We thank Czech Radio and MUDr. Böhm for this beautiful description of how Emmy can work in a small town - Bezdružice has about 940 inhabitants, but MUDr. Böhm's district is much larger.

We knew nothing about it until the article came out! 😀

https://plzen.rozhlas.cz/prakticky-lekar-v-bezdruzicich-zavedl-virtualni-sestru-8947839

The text of the article reads as follows:

The GP's office in Bezdruzice, Tachov region, could no longer handle examining patients and talking to others on the phone in the meantime. So she introduced a virtual nurse.

Patients are getting used to the new way of communicating with their district doctor. Whereas until recently the phone was ringing every minute in Dr. Tomáš Böhm's office and the doctor and nurse were issuing sick notes or electronic prescriptions to other patients over the phone while examining patients, now the phone sounds minimally in the office thanks to the virtual nurse.

"We could no longer handle the office agenda and the amount of phone calls we had was keeping us from investigating patients," says Tomas Böhm, whose district has about 2,000 patients. Like some other practices, the family-free one has therefore started using a joint project by a group of doctors called Virtual Nurse Emmy. Patients register on a secure internet portal and then communicate with the surgery via this portal. They can make an appointment for a check-up, to deal with administrative matters, they can arrange for sick leave to be issued or order a prescription.

Those who do not want to or cannot use the internet can continue to call the surgery on a landline, but a voice robot will answer the call. If the patient replies to the robot that it is an emergency, only then will the phone start ringing in the surgery. All non-acute requests sent electronically or via the voice robot are handled by the doctor and nurse in their spare time. As nurse Jitka Kimlová promises, neither she nor the doctor go home until everything is done on a given day.

Some patients are skeptical

When the doctor was introducing the new way of communication to interested patients in the Druze-free clubhouse, some looked askance, some had reservations about the voice robot, for example, which, in his opinion, does not understand the information spoken well. But other patients praised the new service. For those who would not know what to do with the virtual nurse, the town hall of Bezdružice offered help, as the secretary Jana Wajdová revealed.

In any case, Dr. Tomáš Böhm is counting on the fact that for some people these innovations will simply not work and therefore he is leaving the option of the classic way of communication for the time being. Anyone who wants to continue talking to a live doctor or nurse unconditionally can call on surgery days from 11 am to 12:30 pm.

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Author of the photo: Vlach Pavel - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0

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