AI Powered Chatbots In Healthcare: Use Cases, Pros And Cons

A set of guidelines and best practices to chatbot development vendors and to organizations by agencies such as the CDC can aid in coordinating efforts and in preparedness for the next pandemic. We systematically searched the literature to identify chatbots deployed in the Covid-19 public health response. We gathered information on these to (a) derive a comprehensive set of chatbot public health response use cases and (b) identify their design characteristics. Our study adds to an emerging literature on the use of chatbots in healthcare in general (see Car et al.12 and Montenegro et al.13 for reviews), and in the Covid-19 response in particular (see Almalki and Azeez14 for a review).

Medical services are also able to send consent forms to patients who can, in turn, send back a signed copy. QliqSOFT also offers a HIPAA-compliant method for doctors, nurses, and patients to communicate with each other, along with image and video sharing capabilities. Patients can also quickly refer to their electronic medical records, securely stored in the app.

What is a Healthcare Chatbot?

The patient may also be able to enter information about their symptoms in a mobile app. Healthcare chatbots can offer this information to patients in a quick and easy format, including information about nearby medical facilities, hours of operation, and nearby pharmacies and drugstores for prescription refills. They can also be programmed to answer specific questions about a certain condition, such as what to do during a medical crisis or what to expect during a medical procedure. Customer feedback surveys is another healthcare chatbot use case where the bot collects feedback from the patient post a conversation. It can be via a CSAT rating or a detailed rating system where patients can rate their experience for different types of services. Since the bot records the appointments for all patients, it can also be programmed to send reminder notifications and things to carry before the appointment.

Cancer has become a major health crisis and is the second leading cause of death in the United States [18]. The exponentially increasing number of patients with cancer each year may be because of a combination of carcinogens in the environment and improved quality of care. The latter aspect could explain why cancer is slowly becoming a chronic disease that is manageable over time [19].

Chatbot design

Because the last time you had the flu and searched your symptoms on Google, it made you paranoid. You can also leverage outbound bots to ask for feedback at their preferred channel like SMS or WhatsApp and at their preferred time. The bot proactively reaches out to patients and asks them to describe the experience and how they can improve, especially if you have a new doctor on board. You can also ask for recommendations and where they can bring about positive changes.

• The chatbot can gather real-time data from frontline workers to enable provision of essential support, answer their questions, and provide them with real-time information.
• In addition to the content, some apps allowed for customization of the user interface by allowing the user to pick their preferred background color and image.
• So if you’re assessing your symptoms in a chatbot, you should know that a qualified doctor has designed the flow and built the decision tree, in the same manner, that they would ask questions and reach a conclusion.
• And for pain medication, the bot can display a pain level scale and ask how much pain the patient is in at the moment of fulfilling the survey.

The IAB develops industry standards to support categorization in the digital advertising industry; 42Matters labeled apps using these standards40. Relevant apps on the iOS Apple store were identified; then, the Google Play store was searched with the exclusion of any apps that were also available on iOS, to eliminate duplicates. Yes, there are mental health chatbots like Youper and Woebot, which use AI and psychological techniques to provide emotional support and therapeutic exercises, helping users manage mental health challenges.

Benefits of Chatbots in Healthcare

It is especially true for non-developers who need to gain the skill or knowledge to code to their requirements.However, today’s state-of-the-art technology enables us to overcome these challenges. For instance, Kommunicate builds healthcare chatbots that can automate 80% of patient interactions. Not only can these chatbots manage appointments, send out reminders, and offer around-the-clock support, but they pay close attention to the safety, security, and privacy of their users. Table 1 presents an overview of other characteristics and features of included apps. 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.

Many providers now transform this section into an interactive chatbot feature on the homepage dedicated to responding to general inquiries. Improving human health through the combination of cutting-edge technologies and top medical expertise. Docus.ai hosts a base of 300+ top doctors from 15+ countries who are ready to give you a consultation and validate your diagnosis in a timely manner.

It also helps doctors save time and attend to more patients by answering people’s most frequently asked questions and performing repetitive tasks. After analyzing the patient data, bots can suggest an online discussion with a clinician rather than a visit to their physical office. In its essence, the chatbot technology used in medical contexts promises to ease the burden on medical professionals. This is particularly relevant in today’s situation, where the spread of COVID-19 puts an unprecedented burden on healthcare providers. With the support of this technology, medical centers could ease the pressure on their systems significantly. AI-powered healthcare chatbots are capable of handling simple inquiries with ease and provide a convenient way for users to research information.

