Artificial intelligence and systemwide collaboration support ‘no patient left behind’ strategy for COVID-19 vaccinations

Early in the pandemic Mass General Brigham used Artificial intelligence (AI) to focus on prevention. To ensure safe entry into facilities, developers created easily accessible screening tools. As patients became eligible for COVID-19 vaccines our development team created patient outreach and scheduling tools through e-mail, text, websites, Patient Gateway and call centers to meet the diverse needs of our patients. However, despite this effort there were still 400,000 patients with only a landline number who needed outreach.

In addition to direct mail, the Digital Health Innovation team recommended AI voice scheduling tools. With the help of Mass Eye and Ear our developers connected with Avaamo, a vendor with more advanced voice AI capabilities and a product ready to use specifically for COVID-19 vaccination scheduling. They were also able to provide the solutions in more than 30 languages for our diverse patient population. 

In less than 10 business days the newly created AI named MEG completed outreach to 390,000 patients. Most importantly, MEG was able to facilitate more than 109 vaccine appointments. MEG was also successful in raising awareness of vaccine importance and availability to almost 150K patients. 

Adam Landman, MD, Vice President and Chief Information and Digital Innovation Officer at Brigham and Women’s Hospital noted the exciting opportunity to “build on the success and valuable lessons learned from COVID vaccine scheduling and extend conversational AI over the phone, web and SMS to other patient interactions, improving the patient experience while reducing call volumes to our call centers and practices.”