ANS helps Facial Palsy UK improve patient service with Copilot
Facial Palsy UK [FPUK] is a very young charity (set up in 2012). It is the first and primary charity to offer specific support to people affected by facial palsy due to any cause.
Facial palsy, sometimes known as facial paralysis, is a condition resulting in temporary or permanent damage or absence or impairment of the facial nerve that supplies the muscles of facial function and expression and affects blinking, closing the eye for sleep, eating and drinking, speech, smiling and frowning. Facial palsy can be the result of more than 60 different causes: disease, viral infection, injury, stroke, birth trauma, cancer, or neurological condition, to name but a few.
Whatever the cause, the physical, emotional and psychological consequences of living with facial palsy are usually the same, although to varying degrees, and they can be equally devastating for the people affected and their families.
The Challenge:
The charity’s website was built for patients and healthcare professionals, helping people find information on causes and symptoms, self-help videos and advice.
However, the challenge with such a huge repository of information – 947 pages – is for users to find the information they need. As many of the site’s users’ first visit is when they are in real distress and struggling to see properly, rapidly serving relevant, high-quality information is particularly important.
With over 345,000 active users per year, both patients and medical professionals, the usual website search function wouldn’t cut it in their time of need. For example, a simple search for symptoms like ‘my eye is sore’ brings a page of results to sift through using a standard web search function. The charity needed something that would return relevant, helpful advice for the specific condition.
The Solution:
FPUK approached ANS to provide a solution that would instantly provide relevant, accurate and tailored information to thousands of active users. As a Microsoft Solutions Partner for Data and AI, ANS has the knowledge, experience, and access to the latest Microsoft best practices, so it was perfectly placed to help as part of its CSR pro bono programme.
A chatbot was immediately dismissed as a solution as the technology would only be capable of a simple rules-based approach. An intelligent solution was needed to understand the context of the query, the user’s state of need and that could search, sift and surface the right information instantly from the vast resource library. ANS knew from previous work that if the user didn’t get the information they were looking for within three attempts, they would leave.
Up stepped Microsoft Copilot Service, Microsoft’s most advanced AI solution.
The team at ANS, led by Director of Innovation Chris Huntingford and UK FPUK Patient Ambassador Janet Robb, integrated Copilot into the charity’s website within days. With Copilot embedded into the site, patients are helped much faster and with less frustration. Medical professionals find the correct academic and peer-reviewed materials for accurate diagnosis.
The Benefits:
Users are seeing an immediate benefit with Copilot. They get accurate and relevant real time responses to queries, especially helpful in a distressed state. They can better navigate the website and explore all the resources available to them.
For the charity, Copilot is having a huge impact on their operations. The small staff of four no longer have to spend time answering queries that can be easily solved with information on the site, freeing them up for more critical and sensitive tasks.
Copilot also provides the charity’s team with insights into the biggest needs and concerns of patients, informing their content and advice strategy. Financially, the improvement in efficiency is already having a positive impact on FPUK’s ‘admin to pound’ ratio, freeing up more resources to be spent on helping people.
Overall, the Copilot implementation by the ANS AI team is helping FPUK better serve patients and medical practitioners by serving the right information, instantly.
Karen Johnson, co-CEO at Facial Palsy UK comments: “There is very little information about facial palsy available via the NHS so our website is a lifeline to those affected. For many with facial palsy they are struggling to see and it’s painful to spend too long looking at a screen. It’s vital that they find information quickly.
Just the useful web search function that brings up a wall of resources adds to their stress. With Copilot, they get the right information instantly and in a format they can easily digest.”
Karen adds: “The speed and clarity of response is crucial. Due to there being so many different causes of facial palsy, over a quarter (27.4%) of patients are initially misdiagnosed. Many treatments are time-critical, and our support communications with patients often involve us insisting that patients go back to their GPs if we think they have been misdiagnosed.
Getting people to the right pages on our website quickly means patients can find information instantly 24 hours a day without having to wait for a response from our support team. Copilot will play an important role in education for patients and health professionals, which could reduce the numbers left with lifelong disability and save lives.”
You may also be interested in..
Customer Story
Mencap improves data accuracy with Microsoft Dynamics 365
Insight
St John Ambulance partners with ANS to optimise its Azure Cloud
Insight