In this episode, Teri welcomes Dr. Sandhya Pruthi, the associate medical director for content management and delivery for global business solutions at Mayo Clinic, and the chief medical editor for MayoClinic.org

Dr. Pruthi is also a clinician and attends to patients. The Mayo Clinic is a leader in health-oriented voice technology. They have been a trusted provider of accurate health information for over 150 years. They provide the information in print, digital and mobile. They are now pursuing opportunities in the voice space. They have multiple skills and an especially unique relationship to provide first-party content to Amazon.

Key Points from Dr. Pruthi!

• Why the Mayo Clinic feels that voice technology is an important area to get into.
• The specific things that Dr. Pruthi does at the Mayo Clinic and in the voice space.

The Mayo Clinic and Voice

• They have been watching the trends in the use of “search in voice”
• It’s predicted that in the next 5 to 10 years, more than 50% of people will search for healthcare information using voice activated devices like smartphones and voice assistants.
• They did early work in the voice space by developing a Mayo Clinic First Aid skill.

The Mayo Clinic First Aid Skill

• The skill gives people access to Mayo Clinic content that spans 50 different first aid topics like fever, burns, chest pains, and others.
• They wanted to make sure that they gave trusted information that would help users with not only self-treatment, but also when to seek urgent or emergent care.
• The skill enabled them to understand how they needed to condense the content that is available today on the web, and create it in a way that it was conversational.

Providing Medical Content for Alexa

• Their work on the Mayo Clinic First Aid skill led them into working with Amazon to so far provide 8,000 concepts around health conditions that will help users get information from the first-party use rather than just a third-party use.
• Being able to deliver high quality healthcare information made it a good option to partner with Amazon in their venture into the voice space. They are also looking at partnering with other platforms.

Converting their Written Content into a Voice Format

• They have a great editorial team that worked on taking their written content and creating conversational information that would ensure single responses to questions.
• It took them a great deal of time.

Mayo Clinic’s Future Plans in Voice

• They have 3 pillars and one is that they have been providing voice content around the needs of the healthcare consumer.
• The second one is looking into how voice can help them in improving the healthcare provider-patient efficiency in healthcare facilities.
• The third one is looking into voice as a diagnostic tool or bio-marker to detect certain diseases

Vocal Bio-markers

• The cardiovascular team at the Mayo Clinic worked on how they could detect changes in the voice signal and intensity among patients who were having a coronary angiogram. They were able to detect correlations between the voice signal changes and how that could correlate with a higher risk of having a heart attack or coronary event. They see that as a gateway towards developing a tool that could be used to take care of patients at a distant or remotely.

Where we are going with Voice Technology over the next 5 to 10 years

• Going into the personalized approach to healthcare and voice would be exciting.
• Voice could help people search for the healthcare they need.
• Voice could help people track changes in their blood pressure or heart rate, and predict whether an intervention is necessary.

Links and Resources in this Episode

• Mayo Clinic
• Mayo Clinic First Aid Skill
• Dr. Teri Fisher on Twitter
• Dr. Teri Fisher on LinkedIn
• Please leave a review on iTunes

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