Indonesia’s Halodoc Harnesses AI To Push Telehealth Forward

An Indonesian company is helping to push telemedicine forward by using artificial intelligence (AI) to give doctors feedback on how to improve patient care, according to Google’s The Keyword.

Jakarta-based Halodoc says that its telehealth platform uses AI to provide doctors with the feedback and mentoring that they would receive from fellow doctors in an in-person setting like a hospital. Halodoc has been developing the product with machine learning experts from Google’s Late-Stage Accelerator using natural language processing in Bahasa Indonesia. The machine learning models are trained using information from thousands of doctor consultations, according to the Google report.

Halodoc’s app allows doctors to receive feedback on how well and quickly they perform services, along with advice on how to improve their patient consultations and an option to receive additional coaching from fellow physicians, according to the company.

Halodoc said that around 5 percent of Indonesians are using its platform. Performance ratings for both the app and participating physicians have steadily improved over the past six months, with app ratings rising to 4.8 stars and doctors’ scores climbing 64 percent.

Telemedicine is being increasingly adopted both in the U.S. and abroad as an effective way to deliver and manage healthcare services amid the disruptions cause by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

A study this summer by NYU Lagone, for example, found that virtual visits jumped 4,345 percent for non-urgent care and 683 percent for urgent care between March 2 and April 14 this year.

The boom in U.S. telemedicine has also been fueled by a recent easing of payment restrictions that allow for full reimbursement of telehealth visits by Medicare, Medicaid and many private insurers.

Patient willingness to try telemedicine has also helped to boost uptake.

Murray Brozinsky, CEO of virtual care platform Conversa Health, told PYMNTS this summer that healthcare clients report adoption rates of online visits have zoomed from the low single digits to above 60 percent during the pandemic “This was building, but we weren’t at a tipping point,” Brozinsky said. “What telehealth likely required was catalyst, [and] COVID-19 has now been that catalyst that pushed it … right over the edge.”