Chatbots in Healthcare: Improving Patient Engagement and Experience

Today, chatbots are capable of much more than simply answering questions, and their role in healthcare organizations is quite impressive. Below, we discuss what exactly chatbots do that makes them such a great aid and what concerns to resolve before implementing one. To discover how Yellow.ai can revolutionize your healthcare services with a bespoke chatbot, book a demo today and take the first step towards an AI-powered healthcare future. Customized chat technology helps patients avoid unnecessary lab tests or expensive treatments. Patients can use text, microphones, or cameras to get mental health assistance to engage with a clinical chatbot. A use case is a specific AI chatbot usage scenario with defined input data, flow, and outcomes.

• Let’s dive a little deeper and talk about a couple of the top chatbot use cases in healthcare.
• When it comes to warning the public about potentially harmful health care, the two most popular artificial intelligence chatbots clam up.
• Most healthbots are patient-facing, available on a mobile interface and provide a range of functions including health education and counselling support, assessment of symptoms, and assistance with tasks such as scheduling.
• The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interests with respect to the authorship and/or publication of this article.

With chatbots implemented in cancer care, consultations for minor health concerns may be avoided, which allows clinicians to spend more time with patients who need their attention the most. For example, the workflow can be streamlined by assisting physicians in administrative tasks, such as scheduling appointments, providing medical information, or locating clinics. Despite limitations in access to smartphones and 3G connectivity, our review highlights the growing use of chatbot apps in low- and middle-income countries.

Chatbot Reduces Waiting Time

A chatbot designed specifically for the needs of a medical center could allow patients to book their appointments in less than a minute without ever having to get in touch with a human agent or receptionist. Simple questions concerning the patient’s name, address, contact number, symptoms, current doctor, and insurance information can be used to extract information by deploying healthcare chatbots. AI-enabled patient engagement chatbots in healthcare provide prospective and current patients with immediate, specific, and accurate information to improve patient care and services. These bots are used after the patient received a treatment or a service, and their main goal is to collect user feedback and patient data.

By adding a healthcare chatbot to your customer support, you can combat the challenges effectively and give the scalability to handle conversations in real-time. Chatbot for healthcare help providers effectively bridges the communication and education gaps. Automating connection with a chatbot builds trust with patients by providing timely answers to questions and delivering health education.

Whether it’s a minor health issue or a crisis situation, chatbots are available 24/7 to address user concerns promptly. Since medical chatbots learn from the training data they were given, the projections of this data can lead to inequalities and inaccuracies. Therefore, the biggest challenge that healthcare chatbot developers face is ensuring the accuracy of responses. Currently, and for the foreseeable future, these chatbots are meant to assist healthcare providers – not replace them altogether. At the end of the day, human oversight is required to minimize the risk of inaccurate diagnoses and more.

The technology helps clinicians categorize patients depending on how severe their conditions are. A medical bot assesses users through questions to define patients who require urgent treatment. It then guides those with the most severe symptoms to seek responsible doctors or medical specialists. Chatbots with access to medical databases retrieve information on doctors, available slots, doctor schedules, etc. Patients can manage appointments, find healthcare providers, and get reminders through mobile calendars.

Top Health Chatbots

Rather, it is possible to suspect that there will be a connection between the automatic discovery of pertinent data and delivering it, everything with an object of providing more customized treatment. Although a doctor doesn’t have the bandwidth for reading and staying ahead of each new piece of research, a device can. An AI-enabled device can search through all the information and offer solid suggestions for patients and doctors.

Cem’s work has been cited by leading global publications including Business Insider, Forbes, Washington Post, global firms like Deloitte, HPE, NGOs like World Economic Forum and supranational organizations like European Commission. Throughout his career, Cem served as a tech consultant, tech buyer and tech entrepreneur. He advised businesses on their enterprise software, automation, cloud, AI / ML and other technology related decisions at McKinsey & Company and Altman Solon for more than a decade.

Madhu et al [31] proposed an interactive chatbot app that provides a list of available treatments for various diseases, including cancer. This system also informs the user of the composition and prescribed use of medications use of chatbots in healthcare to help select the best course of action. The diagnosis and course of treatment for cancer are complex, so a more realistic system would be a chatbot used to connect users with appropriate specialists or resources.

More research is needed to fully understand the effectiveness of using chatbots in public health. Concerns with the clinical, legal, and ethical aspects of the use of chatbots for health care are well founded given the speed with which they have been adopted in practice. Future research on their use should address these concerns through the development of expertise and best practices specific to public health, including a greater focus on user experience. However, healthcare data is often stored in disparate systems that are not integrated. Healthcare providers can overcome this challenge by investing in data integration technologies that allow chatbots to access patient data in real-time. Artificial Intelligence (AI) and automation have rapidly become popular in many industries, including healthcare.

