Contributed by Lucas Merrow, Eliza Corporation

Dinner is on the table and the kids are telling you about their day. Just as you reach for the salad the phone rings. It’s your health plan calling – again.  
As more healthcare organizations use phone-based, speech-enabled programs to reach out to their members and patients, they must also realize that each call is asking someone to take time away from their busy lives.
That’s why it’s so important when developing this kind of outreach to ensure that this powerful communication tool – the phone – doesn’t inadvertently become a weapon and jeopardize the very relationships that organizations are trying to build.  
Virtually unlimited bandwidth:
weapon or tool?
Speech recognition technology makes it possible to cost-effectively interact with patients and members about a wide variety of health and benefit related topics, essentially filling in where other resources – such as nurses and customer support staff – simply don’t have the time or capacity.  
Of course, reaching hundreds of thousands of people with the wrong information, placing the call at a time that is inconvenient for them or delivering information in a manner that is perceived as a waste of their time will create more harm than good.
Successful outreach draws on past approaches that have been proven “in the wild” and tested for your specific population. How are people reacting to the program?
Are they taking the call to action? How is the program affecting your other resources, such as call center volume? Even when time is of the essence, it pays to closely monitor the program – and swiftly adjust it as needed—to ensure the outreach supports both short-term goals and long-term relationship-building strategies.   
A computer talking to people:
weapon or tool?
While this approach can indeed streamline member outreach, the technology driving the program had better deliver a worthwhile experience. Otherwise, members are unlikely to accept any future calls.  
The speech recognition engine must be specifically tuned to a healthcare population (including seniors who may give more open-ended verbal responses), and all the challenges that calling into a person’s household that presents (what if the person picking up the phone doesn’t speak English or is hard of hearing?).
Otherwise, people on the receiving end feel misunderstood and frustrated, and are eager to break off the relationship.
The right platform should also be able to adjust on-the-fly to a person’s spoken responses, pointing them to the appropriate resources based on what the system “learns” during the call – just as a live nurse or customer support specialist would.
Total freedom of message development: weapon or tool?  
Automated dialogs become part of your company’s brand. For that reason, it’s important to leverage all available information – including historical behavior, demographics, and more – to make the call as relevant as possible for a member. And keep in mind that talking about potentially sensitive health issues over the phone is a far cry from booking a flight with an airline. The goal is to create an interaction that delivers the greatest impact for a specific individual, with all his idiosyncrasies.
In addition to being relevant, actionable, and credible, the content of the call must make sense for the medium in which it is delivered – in this case, the phone. A flexible platform that approximates a natural conversation, offers give and take, and makes the person on the receiving end feel understood and supported goes a long way towards winning loyalty.
Access to member information:
weapon or tool?   
Call a household three times in a single day with information for three different people and you’ve just given that entire household a reason to hang up when you call again next week.
So, if you’re going to run multiple programs, make sure there are behind-the-scenes systems in place that will coordinate calls across multiple programs.
Use what you learn from previous outreach – including when a certain population is most receptive to interacting with your system over the phone – to best plan and deploy future programs. You owe it to the people you’re calling to leverage all the technologies and data analysis tools available to create engaging, respectful conversations.
When developed and deployed well, speech recognition is a valuable component of a healthcare organization’s overall communication strategy – and one that offers virtually unlimited potential as the technology and the market for it mature.
In the words of Arthur C. Clark, futurist and science fiction writer, “Any sufficiently developed technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Therein lies the goal of any speech-enabled, phone-based program.