Across the health sector, patients want reliable and accessible information, and care providers want to ease their administrative burden. The Ottawa Hospital (TOH) aims to achieve both goals with its GenAI-powered digital assistant, Digital Teammate.
For a pilot use case, Deloitte developed a virtual agent to interact with patients before surgery, equipping it to answer common questions based on an approved document base, and making it accessible 24-7 from any screen.
Leveraging the power of large language models, the avatar can engage in conversation and even pick up on both verbal and non-verbal cues, such as tone of voice and facial expressions.
Digital Teammate allows for human-like interactions at scale. Patients face less delay in getting information during their care journeys (e.g., no need to wait for medical consultations), and health care workers have more available time to prioritize value-added patient interactions. This innovation thus contributes to the well-being of health workers and their patients while driving significant improvements in our health care system.
“We end up with better patient care and better patient experiences,” says Niraj Dalmia, a partner at Deloitte Canada and the Life Sciences & Health Care leader for the firm’s AI practice, Omnia AI.
With subsequent stages of testing, Digital Teammate has shown promise for many additional uses at TOH. “We’ve been able to demonstrate technical feasibility as well as acceptance,” says Dalmia.
The technology, which benefited from Deloitte’s end-to-end development—from project management and coding, to deployment and training—as well as other contributions, is currently being explored for use in broader applications across Canada and globally.
