Pharmacy phone lines are a terrible first use case for voice AI. Older callers, drug names, insurance mess, zero patience. Automating "store hours" is fine. Automating refill exceptions is how you get this outcome.

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zukzuk 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

We build text-based (e.g. SMS rather than voice) agents for various medical conversations (e.g. preparing people for complex appointments).

Our user base skews elderly. Going in, I was really skeptical about how much engagement and value we could provide to these older patients. I'm blown away how well it all turned out and how valuable it's been for our patients and client clinics.

For example, we were able to reduce no-shows for some high-cost appointments by 80%. Turns out that the reasons why people don't show up are a complicated and diffuse — everything form anxiety, to not speaking english, to being confused about how to get into the building — and properly configured LLM-based systems are really, really good at dealing with exactly this sort of problem.

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AndrewKemendo 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Explain to me then why pharmacies have almost exclusively used IVR based phone systems for pharmacy refills and prescription management for the last decade?

Like they don’t even say the full name of the prescription they just tell you the first three letters and they’ll say “for the patient born on…”

Current pharmacy IT systems are currently almost 100% automated so how are you claiming it’s the first use?

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superb_dev 2 days ago | parent [-]

Do you actually use these systems? They can’t at all handle my case where half the time the drug is on back order or there some insurance non sense in the way. I need to talk to a human every time

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AndrewKemendo 2 days ago | parent [-]

Correct they fail in any out of boundary condition which is like 50% of cases in my experience

Even worse is that the human is usually just as worthless because the problem is often upstream at the insurance provider or regulation

This is something I’m finding with people complaining about AI systems the AI system in this case is not any worse than the previous IVR system was it just expanded the use cases and now people say oh it doesn’t work for those expanded use cases

There’s no mention whatsoever of the current absolute devastatingly bad state of all software across the world

It’s like people are mad when there’s an application that already sucks, someone attempts to use genAI, that fails and then they blame AI

The whole thing is absurd

	▲	superb_dev 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		I think the problem is that these AI systems usually think they can solve 100% of the cases and make it harder to get to the human operator

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barbazoo 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I just don't get why we're not doing it vertically like you said here. Implement a part of the cognitive work using AI but let the hard parts be done by a person. They're still gonna be more rich, just less so.

	▲	DANmode 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		You figured it out, there, at the end!