Saúde iD: Relying on Google Cloud’s OCR technology to improve customer experience
About Saúde iD
Saúde iD is a healthcare platform that connects patients with physicians and healthcare companies. It offers medical appointments, checkups, surgeries, and other procedures at a fair price.
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Contact usCloud-based solutions made it easier for users to engage with the platform, improved the customer support team’s performance, and increased sales conversion rates.
Google Cloud results
- Development of a scalable business solution
- Fast recognition of medical orders
- Better support and monitoring of cross-functional actions
- More accurate data collection
Increased productivity for customer support teams
Saúde iD acts as a marketplace connecting patients, physicians, and healthcare organizations. The company, with roughly 60 direct employees and an office in São Paulo, focuses on scheduling surgeries, checkups, and procedures while prioritizing the best customer experience.
Today, Saúde iD’s environment is fully cloud-based. Previously, the company faced several challenges, including no centralized overview of its infrastructure, which made it harder to create new products and scale existing applications.
However, this was not the only reason why Saúde iD moved to the cloud. In line with health-related IT technology trends, the company needed a reading system for medical orders. By adopting an optical character recognition (OCR) solution, characters can be recognized in image or bitmap files regardless of whether they were scanned, handwritten, typewritten, or printed.
"Imagine, in a scenario with more than 50 medical orders, the customer support team, or even customers themselves, having to digitize them one by one to perform searches or create a shopping cart. That would be quite confusing. OCR technology simplifies these tasks by identifying terms in orders, customer location details, and other features that help us understand and categorize them properly," says Diego Santana, Lead Data Engineer at Saúde iD.
The company’s IT and data teams were already familiar with Google Cloud solutions. Considering this and other factors, such as the time-to-deployment and the company’s own work methodology for tools, Saúde iD turned to the public cloud to host its entire environment and kick off the OCR project.
Tests to improve performance
Google Cloud powers OCR technology using AI-based solutions, such as Vision AI and Document AI, which go beyond traditional text recognition. Its suite of solutions enables the company to organize and enrich data, generating business-ready insights.
This suite is also flexible, as features from Vision AI and Document AI are integrated with corporate applications through APIs. In Saúde iD, all these solutions working together make a huge difference.
"When reading digitized documents, Vision API is our key solution. We use Cloud Functions to process data, Cloud Storage to store documents, BigQuery and Pub/Sub to generate logs, and Cloud Run to host our application. Retail API was also essential to test future website search features."
—Cássio Henrique Resende Reis, Data Scientist, Saúde iDThe marketplace’s main structure is based on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) using a shared virtual private cloud (VPC). As a result, resources from several projects can connect to a common VPC network to unlock secure and efficient communications.
Thanks to all these solutions, the company managed to enhance its customer support processes. The team now sends patients’ medical orders to the system, which then reads these digitized or handwritten forms and automatically fills carts based on each patient’s location and distance parameters set. Finally, the system offers two possible options: shortest distance and lowest price.
Productivity, better customer experience, and other benefits
The OCR system is currently used by Saúde iD’s Customer Support Center, which has already gained several benefits from artificial intelligence, for example streamlined document reading and procedure scheduling.
These advantages include higher productivity for the customer support team, as well as an increase in sales conversion rates and easier user adaptation.
"OCR technology involves a new customer support experience, streamlines processes, and helps us expand our customer base. In terms of internal performance, we now have better support and monitoring of cross-functional actions and can even measure the cost-benefit ratio achieved."
—Diego Santana, Lead Data Engineer, Saúde iDSaúde iD’s employees highlighted the fast recognition of medical orders and the opportunity to develop a scalable business solution as other relevant benefits obtained from Google Cloud solutions.
These tools also offer the chance of making an accurate data collection. Generated data are used to understand how long it takes each customer to fulfill a request, how OCR technology streamlines and automates these processes, and to plan strategies to enhance user experience.
The team is now planning to incorporate new OCR features to improve patient experience. The next step is to develop a self-service tool for customers to prepare their own carts independently and efficiently.
"The next stage is to natively integrate OCR features to the website. We aim to offer a robust product, which is why we want to improve what we have already developed using Vision AI and Document AI, and promote actions to increase the effectiveness and assertiveness of these models."
—Diego Santana, Lead Data Engineer, Saúde iDTell us your challenge. We're here to help.
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About Saúde iD
Saúde iD is a healthcare platform that connects patients with physicians and healthcare companies. It offers medical appointments, checkups, surgeries, and other procedures at a fair price.