66 - COVIDCast #17 - Elana Meer and Maguire Herriman - Developing a COVID Chatbot With Google

This episode is a continuation of our COVIDCast series. In it, Jonathan Wakim and I speak with Maguire Herriman and Elana Meer about a COVID Chatbot project they worked on at Penn along with Google to better address questions posed by those who visit the Penn Medicine website to learn about the coronavirus and current policies. To give you some more perspective on the project, I’ll read off from an article highlighting the work. A Penn team led by Roy Rosin, MBA, and Kevin Volpp, MD, PhD, and a team from Google have created an AI chatbot to help answer common questions related to COVID-19. This chatbot helps offload call volume from Penn Medicine’s phone lines to unburden our clinicians and shorten wait times for patients, while also making it faster and easier to find answers whether you’re a nurse managing the hotline or an anxious patient seeking accurate information. Soon, this chatbot will expand to assess symptoms and triage patients to make sure they are routed to the most appropriate clinical intake level. An open-source version of the chatbot will be made available to other health systems through Google for free. In the episode, we discuss both of their backgrounds, what drew them to medicine and the MD/MBA degree, and how they’ve been able to help as project managers for the Chatbot project to improve its functionality. Show Notes Maguire's LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/maguire-herriman-97463287 Elana's LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/elana-meer-b7532399 Chatbot Link https://www.pennmedicine.org/coronavirus/frequently-asked-questions-about-covid-19 Article About the Chatbot https://chibe.upenn.edu/chibeblog/covid-19-how-chibe-is-making-a-difference/