An overwhelming majority of surgical patients at North Bay’s hospital say they like a new AI tool that answers their medical questions 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The North Bay Regional Health Centre is now offering patients access to Seamless Answers, a clinician-approved AI assistant as part of its surgical care. Seamless Answers is part of the SeamlessMD platform and includes information contributed by hospital staff. Autumn Tignanelli, a nurse at the North Bay hospital, said the feature is extremely popular with patients. “I hear on a daily basis how much more comfortable people are that they didn’t go to emerge because they felt they had somebody to talk to and reassure them on how their recovery was going,” Tignanelli said. Amanda Gauthier, patient monitoring lead for SeamlessMD, said the AI platform has been customized by hospital staff. “We use many health-care provider voices,” Gauthier said. “We have input from the surgeons, physiotherapists, nutritionists. So we developed all of the information.” Seamless Answers pulls its answers exclusively from the hospital’s patient education library already built within SeamlessMD. Every answer cites its health care source and links back to the original page so patients can read the full instructions. When a question falls outside the approved content, patients are directed to contact their care team. The feature is offered in multiple languages and includes guardrails fine-tuned for clinical environments, ensuring patients receive appropriate answers. Patients can enroll three weeks before their surgeries take place in 10 areas, including orthopedics, urology, general surgery, women’s surgeries and pediatrics. “We have a 92 per cent satisfaction rate with the patients that are using it,” Gauthier said. Personal information is protected A total of “502 questions (were) answered in the last six months since the launch.” Patients who have questions about their recovery outside of business hours usually turn to AI tools like ChatGPT or Google. But cyber tech analyst Ritesh Kotak said these types of AI software can make errors or use the data for their own purposes. “Imagine you’re searching for some very personalized information -- medical-related information,” Kotak said. “All of a sudden, this big tech company knows about it and what they do with that data, whether they sell it or they repurpose.” The health centre said Seamless Answers was built to close the loophole. “There is no external information. So, it’s really providing a safe and guided answer for the patient’s question,” Tignanelli said. The hospital said that since going live, 48 per cent of patient questions have been asked outside overnight or on weekends.
