Pohde sim­pli­fies den­tal appoint­ment changes with an AI assis­tant

North­ern Ostro­both­nia Well­be­ing Ser­vices Coun­ty (Pohde) has intro­duced an AI-pow­ered phone assis­tant that allows patients to can­cel or resched­ule den­tal appoint­ments with­out wait­ing in a tele­phone queue. This makes Pohde the first ser­vices coun­ty in Fin­land to imple­ment such a ser­vice for patient sup­port.

Speak­ing with the AI assis­tant is very sim­i­lar to hav­ing a con­ver­sa­tion with a human ser­vice rep­re­sen­ta­tive. The ser­vice does not require any tech­ni­cal skills or spe­cial knowl­edge. The AI assis­tant under­stands nat­ur­al speech and can han­dle com­mon appoint­ment-relat­ed requests. If it is unable to help, the call is auto­mat­i­cal­ly trans­ferred to a Pohde pro­fes­sion­al for fur­ther assis­tance.

The use of the AI assis­tant is designed with pri­va­cy and secu­ri­ty in mind. Con­ver­sa­tions remain con­fi­den­tial, and their con­tent is not used to train arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence mod­els.

The ser­vice is being imple­ment­ed as part of the Uusi­Ai­ka project, fund­ed by the Finnish Inno­va­tion Fund Sitra. The main goal is to make pub­lic ser­vices more effi­cient, improve patient expe­ri­ence, and free up health­care pro­fes­sion­als’ time for tasks that require human exper­tise.

By intro­duc­ing an AI-sup­port­ed assis­tant ser­vice, Pohde is tak­ing an impor­tant step toward mod­ern­iz­ing health­care access and improv­ing the effi­cien­cy of appoint­ment man­age­ment.

Read more in Finnish here.

Source: Pohde