As shown in Figure 3, the chatbots in our sample varied in their design along a number of attributes. When you are ready to invest in conversational AI, you can identify the top vendors using our data-rich vendor list on voice AI or chatbot platforms. Chatbots are integrated into the medical facility database to extract information about suitable physicians, available slots, clinics, and pharmacies  working days.

Sales Chatbot Use Cases

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). 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. Healthcare industry opens a range of valuable chatbot use cases, including personal medication reminders, symptom assessment, appointment scheduling, and health education. These virtual assistants improve patient engagement, streamline administrative tasks, and contribute to evidence-based clinical decision-making. The primary role of healthcare chatbots is to streamline communication between patients and healthcare providers. They serve as round-the-clock digital assistants, capable of handling a wide array of tasks – from answering common health queries and scheduling appointments to reminding patients about medication and providing tailored health advice.

Once you integrate the chatbot with the hospital systems, your bot can show the expertise available, and the doctors available under that expertise in the form of a carousel to book appointments. You can also leverage multilingual chatbots for appointment scheduling to reach a larger demographic. Witnessing the success of this, a lot of major healthcare institutions followed suit and deployed a healthcare chatbot during the pandemic that provided information about common diseases, their symptoms, and other precautionary methods. Through chatbots (and their technical functions), we can have only a very limited view of medical knowledge. The ‘rigid’ and formal systems of chatbots, even with the ML bend, are locked in certain a priori models of calculation. Expertise generally requires the intersubjective circulation of knowledge, that is, a pool of dynamic knowledge and intersubjective criticism of data, knowledge and processes (e.g. Prior 2003; Collins and Evans 2007).

Chatbot use cases in the Covid-19 public health response

These chatbots are equipped with the simplest AI algorithms designed to distribute information via pre-set responses. Based on TIDIO’s projections, the use of chatbots is expected to drive substantial growth in the chatbot market during 2023, with an estimated increase of over $994 million, indicating an annual gain of approximately $200 million. The current compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of approximately 22% suggests that this figure could potentially reach $3 billion by the end of the current decade.

Moreover, though many chatbots leveraged risk-assessment criteria from official sources (e.g., CDC), there was variability in criteria across chatbots. A comparison of symptom-checker tools indicated great variability in effectiveness in terms of their sensitivity and specificity,37 with some outperforming the CDC symptom-checker. Therefore, while utilizing official sources is a prudent practice, especially for off-the-shelf solutions and for non-healthcare organizations, more healthcare chatbot use cases work is required to understand best practices. We categorized these chatbots based on (a) their use case which reflects the public health response activity they supported and (b) their design characteristics. We used qualitative methods to allow our use cases and use-case categories to emerge from our data. Specifically, both authors engaged in open coding (see Miles and Huberman18) where we identified the public health response activities that the chatbots supported.

They can take over common inquiries, such as questions about shipping and pricing. Bots answer them in seconds and only route the more complex chats to specific agents. This way, the load on your staff will decrease, the quality of service will stay high, and you’ll keep customers happy. Chatbots can serve as internal help desk support by getting data from customer conversations and assisting agents with answering shoppers’ queries. Bots can analyze each conversation for specific data extraction like customer information and used keywords. They can also collect leads by encouraging your website visitors to provide their email addresses in exchange for a unique promotional code or a free gift.

Sophisticated AI-based chatbots require a great deal of human resources, for instance, experts of data analytics, whose work also needs to be publicly funded. More simple solutions can lead to new costs and workload when the usage of new technology creates unexpected problems in practice. Thus, new technologies require system-level assessment of their effects in the design and implementation phase. They collect preliminary information, schedule virtual appointments, and facilitate doctor-patient communication. An example is a telehealth platform where a chatbot pre-screens patients, collects their symptoms and history, and schedules a video consultation with the relevant specialist, making telemedicine more streamlined and accessible. Survivors of cancer, particularly those who underwent treatment during childhood, are more susceptible to adverse health risks and medical complications.

As advancements in AI are ever evolving and ameliorating, chatbots will inevitably perform a range of complex activities and become an indispensable part of many industries, mainly, healthcare. You have probably heard of this platform, for it boasts of catering to almost 13 million users as of 2023. Ada Health is a popular healthcare app that understands symptoms and manages patient care instantaneously with a reliable AI-powered database. According to an MGMA Stat poll, about 49% of medical groups said that the rates of ‘no-shows‘ soared since 2021. No-show appointments result in a considerable loss of revenue and underutilize the physician’s time.