COVID care: how a bot supported vaccine safety in a pandemic

Driving efficiency and automation through robust partnerships

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engineon is a unique business management system designed to help partners drive efficiencies through automating processes. Delivered as a consultancy company model, the engineon system comprises a series of modules, all of which are aimed at managing specific business functions and data families.

Technologies deployed include artificial intelligence, machine learning, and natural language processing. Initially focused on supporting healthcare specialists, engineon’s tools are universally-applicable - and proposals for a range of additional verticals are in development.

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Setting the scene

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Modern public health population monitoring presents a unique set of challenges

When a global pandemic strikes and public health authorities find themselves racing to protect large numbers of vulnerable people against a deadly virus, they need every tool they can get their hands on to gain an advantage. This includes the ability to rapidly administer - and monitor reactions to - new treatments.

When these treatments are delivered at a national or even regional population level, analog record keeping and response tools can struggle to keep up with the relentless flow of inquiries and calls from worried patients. Importantly, overwhelmed teams risk missing or failing to respond quickly enough to patients suffering adverse reactions.

This was of particular concern during the rollout of the various coronavirus vaccines, which were quickly administered among large swathes of the global population. Healthcare professionals needed to build a picture of the safety of the vaccines and monitor adverse reactions. For this task, engineon’s Botpress COVID Vaccine bot proved invaluable, removing the need for patients to schedule and attend in-person check-ups while providing vulnerable patients with a channel for reporting any problems and receiving appropriate care.

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A chatbot intelligent enough to reassure patients

With healthcare providers facing staffing and funding pressures,anything that supports efficiencies and enables clinicians to meet patient needs in a more targeted way is welcomed. It’s little wonder then that chatbots are proving increasingly useful in the world of medicine.

engineon’s COVID Vaccine bot proved an essential tool in Italy’s response to the pandemic, helping public health authorities understand the immediate impact of vaccines, while providing convenience to patients and professionals alike.

engineon started from the needs of the Public Health Office regarding citizen monitoring: to acquire information about vaccine reactions and make corresponding decisions.To do this, they developed a survey to collect vaccine reactions that they “translated” to a voice bot, all while adhering to European privacy laws. engineon and the Public Health Office decided to engage citizens by using active calls, where engineon’s system calls the patients to administer the survey.

At the end, all acquired data are stored on engineon’s framework to manage results on the engineon BI module.

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Chatbots in development for new verticals

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engineon is working on new voice bots to manage several new categories of AI agents. These range from company disease management process, where engineon’s system collects requests to open or manage employees’ disease days, to a disease monitoring system to collect patients’ life parameters and support doctors in making decisions about prescriptions and therapy.