Longitudinal Remote Follow-Up by Intelligent Conversational Agents for Post-Hospitalization Care

After a hospitalization, approximately 1 out of 5 patients will suffer from an adverse event, and one-third of these complications are preventable. Having a pharmacist followup with patients a few days after leaving the hospital has been shown to significantly reduce re-hospitalizations and adverse drug events. In this work, we describe our design for an Embodied Conversational Agent system for longitudinal, post-hospitalization follow-up. We discuss how best-practice follow-up interactions between patients and clinical pharmacists inform the design of our system, focusing on the strategies used by the pharmacist to detect and resolve issues that have occurred post-hospitalization.