The time that a clinician and you, the patient, have to talk during an office visit is decreasing. Symptom Helper is a Skill to help increase the efficiency of one aspect of that interaction – the recounting of your symptoms to your care provider. Until now, the clinician had to gather information from you during the office visit. With Alexa, many of those questions could be asked in your home prior to the visit, and a short, relevant symptom statement could be generated that could then be shared with your clinician via a custom Symptom Helper List on your Alexa App during your office visit.
Here is how you would use it: 1. After enabling Symptom Helper, you register in the database log with a first name, by saying “Register me.” 2. You can then enter symptoms into the skill, by saying “Let me log a symptom.” You will then be given the choice of answering approximately 12 questions at once or answering about half of them initially (Part 1). Should you choose to enter just the first 6 questions, you will be able to complete the rest when you are ready. With either choice you will get a concise symptom summary. Why so many questions? Well typically, there are some key questions that the clinician will want to know about the symptom, including onset, frequency of occurrence, things that improve it & things that worsen it, among others. 3. To answer the remaining questions for a partially entered symptom just say, “Tell me the symptoms I should complete.” Alexa will then give you a list of those symptoms from which you choose the symptom you wish to complete. 4. To retrieve a list of your symptoms formatted concisely from the symptom database, you can say, “Tell me my symptoms,” An extremely useful feature of Symptom Helper is the ability to create a custom Symptom Helper list on your Alexa App on your smartphone. To do that,
5. Simply say, “Create a Symptom Helper List for me.” You will be asked to give the name you used to register. (If you have not granted permissions to allow access to both read and write to lists, you will be guided to change them in your Alexa App before the custom list can be created.) Once it is created, you will be able to see it on the Alexa App with the name, Symptom Helper – (YOUR NAME). 6. If you have already created a Symptom Helper list on your Alexa App, you can add any of these spoken Symptoms to that list. Just say, “Let me add a symptom to my Alexa App.” 7. To change the status of a symptom from Active to Resolved or vice versa say, “Let me change the status of one of my symptoms.”
Undoubtedly, even after answering all the questions, your clinician will probably have a few more to ask, but by using Symptom Helper you can give that conversation a great start.
Here are a few more features of Symptom Helper: 8. To delete an individual symptom, just say, “Let me delete a symptom,” and you will be led through the process to delete the symptom from the log. 9. To start the process to delete a logged patient, you can say, “Let me delete a patient.” This will also delete any associated symptoms in the database as well as the patient. It will not delete any symptoms already on the patient’s Symptom Helper List on the Alexa App. 10. To get some coaching on how to describe your symptom in preparation for your doctor visit, you can say, “Coach me on describing my symptoms.” 11. Finally, you can say, “Help” to hear some tips on using Symptom Helper.
I hope you find Symptom Helper useful & I look forward to your feedback.
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