VFH Episode 39
In this episode, Teri welcomes Joyce Even, the vice-chair of content management and delivery in global business solutions for the Mayo Clinic.
Mayo Clinic is a pioneer in voice technology when it comes to healthcare and they are really paving the way for a lot of organizations to do some great things. Joyce has 30+ years of in-depth understanding of healthcare, financial, and data/systems management. She began her career at Mayo Clinic in a financial analyst role, progressing into leadership positions, and responsibilities. She’s involved in extending Mayo Clinic’s knowledge and capabilities by delivering integrated, market-leading health and healthy living solutions.
Key points from Joyce!
- How Mayo Clinic got started in voice, why they think it is such an important technology, some of the skills that they have produced, and some of their early successes.
The Voice Journey for Mayo
- They went into voice back in 2017.
- Mayo Clinic has been delivering health information for many years through multiple channels. They started out with print and progressively got into other channels like internet and mobile devices.
- As they continued to look into where the new channels would be, that’s where voice came up, and they started looking into how to deliver health information through voice technology.
Constructing Content for Voice
- As they were investigating how to construct spoken content, they recognized that they would have to leverage some different toolsets in order to produce their content in a way that would allow them to actually hear it being spoken back to them.
- Their editors began to experiment with some of those tools and they started by creating the Mayo Clinic first aid skill for Alexa which enabled them to develop content that could be spoken. That is how they started their journey with voice.
- The skill receives a lot of activity and they also created a Google Action around the same information.
- They keep learning how to make the information better and have been understanding more and more how people ask questions, and realizing the importance of intent in developing content for voice.
- They started working with Amazon to develop first-party content which enables people to ask Alexa questions without having to download any skill. They have so far worked with Amazon to deliver over 8,000 health concepts so that a user can simply ask Alexa anything health related and Alexa will respond without the user having to say, “Download that skill” or “Open Mayo Clinic First Aid.”
The Impact of Alexa’s HIPAA Compliance
- She thinks it really opens up some doors for health providers to engage their patients differently than how they have been, especially in delivering patient education for when they first might be diagnosed with a disease, to being educated on how to take care of themselves after medical procedures.
- They are looking into how voice technology can play a role and be more effective than traditional patient education is.
Vocal Biomarkers
- This is an exciting area for the Mayo Clinic. They are studying biomarkers of voice so that a person could just be speaking and a smart speaker could detect a health condition in the person.
- They are also looking at coronary artery disease and seeing if they can detect this condition from a person’s voice. The technology can also be leveraged for other types of diseases like Parkinson’s and others. The diseases can then be confirmed through other tests to avoid relying solely on voice.
- They don’t see voice as the only thing for diagnostic or health information delivery.
The Future Directions of Mayo’s Voice Related Work
- They will continue to investigate the biomarkers for multiple conditions going beyond coronary artery disease.
- They will also be pursuing post-procedural patient education with patients, and have been developing interactive care plans for after a person is dismissed from the hospital. They will be piloting some activities in that arena.
Links and Resources in this Episode
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