In addition to the concern of accuracy and validity, addressing clinical utility and effectiveness of improving patients’ quality of life is just as important. With the increased use of diagnostic chatbots, the risk of overconfidence and overtreatment may cause more harm than benefit [99]. There is still clear potential for improved decision-making, as diagnostic deep learning algorithms were found to be equivalent to health care professionals in classifying diseases in terms of accuracy [106]. These issues presented above all raise the question of who is legally liable for medical errors. Avoiding responsibility becomes easier when numerous individuals are involved at multiple stages, from development to clinical applications [107].

What are the AI Chatbots in Healthcare?

Depending on their type (more on that below), chatbots can not only provide information but automate certain tasks, like review of insurance claims, evaluation of test results, or appointments scheduling and notifications. By having a smart bot perform these tedious tasks, medical professionals have more time to focus on more critical issues, which ultimately results in better patient care. They will be equipped to identify symptoms early, cross-reference them with patients’ medical histories, and recommend appropriate actions, significantly improving the success rates of treatments. This proactive approach will be particularly beneficial in diseases where early detection is vital to effective treatment. Moreover, chatbots offer an efficient way for individuals to assess their risk level without overwhelming healthcare systems already under strain due to the pandemic. Instead of inundating hospitals and clinics with patients reporting mild symptoms or seeking general advice, people can turn to chatbots for initial assessments.

If you wish to know anything about a particular disease, a healthcare chatbot can gather correct information from public sources and instantly help you. Now that we understand the myriad advantages of incorporating chatbots in the healthcare sector, let us dive into what all kinds of tasks a chatbot can achieve and which chatbot abilities resonate best with your business needs. Patients appreciate that using a healthcare chatbot saves time and money, as they don’t have to commute all the way to the doctor’s clinic or the hospital. Although the use of NLP is a new territory in the health domain [47], it is a well-studied area in computer science and HCI. One study found that any effect was limited to users who were already contemplating such change [24], and another study provided preliminary evidence for a health coach in older adults [31].

A medical bot can recognize when a patient needs urgent help if trained and designed correctly. It can provide immediate attention from a doctor by setting appointments, especially during emergencies. With so many algorithms and tools around, knowing the different types of chatbots in healthcare is key.

Chatbots in healthcare – key risks

While healthbots have a potential role in the future of healthcare, our understanding of how they should be developed for different settings and applied in practice is limited. There has been one systematic review of commercially available apps; this review focused on features and content of healthbots that supported dementia patients and their caregivers34. To our knowledge, no review has been published examining the landscape of commercially available and consumer-facing healthbots across all health domains and characterized the NLP system design of such apps. This review aims to classify the types of healthbots available on the app store (Apple iOS and Google Play app stores), their contexts of use, as well as their NLP capabilities.

As such models are formal (and have already been accepted and in use), it is relatively easy to turn them into algorithmic form. The rationality in the case of models and algorithms is instrumental, and one can say that an algorithm is ‘the conceptual embodiment of instrumental rationality within’ (Goffey 2008, p. 19) machines. Thus, algorithms are an actualisation of reason in the digital domain (e.g. Finn 2017; Golumbia 2009). However, it is worth noting that formal models, such as game-theoretical models, do not completely describe reality or the phenomenon in question and its processes; they grasp only a slice of the phenomenon. All the included studies tested textual input chatbots, where the user is asked to type to send a message (free-text input) or select a short phrase from a list (single-choice selection input). Only 4 studies included chatbots that responded in speech [24,25,37,38]; all the other studies contained chatbots that responded in text.

Despite the healthy analysis circulating the problem, the right technology will make that bond between the patient and provider stronger, not break it. Such bots can offer detailed health conditions’ track record and help analyze the impacts of the prescribed management medicine. A survey done by Crunchbase says that over $800 million has been spent across almost 14 recognized startups building a health chatbot service. With the use of empathetic, friendly, and positive language, a chatbot can help reshape a patient’s thoughts and emotions stemming from negative places. As a result of patient self-diagnoses, physicians may have difficulty convincing patients of their potential preliminary misjudgement.

While chatbots can provide personalized support to patients, they cannot replace the human touch. Healthcare providers must ensure that chatbots are used in conjunction with, and not as a replacement for human healthcare professionals. Chatbots are software developed with machine learning algorithms, including natural language processing (NLP), to stimulate and engage in a conversation with a user to provide real-time assistance to patients. Chatbots have been implemented in remote patient monitoring for postoperative care and follow-ups.

We then discuss ethical and social issues relating to health chatbots from the perspective of professional ethics by considering professional-patient relations and the changing position of these stakeholders on health and medical assessments. We stress here that our intention is not to provide empirical evidence for or against chatbots in health care; it is to advance discussions of professional ethics in the context of novel technologies. The design principles of most health technologies are based on the idea that technologies should mimic human decision-making capacity. These systems are computer programmes that are ‘programmed to try and mimic a human expert’s decision-making ability’ (Fischer and Lam 2016, p. 23). Thus, their function is to solve complex problems using reasoning methods such as the if-then-else format.

