Boston, MA - Orbita, a company that helps people create, manage and deploy conversational, voice-driven experiences for technology like Amazon Alexa and Google Home, has teamed up with the clinical trial data firm ERT to start to uncover ways in which voice technology can play a role in clinical trials. Both companies have powerful proprietary platforms and a track record of harnessing them to advance patient experiences, so the partnership has the potential to really impact the clinical trial experience. The goals of this partnership include improving how data is captured from trial participants, improving patient engagement, and enhancing the researchers' ability to organize, interpret, and act on the data.
From the press release: “Clinical trial investigators and coordinators use Orbita Voice’s intuitive tools to create interactive voice surveys and collect voice responses, and use built-in analytics to track user engagement and respond to user input. They can create and manage care plans by setting care goals, tasks, and rules over a specified timeline, including completion of daily pain assessment surveys, wellness tasks, or vitals measurements. Patients and family members can review and manage care tasks via voice as well as in mobile phone and web environments.
According to Harry Wang, senior director of research at Parks Associates, “Voice-based UI innovations have huge implications for the healthcare industry, particularly in areas where patient participation, interaction, and engagement is critical to the market success of digital health solutions and services. This collaboration between Orbita and ERT is a clear example of voice recognition technology’s potential in healthcare and we expect many more use cases that incorporate voice UI to emerge.”
Why this matters:
In our 2017 Digital Trends Report, we outlined how voice is powering a massive shift in how we engage content – from an era when we clicked to one when we tapped to one where we’ll primarily talk. The constant stream of new voice-driven applications hitting the market certainly seems to back this up. Healthcare, specifically pharma, will be wise to start to explore how voice, and the larger trend of “conversational” interactions (think messaging, chat, chatbots, etc.) can be leveraged to improve customer experiences—both patient and HCP. The first-movers that are able to right-size their solutions to the current realities (read limitations), set appropriate expectations, and position themselves to scale as the technology matures will be the ones that find the greatest success as conversational interfaces become more and more the norm in our digital lives.
