Lucy is an AI enabled patient communication solution enabling patients to request assistance without the need to press a button. Simply by speaking their request, nurses are

alerted to their need, with AI prioritising and smart-routing requests to the right resource to meet the patient’s needs.

Lucy provides immediate response to patients, confirming they have been heard and that a nurse is on their way. Patients also have the ability to access FAQs, without a nurse required.

Nurses can spend around a quarter of their time completing tasks that are not critical patient care activities. Lucy changes nursing working processes by using AI to eliminate unnecessary activities.

Lucy is now live in the Prince of Wales Spinal Unit for the first 28 patients.

In a world first, patients are using the system to request help from nurses – without having to press a button. Instead using only their voice.

How it works:

Patients speak their request for assistance Lucy.

AI interprets the request – enabling patients to operate rooms with connected smart devices, book appointments and request assistance.

Where possible, Lucy answers the question immediately from a FAQ database.

Patients receive immediate confirmation that their request has been received.

Requests are assigned priority and smart-routed to nurses or support teams.

Alert messages are sent to directly to right team members' mobile device, requesting them to respond to the patient.

Tasks can be moved between teams and assigned by dragging and dropping on their mobile device.

Data capture predicts trends in patient needs and workforce management.

Lucy has already met its primary goals, in improving the brand experience of the Prince of Wales Hospital for 100% of patients surveyed.

The median response time to a patient request in modern hospitals is 10.4 minutes (The Journal of the American Medical Association). Within the 28 bed initial roll-out of Lucy, the median time is 2 mins and 9 secs. This is a 79.8% improvement versus that benchmark.

Importantly, we are witnessing Lucy in the early stages of enhancing patient experience and improved patient satisfaction by providing a patient-centred communication and immediate feedback to the patient and Increased nursing time to care, by reducing the time required for care coordination

As we continue to roll-out Lucy to more beds, we hope to see the system lead to improved overall management of clinical teams through enhanced data sets and dashboard that support decision making associated with skills development and rostering.

The Prince of Wales Hospital believes in innovating the hospital experience to provide it’s patients with the highest standard of clinical care.

So in a world first, we created a voice activated bedside assistance to improve patients’ experience of the hospital and prove its brand purpose.

Lucy replaces the existing call system by allowing patient’s to request assistance simply by talking to a smart speaker, the Lucy platform then prioritises the request, and directly allocate it to the nurses’ mobile device.

Lucy is a project that has been over a year in the making;

March ’17: Idea conceived

May/June ’17: Early prototype developed

July-Sept ’17: Hospital co-design, MVP development and testing in simulation hospital

Oct/Nov ’17: Performance tuning to improve recognition

March ’18: Pilot preparation activities

April ’18: Installation at hospital

Even in modern hospitals, the primary communication system between patient and nurse is a button for the patient and a bell for the nurse, that can mean anything. It cannot distinguish between a patient’s needs which can vary from a glass of water, to situations of life and death.

This leads to staffing inefficiency, extra stress on carers at capacity and loss of life in extreme instances.

The Prince of Wales Hospital has the leading spinal unit in Australia. It has over 50 beds dedicated to treating patients with conditions including paraplegia and quadriplegia. For these patients the simple act of hitting a button is beyond their physical ability.

Our challenge was to bring the alert system into the 21st century, to improve the brand experience of the Prince of Wales hospital, give spinal patients the ability to request help and decrease the time it takes nurses to respond.