A general hospital answers the same questions all day. "What time can I visit?" "Do you take my insurance?" "How do I book with the urologist?" "Where do I park?" Those calls bury the front desk, pulling staff away from patients who actually need help, or routing inquiries to voicemail when the lines are full.
SMGH had grown beyond what a phone-and-counter operation could handle. They needed a way for patients, visitors, and job-seekers to find answers on their own, but the answers had to be accurate, current, and reflect their actual policies, not a generic FAQ that goes stale within a month.
We built a new website covering the hospital's six core departments, Urology, Oncology, Neurology, Midwifery, Obstetrics & Gynecology, and Pulmonology, alongside everything patients and visitors need: admission, billing, patient rights, complaints, careers, and a prominent emergency contact section.
On top of that we embedded an AI chatbot trained on the hospital's actual content. It pulls answers from the same CMS that powers the website, so when SMGH updates their visiting hours or admission policy, the chatbot answers with the new information immediately. No retraining cycle, no stale answers.
The chatbot is designed to know its limits. Clinical questions get redirected to actual medical staff. Logistical questions, visiting hours, parking, paperwork, department info, appointment routing, get answered in under five seconds, day or night.
The website and chatbot launched together and immediately took the edge off the front desk's phone volume. Patients can now find department information, book appointments, and ask routine questions at 2am, when no one was answering before.
The bigger shift was for the hospital staff. Instead of being a switchboard, the front desk gets to focus on the patients in front of them. The chatbot handles the long tail of repetitive questions; humans handle the ones that need empathy.
Next phase: layering appointment booking directly into the chatbot, so a patient can go from "how do I see a urologist?" to "you're booked for next Tuesday" without leaving the conversation.