AI can help redefine user experience in health and public safety

When every moment counts and ease and usability are critical, intentional user experience design can make a significant impact.

Hillel Cooperman, Stephanie Trunzo | August 15, 2024


Whether you’re delighted by the recommendations your favorite shopping app makes or the ease of a touchless key hotel check-in, the digital experiences we as consumers have come to expect are constantly being improved. Not so much at work, however, where the UX (user experience) of enterprise applications and other systems may not be prioritized and can be outdated, cumbersome, and unintuitive.

“Enterprise scenarios are often complex, but that doesn’t mean user experience should be an add-on or afterthought,” says Mike Sicilia, the executive vice president who oversees Oracle’s industry applications. “Enterprises that invest in the future of UX are putting their customers—the people who use these products every day and the goals they’re trying to accomplish—at the heart of every decision.”

UX isn’t just about an application’s user interface. It encompasses a user's overall digital experience, whether it’s with a system, service, website, or application, across mobile, voice, and other channels. UX goes much deeper than color schemes and fonts. A great user experience requires rethinking not just the way something looks, but also how it works and flows.

For better or worse, UX influences our actions and feelings toward our daily work and the technology we use to help us succeed. Users want enterprise software that doesn't get in the way of their jobs or reduce their productivity, and they expect these technologies to perform at the same level—to provide the same consumer-friendly features and functionality—as apps on their personal devices. Although intended to make things easier, all too often technology makes our lives, and our jobs, more complex. That’s where the powerful combination of UX and artificial intelligence comes into play.

Using AI modeling in UX

By using data, automation, and machine learning algorithms to automate repetitive tasks and predict user behavior, AI can be implemented to help accelerate workflows, enhance efficiency and productivity, and provide valuable insights to improve decision-making.

Using AI in UX design is becoming increasingly common. It has the potential to be implemented to help enhance user engagement, personalize user experiences, and streamline processes. Designers can implement AI modeling to help analyze interactions in real time and provide relevant information to the user.

For example, by tapping large language models (LLMs), a type of AI program trained on large amounts of text data, you can implement the LLMs to help predict the next word or sequence of words based on the context provided. Search engines regularly supply users with text suggestions which can help reduce their search time and can result in increasing their satisfaction.

UX and AI: Helping address healthcare’s burnout problem

Within some settings, such as healthcare and public safety, application ease of use is particularly critical, and the use of AI can help. For example, cumbersome UX within electronic health records (EHRs) can be a major contributor to clinician burnout. Click-heavy screens, arduous data-entry requirements, and multiple buttons consume time, shifting much of a clinician’s time and focus to the monitor and away from the patient.

Enterprise scenarios are often complex, but that doesn’t mean user experience should be an add-on or afterthought. Enterprises that invest in the future of UX are putting their customers, the people who use these products every day—and the goals they’re trying to accomplish—at the heart of every decision.”

Mike Sicilia Executive Vice President, Oracle Global Industries

EHRs whose UXs integrate AI capabilities can implement this AI to help simplify and enhance clinical workflows. For example, during their walk to the exam room doctors can acquaint themselves with a patient’s medical history and the reason for the patient’s appointment by using AI-based natural language voice technologies. During the exam, an AI-guided screen can be implemented to help automatically present relevant information and suggest actions that need to be taken, doctors can save precious time, and each patient’s experience can improve with more face time. Other benefits of implementing AI within healthcare UX can include helping to improve the following:

  • Streamlined web chat interactions to guide and assist in patient interactions, such as appointment management, patient onboarding, and insurance claims, which can help reduce burden on administrative staff.
  • Enhanced speech recognition accuracy and quality to achieve voice-to-text conversion, determine the speaker’s intent, and interpret a user’s voice commands during a patient visit.
  • Improved clinical documentation accuracy, including patient visit transcripts and summaries entered directly into the EHR to match patients with clinical trials and inform downstream research.
  • Automated routine tasks to help reduce clinicians’ time spent completing documentation and other paperwork and help reduce administrative mistakes and medical errors caused by clinician fatigue.

UX and AI: Speeding crisis resolution in public safety

Likewise, when lives hang in the balance, police, firefighters, EMTs, and other first responders require—and deserve—intuitive applications and interfaces optimized for the fast-paced, high-stress environment in which they operate. Understanding first responder pain points and designing clean, glanceable UX that emphasizes visual hierarchy is critical, as protecting and saving lives hinges on timely access to information. Unfortunately, archaic, siloed systems coupled with widespread public safety staffing shortages, can sometimes jeopardize timely response efforts.

When every second matters, highlighting critical data points within the UX—even a few seconds earlier—has the potential to help save lives, and AI can assist in such essential work. Faster computing can help first responders operate more efficiently, alleviate their stress, and ultimately resolve crises faster, which canmake communities safer.

Other ways that AI and intelligent systems within public safety UX can be implemented to help improve emergency responses include the following:

  • Streamlining inter- and intra-agency emergency response communication and coordination by embedding AI in systems to deepen data analysis and exchange to improve situational awareness required in crisis management.
  • Accelerating first responder dispatch by auto-populating 911 call information, identifying and merging duplicate calls, providing “next word” text suggestions, and verifying the incident location.
  • Making emergency response more intelligent by using tools that provide critical information about the locations and subjects to help dispatchers assign the personnel and units best equipped to handle the situation—rather than just the closest officer or firefighter.

Platforms designed specifically for public safety can help to remove data silos, reduce manual busy work, and empower first responders with real-time information and situational awareness that help them make more objective decisions when every second counts. Of course, AI solutions must maintain the human element to ensure decision-making is fully vetted and understood by the power who need and use it most.

In all areas of life—consumer and business alike—legacy systems will be replaced with solutions that offer personalized and predictive insights and actions. We need intelligent shortcuts to accomplish complex tasks more quickly, efficiently, and expertly.

Oracle continues to introduce new ways for customers to leverage and implement AI within its cloud applications to help increase productivity, reduce costs, expand insights, which can help improve the employee and customer experience. Learn more about Oracle AI.

Hillel Cooperman, Senior Vice President, User Experience Design, Oracle

Stephanie Trunzo, Senior Vice President, Oracle Industries


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