Simplifying prescription refills through a contextual AI assistant

The Challenge

Founded in 2015, Circle Medical is a primary care practice that uses technology to deliver better patient experience and outcomes at a lower cost. Its patient-facing AI assistant automates traditionally human-intensive processes such as scheduling, billing, and managing medical records.

Circle Medical receives thousands of messages from patients every month. Many of these messages are routine, but are hard to automate with static solutions, as user requests often go beyond just simple FAQs. Given the continuous flow of patient requests, Circle Medical was searching for a scalable solution that provides a personalized experience and meets the high standards of their patients.

The Solution

Using Rasa’s advanced machine learning-based dialogue management, Circle Medical was able to automate a use case for medication prescription refills within a few weeks. The customizability of Rasa Core enabled the team to provide a personalized solution that integrates into their own system and can handle multiple turns in the course of one conversation.

In addition, the team was able to host everything on their HIPAA-compliant hosting infrastructure, encrypting conversations in transit and storage to ensure full patient privacy.

The Results

Automating prescription refills demonstrated massive potential to increase patient satisfaction through faster response cycles, while saving costs. More than 50 percent of refill requests are fully handled by the AI assistant, requiring physicians only for review and approval. Physicians feedback was overwhelmingly positive, as automating repetitive tasks enabled them to focus on important in-depth discussions with a greater number of patients.

Circle Medical is now working on expanding their AI assistant to include additional use cases.

We receive thousands of incoming patient messages per month. We wanted to build an AI assistant that automates some of the communication between patients and their care team. Rasa was the clear choice being customizable and open source. Being able to host it was crucial to protect the privacy of our patients. It only took us two weeks to ship a first version that helps patients refill their medication automatically. We’re really impressed how easy it was to customize it for our use case.

Jean-Sebastien Boulanger, Co-Founder & CTO at Circle Medical