Another study reported finding no significant effect on supporting problem gamblers despite high completion rates [40]. This result is possibly an artifact of the maturity of the research that has been conducted in mental health on the use of chatbots and the massive surge in the use of chatbots to help combat COVID-19. The graph in Figure 2 thus reflects the maturity of research in the application domains and the presence of research in these domains rather than the quantity of studies that have been conducted. Studies were included if they used or evaluated chatbots for the purpose of prevention or intervention and for which the evidence showed a demonstrable health impact. Chatbots can help patients manage their health more effectively, leading to better outcomes and a higher quality of life.

Associated Data

We will examine various use cases, including patient engagement, triage, data analysis, and telehealth support. Additionally, the article will highlight leading healthcare chatbots in the market and provide insights into building a healthcare chatbot using Yellow.ai’s platform. The industry will flourish as more messaging bots become deeply integrated into healthcare systems. Engaging patients in their own healthcare journey is crucial for successful treatment outcomes. Chatbots play a vital role in fostering patient engagement by facilitating interactive conversations.

Doctors also have a virtual assistant chatbot that supplies them with necessary info – Safedrugbot. The bot offers healthcare providers data the right information on drug dosage, adverse drug effects, and the right therapeutic option for various diseases. This chatbot solution for healthcare helps patients get all the details they need about a cancer-related topic in one place. It also assists healthcare providers by serving info to cancer patients and their families. The medical chatbot matches users’ inquiries against a large repository of evidence-based medical data to provide simple answers. This medical diagnosis chatbot also offers additional med info for every symptom you input.

Professional development

For instance, medical providers can utilize bots for making a connection between patients and doctors. Log in to nearly every website these days and there is a chatbot waiting for helping you in website navigation of solving a minor issue. Hence, chatbots will continue to help users navigate services about their healthcare.

Although scheduling systems are in use, many patients still find it difficult to navigate the scheduling systems. Some of the tools lack flexibility and make it impossible for hospitals to hide their backend/internal schedules intended only for staff. Having an option to scale the support is the first thing any business can ask for including the healthcare industry.

• More research is needed to fully understand the effectiveness of using chatbots in public health.
• Doctors also have a virtual assistant chatbot that supplies them with necessary info – Safedrugbot.
• This feature not only empowers patients but also reduces the burden on healthcare staff who would otherwise need to handle these requests manually.

Healthcare chatbot development can be a real challenge for someone with no experience in the field. Babylon Health offers AI-driven consultations with a virtual doctor, a patient chatbot, and a real doctor. Chatbot developers should employ a variety of chatbots to engage and provide value to their audience.

Although some applications can provide assistance in terms of real-time information on prognosis and treatment effectiveness in some areas of health care, health experts have been concerned about patient safety (McGreevey et al. 2020). You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. A pandemic can accelerate the digitalisation of health care, but not all consequences are necessarily predictable or positive from the perspectives of patients and professionals. With psychiatric disorders affecting at least 35% of patients with cancer, comprehensive cancer care now includes psychosocial support to reduce distress and foster a better quality of life [80]. The first chatbot was designed for individuals with psychological issues [9]; however, they continue to be used for emotional support and psychiatric counseling with their ability to express sympathy and empathy [81]. A study performed on Woebot, developed based on cognitive behavioral therapy, showed that depressive symptoms were significantly reduced, and participants were more receptive than in traditional therapies [41].

Business owners who establish healthcare do their best to execute data security measures for making sure their platforms resist cyber-attacks. Conversational chatbots utilize NLU (Natural Language Understanding), NLP (Natural Language Processing), and apps of AI that power devices for understanding human intent and language. According to medical service providers, chatbots might assist patients who are unsure of where they must go to get medical care. Numerous people are unaware of when their conditions need a visit to the doctor and when it is a must to contact a doctor through telemedicine.

This feedback is invaluable for providers as it helps them identify areas that require improvement and enhance the overall quality of care. AI Chatbots have revolutionized the way patient data is collected in healthcare settings. With their efficient capabilities, they streamline the process of gathering vital information during initial assessments or follow-up consultations. By engaging patients in interactive conversations, chatbots can elicit detailed responses and ensure accurate data collection.

While chatbots are valuable tools in healthcare, they cannot replace human doctors entirely. They can provide immediate responses to common queries and assist with basic tasks, but complex medical diagnoses and treatments require the expertise of trained professionals. In conclusion, embracing the use of chatbots in healthcare holds immense promise for transforming how medical services are delivered.

This efficient sorting helps in managing patient flow, especially in busy clinics and hospitals, ensuring that critical cases get timely attention and resources are optimally utilized. Healthcare chatbots revolutionize patient interaction by providing a platform for continuous and personalized communication. These digital assistants offer more than just information; they create an interactive environment where patients can actively participate in their healthcare journey. Case in point, people recently started noticing their conversations with Bard appear in Google’s search results. This means Google started indexing Bard conversations, raising privacy concerns among its users. So, despite the numerous benefits, the chatbot implementation in healthcare comes with inherent risks and challenges.