Hyro Conversational AI to Help Hospitals with Patients Seeking COVID-19 Vaccinations

Hyro, a developer of plug-and-play conversational artificial-intelligence (AI) solutions, has begun equipping U.S. hospitals and healthcare providers with artificial intelligence-powered virtual assistants to help them handle the mass-scheduling of COVID-19 vaccinations.

 

Known as VAXA, Hyro's Vaccine Access Solution is designed to help healthcare organizations handle an expected 500 percent increase in volume at their support centers as patients jam phone lines to obtain information, assess their eligibility, and secure appointments to receive inoculations. VAXA uses conversational AI to answer questions about eligibility, risk of side effects, and other concerns while automating appointment-setups.

VAXA is powered by Hyro's natural language understanding engine that includes voice and text capabilities and can automatically reach out with phone reminders and confirmation requests ahead of upcoming appointments. VAXA also helps clinicians follow-up with patients after inoculation and monitor them for adverse side-effects by integrating with electronic health record systems. It can be deployed as a voice-and-text website virtual assistant, call-center AI voice assistant, or SMS layer that triggers user-specified automatic messaging.

VAXA also includes a designated analytics suite to surface the most popular questions and topics for patients surrounding vaccinations.

"When the pandemic struck last February, the biggest fear was that hospitals would be inundated with infected patients; but, today, with the warp-speed availability of COVID-19 vaccines, that fear has shifted from hospital ICU overload to overload of hospital switchboards," said Hyro CEO Israel Krush, in a statement.

Krush is optimistic that the coronavirus pandemic can at last be brought under control, and that VAXA will play an important role in this effort: "As we enter what is hopefully the last chapter in the story of COVID-19, we are committed to conversational AI as a high-value tool for supporting healthcare organizations during this monumental undertaking."