Conversational artificial intelligence for pre-procedural patient preparation: implementation, validation and patient...

Preparing patients for cardiac catheterization requires critical but repetitive tasks. We conducted a prospective evaluation of the AI voice assistant, Sofiya, for pre-procedural calls in our center. A customized Large Language Model was trained on medical knowledge and deployed on an agentic AI framework with conversational AI. Sofiya called patients to provide instructions, collect clinical data, and answer questions or redirect the patient to a nurse. The study consisted of a 90-day stabilization period with collaboration between clinicians and developers (Phase I), followed by a 90-day real-world application led by nurses (Phase II). The primary outcome was the overall rate of successfully completed calls reaching the end of the script with all patients answering all clinical questions. From January 16, 2025, to July 17, 2025, 1431 patients received 1606 calls from Sofiya. Phase I had 806 calls whose completion rate gradually improved, reaching an average of 86.4%. High completed call rate (87.9%) was maintained in Phase II with an additional 800 calls. AI system errors were observed in 48 (6.0%) calls during Phase I and 24 (2.6%) in Phase II. A voice-based AI assistant can successfully augment routine tasks of pre-procedural patient preparation, allowing nurses to focus on clinical aspects of patient care.