North Bay hospital among first to give patients AI support

NORTH BAY, Ont. – North Bay Regional Health Centre says it’s among the first medical centres in the world to give patients safe, clinician-approved AI support around the clock.

And an overwhelming majority of patient users at North Bay’s hospital say they like a new AI tool that answers their medical questions 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

The organization is now offering patients access to Seamless Answers, a clinician-approved AI assistant as part of its surgical care.

Seamless Answers is part of the SeamlessMD platform and includes information contributed by hospital staff.

More than 92 percent of surgical patients at the North Bay Regional Health Centre who used the AI program to answer their questions said they were happy with the process and the answers they received.

One patient commented: “Very helpful. Better than Google.” Another said: “Always felt less panicked because of responses received.” A total of 502 questions were answered in the six months since the launch.

Autumn Tignanelli (pictured), a nurse at the North Bay hospital, said the feature is extremely popular with patients.

“I hear on a daily basis how much more comfortable people are that they didn’t go to Emergency because they felt they had somebody to talk to and reassure them on how their recovery was going,” Tignanelli said.

Amanda Gauthier, patient monitoring lead at the hospital for SeamlessMD, said the AI platform has been customized by hospital staff.

“We use many healthcare provider voices,” Gauthier said. “We have input from the surgeons, physiotherapists, nutritionists. So, we developed all of the information.”

SeamlessMD is an education tool that has been customized by NBRHC to provide surgical patients with the information needed to prepare for, and recover from, surgery at the healthcare centre. SeamlessMD is currently available for 10 surgical pathways, including orthopedics, urology, general surgery, women’s health, and pediatrics.

Patients who have questions about their recovery outside of business hours usually turn to tools like ChatGPT or Google, but these tools can make errors when answering because they have little data about the patient’s specific procedure, medications or care instructions. Seamless Answers was built to close that gap for patients.

Seamless Answers uses retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to answer patients’ questions exclusively from NBRHC’s clinician-approved patient education library that’s already part of SeamlessMD.

Every answer cites its source and links back to the original page so patients can read the full instructions.

When a question falls outside the approved content, patients are directed to contact their care team. The feature supports multiple languages and includes guardrails fine-tuned for clinical environments, ensuring patients receive timely, safe and appropriate answers to their questions.

Source: NBRHC and CTV News