Doctors can now talk to their AI-based practice like a human assistant

I am really excited to share a few things that we’ve been working on for the past 12 months at Sikka Software — and I think we’re truly changing the nature of the game for the benefit of our clients.
See, we’ve been really thinking hard on how to connect the dots of big data, cloud, mobile, artificial intelligence, machine learning and APIs to put together real value for our clients in retail health. Over the past few weeks we’ve rolled out really cool stuff such as a brand new dev API, a marketplace, mobile auto-scheduling and two alexa skills — so I thought I would share a few thoughts about this on-going work because we’re really passionate about it!

​

A Medicine of Needs and WantS

While in “medicine of need” (that would be your general doctor), big tech focuses first on solving the automation of diagnosis, which eventually will evolve into AI+nurse as it has been predicted by the brilliant minds of A16Z last year, we believe that for all those other doctors in your care team such as your dentist, ophthalmologist, chiropractor, fitness and wellness coach and even your veterinary (that’s the “medicine of want”), focusing on the business of being a healthcare entrepreneur (in other words running a practice as effectively and efficiently as possible) is a problem that today tech can solve and automatize.

Game Changer

So this week I am so proud to share with you that we are launching two major AI-based initiatives that are a bit revolutionary for our clients: Practice Insights, the first set of Alexa-based skills for dentists and veterinarians, and second, we’re adding bot-based auto-scheduling to our Practice Mobilizer mobile apps (Apple and Android). 
The vision behind all of this has been summarized super well in Vijay Sikka’s Medium post yesterday: we think that soon practices can become self-driving thanks to our technology. In fact, we’re well on our way to make the practice almost self-aware, and to enable the doctor to interact with it using natural voice conversation to drive the business, such as AI-based auto-schedule, inventory management and auto-order, real-time patient appointment arrival notifications and so much more to come in the next few months.

​

practice Insights and alexa

So with this in mind, we worked hard with our AI and product teams for 8 months and we’re launching as a first step our Practice Insights service (beta) today.

Practice Insights works with Amazon Echo and Alexa so that doctors can have hands-free interactions with their practice during their work day. Once the Alexa skill is enabled, doctors can ask about business and day-to-day operations questions such as “when is my next patient arriving” or “Read me my morning report” (a very popular Sikka feature that was until now only available via daily PDF emails).

Video Credit: Jason Folk (@jasonfolk)

Practice Mobilizer Bot Auto-Schedule

Last year we were so proud to launch our first two mobile apps we called Practice Mobilizer (and its companion app Patient Mobilizer)
And with a rapidly growing organic user base, we’re now addressing more than 10,000 practices in the US with this complementary service (beta) which in 12 months has enabled more and more doctors to securely exchange voice, text, and video messages with their patients, check their business vitals, while also helping patients to automatically check-in to their appointment while on their way to the practice, thus drastically reducing wait-times.

Today we’re super happy to add auto-schedule to Mobilizer: patients can naturally interact with our bot in the secure message panel enabled by their doctors, and our AI-based scheduling bot will automatically pick-up the conversation using real, “human” natural english to suggest timeslots that will best fit the patient’s schedule, based on the doctor’s appointment calendar.
(Note: we’ve been using great stuff from Microsoft in terms of language understanding called LUIS and superb multi-calendar sync APIs by Cronofy)

​

ipiktok

Here’s the silver lining: at Sikka we’ve been totally dedicated to add real value to our doctors and practices, using the best that today’s tech can offer, while making sure that the tech is as unintrusive and easy to use as possible.
Practice Assistant and Bot-based Autoschedule are the first offsprings of the AI-first initiative we launched internally a year ago called Ipiktok (means: keen, sharp in Eskimo)
We’ve got a really great team here, and we’re super focused on bringing even more value to retail healthcare in the next year. Try our apps and skills, and please tweet + blog about your experiences using the “ipiktok” hashtag so that we can read and learn from your feedback!

---

My name's phil mora and I blog about the things I love: fitness, hacking work, tech and anything holistic. 
Thinker, doer, designer, coder, leader.
Head of Product at Sikka Software.
 Here's my contact info.

Blog Terms of Use and Attribution Disclaimer

---