Beta Test a Success, Phased Roll-Out of Digital Chatbot for UCSF Patients with Inflammatory Bowel Disease
This past February, 53 patients at the UCSF Colitis and Crohn’s Disease Center were enrolled in a pilot group to test a digital chatbot developed to help monitor Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD) symptoms and identify patients with disease flares. IBD – Crohn's disease, ulcerative colitis, microscopic or collagenous colitis, and related illnesses – affects about 1.3%1 of adults in the United States.
The virtual care chat, developed in collaboration with the UCSF Center for Digital Health Innovation (CDHI), the Digital Patient Experience program, UCSF Colitis and Crohn’s Disease Center, and Conversa Health, also reminds patients with IBD to obtain labs at appropriate time intervals, encourages patients to get the health care maintenance they need when they need it, and improves patient satisfaction and encourages patients to become more involved with their own care.
In the 2021 UCSF Health Improvement Poster Symposium, Anobel Odisho, MD, MPH, Clinical Product Manager on the Digital Patient Experience and Assistant Professor of Urology, discussed the project reporting that 91% of the beta group found the chat “somewhat or very helpful.”
In his presentation, A Digital Health Chatbot to Monitor Patients with Inflammatory Bowel Disease, Dr. Odisho also shares the successes of the chatbot pilot, lessons learned, and the next steps of the project.
Some key highlights of his presentation:
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The IBD care chat will be rolled out in phases to more than 3,000 IBD patients (who have had a visit in the last year) at UCSF Health.
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The team* is working on trigger alerts when patients have new medications, and on identifying the appropriate symptom thresholds for clinical escalation in the in-basket (what score thresholds should be used: yellow flags, red flags).
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A multi-pronged campaign is important in the early phase of patient enrollment. Patients who didn’t know about the program in advance were less likely to open messages.
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Workflow integration is important – incorporating clinical partners, providers, staff to understand the practice and how the digital tool can be used to make their workflow more efficient.
Learn more about the digital chatbot for IBD patients and what’s next for this project.
*IBD Care Chat Balanced Product Team: Uma Mahadevan, MD, Olivia Bigazzi, Eli Medina, Jerry Young, Ali Maiorano, Sondra Renly, Andrew Liu, Chris Sorric, Chris Miller, Ed Wise, Aaron B, Neinstein, MD, Anobel Y. Odisho, MD, MPH.
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