Chatbots in Healthcare: Chatbots, also known as conversational agents, interactive agents, virtual agents, virtual humans, or virtual assistants, are artificial intelligence programs designed to simulate human conversation via text or speech.
Numerous positive points of view have been made on the possible uses of health care chatbots in the middle of the marketing and business world.
In the circumstances of health care, chatbots or healthbots are deliberate to supply personalized health and therapy details to patients, provide relevant products and services to patients, also as suggest diagnoses
and recommend treatments based on patient symptoms.
The Task of Artificial Intelligence – Chatbots in Healthcare
Patients love speaking to real-life doctors, and artificial intelligence is what makes chatbots sound more human. Some chatbots with complex self-learning algorithms can successfully maintain in-depth, nearly human-like conversations.
Do medical chatbots powered by AI technologies cause significant paradigm shifts in healthcare?
Yes. Recently, Northwell Health, an AI company developing chatbots that will help patients navigate cancer care, says more than 96% of patients who used its post-discharge care chatbots found it very helpful, demonstrating the increased client engagement.
Machine learning applications are starting to transform patient care as we all know it. Although still in its early stages, chatbots will not only improve care delivery, but they will also lead to significant healthcare cost savings and improved patient care outcomes shortly.
Benefits of Chatbots in Healthcare
The benefits of using hybrid chatbots in healthcare are enormous – and every one stakeholder shares the advantages.
For once, medical chatbots reduce healthcare professionals’ workload by reducing hospital visits, reducing unnecessary treatments and procedures, and decreasing hospital admissions and readmissions as treatment compliance and knowledge about their symptoms improve. For patients, this comes with a lot of benefits:
- Less time spent commuting to the doctor’s office
- Less money spent on unnecessary treatments and tests
- Easy access to the doctor at the push of a button
Chatbots drive cost savings in healthcare delivery, with experts estimating that cost savings by healthcare chatbots will reach $3.5 billion globally by 2022.
Chatbots are gradually reducing hospital wait times, consultation times, unnecessary treatments, and hospital readmissions by connecting patients with the right healthcare providers and helping patients understand their conditions and treatments even without visiting a doctor.
4. Use Cases of Chatbots in HealthCare
To develop a chatbot that engages and provides solutions to users, chatbot developers need to determine what type of chatbots would most effectively achieve these goals.
Therefore, two things that the chatbot developer needs to consider are the intent of the user and the best help the user needs; then, we can design the right chatbot to address these.
There are three primary use cases for the use of chatbot technology in healthcare – informative, conversational, and prescriptive. These chatbots vary in their conversational style, the depth of communication, and the type of solutions they provide.
Informational Chatbots
Informational chatbots provide helpful information for users, often in the form of pop-ups, notifications, and breaking stories. Normally, Informational bots provide automated figures and customer support.
If you search articles about flu symptoms on WebMD, as an example, a chatbot may crop up with information about flu treatment and current outbreaks in your area.
Health news websites and mental health websites also use chatbots to help them access more detailed information about a topic.
For example, while reading about alcoholism and withdrawal, a chatbot may pop-up with this: “Do you would like help with alcohol addiction? Speak with any of our mental health professionals.”
Oppressive Chatbots
Although oppressive chatbots are conversational by design, they are built not just to provide answers or direction, but to offer therapeutic solutions.
One example of an oppressive chatbot is Woebot. Woebot is one of the chatbots designed by researchers at Stanford University to supply psychological state assistance using cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) techniques.
People who suffer from depression, anxiety disorders, or mood disorders can converse with this chatbot, which, in turn, helps people treat themselves by reshaping their behavior and thought patterns.
Chatbot developers should employ a variety of chatbots to engage and provide value to their audience. The key is to know your audience and what best suits them and which chatbots work for what setting.
Any chatbot you develop that aims to offer medical advice should deeply consider the regulations that govern it. There are things you can and cannot say, and there are regulations on how you can say things. Navigating yourself through this environment would require legal counsel to guide as you build this portion of your chatbot.
Top 3 Health Chatbots
When you think of all the flavors of chatbots out there (in the realm of digital health) waiting to be built, there are quite a few variants that jump to mind immediately:
1. Your.MD
This free AI-enabled chatbot allows you to input your symptoms and get the most likely diagnoses.
Trained with machine learning models that enable the app to offer accurate or near-accurate diagnoses, YourMd provides useful health tips and knowledge about your symptoms also as verified evidence-based solutions.
2. ADA Health
Once the fastest-growing health app in Europe, Ada Health has attracted more than 1.5 million users, who use it as a standard diagnostic tool to provide a detailed assessment of their health.
Ada chatbot asks the user simple questions and runs their answers on a dataset of thousands of similar inputs and cases to provide the most approximate evaluation of their health and offer relevant solutions.
3. Forksy
Forksy is that the go-to digital nutritionist that helps you track your eating habits by giving recommendations about diet and caloric intake. This chatbot tracks your diet and provides automated feedback to enhance your diet choices; plus, it offers useful information about every food you eat – including the number of calories it contains, and its benefits and risks to health.
Take Away
The very purpose of introducing chatbots is to form customer interactions easier. In today’s busy life schedule, often visiting the doctor or the hospital might not be feasible. That is when patients search for convenience and what options are often better than using chatbots.
Read More: How Chatbots Are Beneficial In Hospital And Healthcare Business?
