Spectrum Health is a not-for-profit health care provider based in Grand Rapids, Michigan, consisting of 12 hospitals and over 140 service sites throughout the state.

Among its offerings are urgent care and ER services, MedNow, for virtual doctor appointments, and eVisit, an online questionnaire in which a health care provider provides a diagnosis and treatment plan.

Many patients are not aware of these services and will instead head directly to the emergency room. These visits are usually unnecessary, can be overly expensive for both patient and provider, and could lead to longer wait times for all.

To combat this, our Patient Training Tool is a chatbot app that recommends the appropriate Spectrum service based on the symptoms the patient is experiencing.

After a patient speaks to the Google Home device, describing their symptoms, our Patient Training Tool searches through a database and identifies the condition that best matches those symptoms. It relays the matching condition to the patient in easy-to-understand terms and recommends the appropriate service.

The recommended service for a condition may change based on patient choices. Once recommended a service, the patient accepts or rejects the recommendation, informing the Google Home device of the service that will be utilized. If an alternative service is repeatedly chosen for a condition, the Patient Training Tool changes its recommendation to match for all future users.

Our Patient Training Tool, compatible with both Google Home and Amazon Alexa, is written in JavaScript using the Node.js framework to query an Azure SQL database. Dialogflow is utilized for natural language processing.