How a Leading Pet Care Provider Saved 1/3rd of Veterinarians’ Time with Conversational AI

The Hero – A Leading Petcare Services Company

Our client is a global leading petcare service provider headquartered in North America operating over 1000 veterinary hospitals and diagnostic centers in US and Canada. They are committed to providing advanced pet care services for the world at large.

• Industry – Petcare/ Veterinary Sciences
• Employee Strength – 20,000+
• Solutions implemented – Smart Voice Transcription for Electronic Medical Records (EMR)

The Quest – Optimizing Time for Veterinarians

A typical day for a veterinarian starts with early-day surgery procedures if any, to allow the pet for post-op recovery procedures throughout the day. The next activity of the day is to examine outpatient pets and emergency walk-ins.

A critical step to be performed during all these activities is to capture key details of the patient and store them digitally which is commonly referred to as Electronic Medical Records (EMR). An EMR has multiple fields which include but are not limited to pet species, breed, age, weight, immunization and vaccination history, past and current diagnoses, allergies and immunogens, etc.

Filling up the details in EMR is a laborious task but every doctor/clinician has to do it religiously. In our client’s case, each veterinarian took almost 20 minutes to complete filling in the details in the PMS per examination. The aggregate time spent on filling EMR details mounted up to consuming at least 50% of veterinarians’ time in a day.

The challenge for the client was bifold.

• The doctors did not keenly enjoy the data entry task, leading to a lack of motivation to adhere to this compliance
• The time invested to update EMR had an impact on actual pet care both in terms of time spent per pet and the number of pets attended to

The Solution – Smart Voice Transcription for EMR

When the client approached purpleSlate with their challenges, we understood that automating EMR entry in the PMS is the way forward. How to automate data entry into the PMS? Unlike human healthcare, in veterinary care, the pets need to be in constant hold of the veterinarian throughout the examination. So any tool which requires them to use a hand when they were examining the pet, was out of the equation. This is where a Voice solution came in as a blessing.

We at purpleSlate designed a solution where doctors can just talk to the system. The key intent and medical terminologies from their speech will be automatically extracted and will be parsed into the relevant fields in the PMS.

But there was a catch. The system needed to understand complex medical terminologies and more importantly parse the information to the right fields. We achieved a 90%+ accuracy level on voice recognition, and Natural Language Understanding (NLU) of the medical terminologies and language along with their appropriate hierarchy were achieved with rigorous training of the ML models on entity recognition and intent identification. We also trained the models on an extensive corpus of user utterances, including complex medical vocabulary, combined with retraining workflows for the continuous maturity of the ML models. This helped us manage the challenges around accuracy.

Benefits for the Client

• 1/3^rd of time saved for veterinarians because of automating data entry into practice management system using smart voice transcription
• Identifying user’s intent and converting the speech to text with 90%+ accuracy
• The time saved for doctors directly translated into productivity gains as they were able to examine more pets on a daily basis
• Doctors were able to provide better care for their patients as the focus was on examination and petcare as opposed to spending time on computers
• Assistants helping senior practitioners for EMR data entry were able to shift their focus to more value-added tasks
• Revenue gains because of the increase in the number of pets examined in a day along with the improvement in the quality of pet care