Healthcare workers put on a brave face every day to serve those suffering, often putting aside self-care. Work pressures can lead to mental health problems, which unfortunately exacerbate carers’ feelings of guilt in needing care themselves. Sometimes caregivers do not seek facilitate out of shame. This is a psychological entanglement that requires a modern kind of solution.
The Eastern Regional Health Authority (Eastern Health) is the largest integrated health authority in the Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador. Like all health care organizations, Eastern Health is grappling with a global pandemic that is not only impacting the physical health of infected victims, but also the emotional and mental health of their own employees, physicians and the families they rely on. To facilitate combat the psychological effects of the pandemic on healthcare workers, Collette Smith and her team at Eastern Health are using conversational artificial intelligence.
Smith serves as vice president of clinical services and human resources and chief nursing officer at Eastern Health. Her role is situated between clinical services and human resources, giving her a unique ability to recognize the needs of healthcare professionals and find modern solutions to their most pressing challenges. During the ongoing pandemic, which has left many people feeling anxious, fearful and isolated, demand for mental health services often exceeds supply. People seeking mental health services often don’t know exactly what they need. They need a guide to facilitate them find the right facilitate. However, with such human resources already strained by the pandemic, it may be hard for healthcare providers to expand pathways to services.
This is where conversational artificial intelligence comes in handy. In 2020, Eastern Health launched EVA (Employee Virtual Assistant), a tool that provides Eastern Health employees, physicians and their families with 24/7 access to mental health support and resources. Eva uses plain language to talk to people seeking facilitate to direct them to the right resources, whether it’s self-help, virtual services, or even immediate emergency care. As a bonus, EVA helps employees seek facilitate while maintaining social distancing.
“We have developed a new path and a very safe environment for people to interact with and navigate our system,” Smith says. “It was a godsend for our team because it allowed us to get immediate and safe support.”
EVA allows for what Smith calls “peer-to-peer support,” allowing employees who need facilitate to find other employees who can provide it. “This puts help at the fingertips of every person, every team member, every group and every person who is caring for their colleagues at any time,” Smith says. “Whether it’s in the middle of an event or we just want to check in and keep people healthy. It opened the way for people to help each other.”
EVA also helps address the hesitancy some people feel about disclosing their mental health issues. Some people feel more comfortable revealing their struggles with a non-human bot. Watson’s stalwart privacy controls ensure users’ confidentiality is protected at every step.
Users remain anonymous when interacting with EVA, something Smith implemented on purpose. Users are not tracked and the bot does not know who they are talking to. Instead, Eastern Health seeks to collect as much information as possible about user experiences through other means, such as by asking for voluntary feedback.
“The feedback we’re getting is absolutely amazing,” Smith says. “People feel safe. People feel that the mechanisms and areas they need to focus on really exist and are available to them. And also that the organization cares about them.”
Powered by Watson, EVA is more than just a chatbot. The virtual assistant can learn and then pass on its knowledge to Smith’s team.
“The more experience an EVA has, the more EVA learns, and the more EVA learns, the more we learn,” Smith says. “The paths that people are asking about are being gradually developed. We incorporated a lot of expertise into the results and advice we gave, but the more questions we asked, the more we realized what software we still needed.” Eastern Health can build the EVA body of knowledge by looking at these gaps and filling them.
Based on these findings, Smith’s team is now building software to handle all types of employee queries unrelated to mental health.
“I think it’s quite nice that people are coming to EVA now for things that aren’t even directly related to mental health, but also for other needs,” Smith says. “As an organization, we are also learning this because people see EVA as their favorite place.”
Smith already plans to expand EVA beyond Eastern Health to its partners across the province and beyond.
“The intelligence we have built here can be very easily transferred to any organization. Other organizations may simply build their funnels based on the software they already have. Our next step is to share, share, share the success we have had and then build on the other needs we see beyond psychological safety.”
It’s a broad vision, but it started with petite goals and gradually grew. Smith encourages organizations not to over-plan, but to take petite steps and build knowledge along the way.
“We learn every day as we go through this,” he says. “It doesn’t have to be perfect at launch. It will teach you as much as you get from programming. So just jump in and enjoy.”
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