the HealthConnect platform that expands their reach beyond the in-house doctors.

“The shift in the delivery of care from the physical to the virtual didn’t originate in 2020, but as a result of the global pandemic, demand for these telehealth services surged,” said Anthony Lange, SVP, healthcare and life sciences, Virtusa. “By adding HealthBot to HealthConnect, we improve the telehealth experience by making it easier and faster for individuals to connect with medical professionals while freeing doctors from many routine tasks so they can spend more time where it’s needed most, addressing critical patient needs.”

A critical component of HealthBot is its use of Microsoft Azure. Virtusa recently earned the Modernization of Web Applications to Microsoft Azure advanced specialization, a validation of a solution partner’s deep knowledge, extensive experience, and proven expertise in migrating and modernizing production web application workloads and managing app services in Azure.

“Companies like Virtusa add value by integrating their solutions with Microsoft Azure services,” said Venkat Krishnan, Executive Director, Commercial Partners, Microsoft India. “Virtusa’s solution helps drive the digital transformation for the healthcare industry.  As a result, healthcare organizations can deliver impactful, human-centered experiences, enabling them to focus more on patient outcomes and less on managing services and paperwork.”

To learn more about Virtusa and HealthConnect, please visit: virtusa.com/solutions/healthconnect/healthbot

¹Gartner, 2021 Strategic Roadmap for Enterprise AI: Natural Language Architecture, Anthony Mullen, et al., 15 December 2020.