Richard Samuel, Healthcare Strategy Director at EBO, took the stage at Digital Health Rewired to discuss how Conversational AI can enhance patient empowerment and engagement.
Looking back on the past three years of digitalising NHS patient engagement, Richard Samuel remarked:
With a third of all patient interactions expected to be digital within the next five years, it’s crucial to first take a step back, reflect on our progress, identify emerging risks, and explore strategies to mitigate them.
Mitigating Risk and Driving Success Forward
“We must be far more obsessive over the quality of patient interactions and responses.”
In the race to speed up and digitise processes, there’s a risk of wasting precious clinical and administrative time. Failing to ensure response quality and designing digital interactions poorly can result in rework, extra patient follow-ups, and avoidable in-person consultations.
In some respects, digitising engagement is the easy part – the real challenge comes in effectively implementing the outcome. Without thoughtful design and seamless integration with clinical and operational workflows, we risk inefficiencies, staff burnout, and declining productivity. Simply measuring response rates isn’t enough—what truly matters is evaluating the quality of patient responses.
Augmenting Current Transactional Capability
Richard highlights the importance of the psychologisation of digital engagement—ensuring technology is inclusive, patient-focused, accessible and enhances the quality of interactions. By prioritising accessibility, engagement, and seamless communication, we can improve outcomes and productivity.
To achieve this, healthcare must evolve to be:
Dynamic
Adapting to responses in real-time to enhance user experience, interaction quality, and increase completion rates.
Quality assured
Reducing failed interactions and downstream inefficiencies.
Personalised
Increasing impact of engagement and improving user experience and confidence in engagement.
Smart
Understanding both content and context of patient’s responses, effective signposting and reducing unnecessary demand on frontline care.
Adaptive multi-lingual capability
Allowing patients to switch languages mid-conversation.
Seamless handover
Offering instant transfer to a human operator when required.
Multi-channel
Supporting voice and digitised Virtual Assistant.
Learning-driven
Continuously improving responses through user interaction tracking.
The Role of Conversational AI
Conversational AI (CAI) has advanced rapidly over the past 18 months, achieving capabilities once thought to be years away.
By leveraging Natural Language Processing (NLP) and machine learning, CAI understands, processes, and responds to patients via two-way natural conversation.
This form of AI allows trusts to converse with patients intelligently – either through text or voice –understanding their intents and tone, and providing appropriate accurate responses.
Fusing this capability with access to shared patient records, behavioural science and localised information (DOS), can influence patient behaviour and help them navigate to the services or support that best meet their needs.
Unlike many digital solutions that strip away the human touch, CAI restores empathy to digital pathways. It also removes barriers to access by supporting multiple languages, various communication channels, and a range of literacy levels—ensuring truly inclusive patient engagement.
AI in Action: Lincolnshire Partnership NHS Foundation Trust
The Memory Assessment Unit at Lincolnshire Partnership NHS Foundation Trust (LPFT) previously spent over two hours per patient on a 100-question memory assessment—75% of which was dedicated to the questionnaire, leaving just 30 minutes for care and treatment discussions.
With EBO’s Conversational AI, the unit transformed this process into a patient-centric, interactive dialogue that patients can complete in advance—alone or with a loved one or carer. This shift has:
Improved patient experience, allowing them to complete assessments comfortably at home.
Increased accessibility, engaging traditionally less digitally enabled patients.
Doubled clinic capacity, saving an hour of clinical time per appointment.
Freed up more time for care, ensuring clinicians focus on meaningful discussions rather than paperwork.
The impact has been overwhelmingly positive—not a single negative review, with nearly two-thirds of patients preferring this approach over an in-person consultation.
Additionally, by fully digitising the process, LPFT has eliminated manual scanning and paperwork, integrating responses directly into the EPR. This has not only freed up administrative time but also reduced the Trust’s carbon footprint by moving away from paper-based processes.
Technology for the better
Moving forward, our focus must remain on augmenting existing capabilities, ensuring that digital solutions enhance rather than replace the human touch in healthcare. By prioritising quality, accessibility, and intelligent design, we can create a system that not only meets the demands of the digital age but also empowers patients and supports healthcare professionals in delivering the best possible care.
