GGD West-Brabant monitors, protects, and promotes everyone's health. We are assisting them in developing VITA, the AI assistant that supports parents with toddlers in addressing their healthcare questions. Through various strategic growth phases and a custom-made conversational AI solution, we collaborate to reduce the healthcare gap.
Dutch healthcare is under pressure. On one side, the demand for care is increasing, while on the other side, there is a shortage of healthcare professionals. This is what we call the healthcare gap. How can we address this? By removing repetitive and administrative tasks, healthcare professionals gain more time to focus on important and impactful care responsibilities.
Research by GGD West-Brabant shows that 30% of inquiries to general practitioners and emergency services are made by parents with toddlers. Often, these are repetitive questions that do not require the involvement of a doctor. Many answers, advice, and support can be found online. If we can provide parents with these answers quickly and without the need for a doctor, it frees up time for other healthcare tasks.
Meet VITA, the AI assistant from GGD West-Brabant. Healthcare professionals use VITA internally to quickly find answers to repetitive healthcare questions from parents of sick toddlers. This conversational AI solution is trained with data from sources such as Groeigids.nl, Thuisarts.nl, and the FAQ page of GGD West-Brabant, ensuring that VITA always provides helpful answers for parents.
VITA is evolving through different growth phases. In the first phase, healthcare professionals at GGD West-Brabant use VITA internally to find answers to repetitive healthcare questions quickly. In phase two, parents of toddlers can directly access VITA, reducing the need for healthcare professionals' involvement and lowering the workload on doctors. In the third phase, VITA will take on a coaching role, not just answering questions but also providing active support to parents. In the final phase, VITA will offer more personalized options, building a personal relationship with parents over time.
AI solutions often receive negative attention for providing incorrect answers or misinformation. In healthcare, we cannot afford these mistakes, also known as hallucinations. VITA demonstrates a different approach! We’ve designed her in such a way that she never provides incorrect answers. If VITA doesn’t know the right answer to a healthcare question, she will inform the parents and refer them to the appropriate source. This ensures fast and reliable support without the risk of hallucinations.
By utilizing various AI technologies, we significantly reduced the time required for developing and implementingVITA. This allowed us to lower development costs. Curious about which AI technologies we used to optimize our process? We’d be happy to tell you more during a free introductory meeting.
Together with strategic design agency Norday (part of Handpicked), we are working on the further development ofVITA in the coming years. Together, we are creating strategies and conversational AI solutions to reduce the healthcare gap.
Would you like to know more about how conversational AI solutions can help your organization move forward? Contact us for a free consultation.