Lee Gyu-lee is a business writer at The Korea Times, focusing primarily on IT & telecommunications, the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy and KOTRA. Prior to this, she has covered a wide range of cultural news, from film, television and K-pop to lifestyle and fashion.
LG Uplus launches AI Contact Center for smart hospital
Barunsesang Hospital in Seongnam, Gyeonggi Province / Courtesy of LG Uplus
By Lee Gyu-lee
LG Uplus has officially launched an artificial intelligence (AI) medical consultation concierge service, the AI Contact Center (AICC), taking a step closer to creating a smart hospital.
The company said Tuesday that it has implemented the service at Barunsesang Hospital, a clinic specializing in joints and the spine, in Seongnam, Gyeonggi Province.
The service allows an AI bot to respond to patient inquiries in real time. It automatically handles simple repetitive consultations such as confirming, changing and canceling appointments, providing directions and issuing certification documents.
This will allow the staff to focus their expertise on complex consultations. The service also handles automatic responses after business hours.
"Through the hospital-specialized AICC that leads the market and technology, we can implement a digital contact center that satisfies stability, security, cost reduction, operational convenience and scalability," LG Uplus said in a press release.
"We will continue to expand AI consultation services that enhance the customer experience in various industries such as health care, retail and finance through excellent AI technology."
The company began a six-month pilot of this service in October to collect and analyze actual hospital data, successfully processing more than 200 automatic responses per month during this period.
“By introducing this AI consultation, the quality of call responses has improved, and the staff can now focus on specialized consultations," said Suh Dong-won, director of Barunsesang Hospital. “We will continue to introduce digital technology to implement a patient-centered smart hospital."
LG Uplus configured the customized AICC solution based on its experience in supplying telecommunications and consultation systems to more than 200 hospital contact centers nationwide. It collaborated with tech company Nascalab to create a solution that integrates with hospital-specific systems such as order communication systems and electronic medical records.
Using EXAONE, a hyperscale AI model developed by LG AI Research, the service offers advanced natural language understanding and consultation response accuracy with its speech-to-text and text analysis technology.
It also has various advanced functions, including AI support that provides information in real time based on keywords during the consultation, automatically summarizing and classifying the content of the consultation, chatbot and automatic Q&A functions.