Chatbots used in the medical industry are Artificial Intelligence-powered conversational solutions that help patients, healthcare representatives, and the insurance industry connect with one another. These healthcare bots also play a significant role in making the pertinent information accessible to the appropriate stakeholders at the appropriate time.
From augmenting the patient experience to aiding medical professionals in enhancing various healthcare procedures and unlatching functional insights, healthcare or medical chatbots can help you achieve multiple objectives. Like any other bot, medical chatbots use Artificial Intelligence and Natural Language Processing (NLU) to process queries and compose answers.
Poised to change how medical service providers, patients, and claims providers interact, healthcare chatbots are the most coming of age and authoritative AI-powered healthcare solutions developed so far.
Quick Navigation
- Importance of Healthcare Chatbots
- Use Cases of Healthcare Chatbot
- Future of Chatbots in the Healthcare Industry
- Conclusion
Importance of Healthcare Chatbots
Research by Google suggests that around 7% of their daily search is about healthcare. That roughly translates to 70000 queries per minute. In other words, receiving healthcare advice digitally is on the rise.
So, who or what bridges the digital relationship between the healthcare industry and its customers? The answer to this query speaks about the significance of chatbots in the healthcare industry.
1. 24/7 Availability
We all know an emergency never knocks on the door. With medical chatbots, you are never bound to the working hours. You can seek any medical guidance and fetch the desired information from the website of your choice with the help of the bots. Healthcare bots facilitate everything that makes things easy for you, from booking medical appointments to arranging an emergency bed at a hospital or a nursing home.
2. Respond to Multiple Patients at Once
When chatting with a healthcare chatbot, you do not have to stand in a queue. The powerful chatbots can converse with multiple people. Thus, it becomes easier for the patients or their representatives to seek information by providing patient data. From the perspective of the medical institution, they can serve multiple patients at once.
3. Timely Medical Advice
A well-executed chatbot can give you timely medical advice. Instead of calling the medical helplines, people can simply chat with the AI-enabled chatbots and get medical advice on what steps to follow by giving relevant medical data. What’s more, healthcare chatbots can link you to the relevant pages.
4. Daily Medication Reminders
While doctors do their job by prescribing the medicines, many patients forget to take them on time. Healthcare chatbots dispense medical advice and send daily reminders to patients for intaking prescription medications.
5. Saves Cost
Chatbots are well suited to handle multiple healthcare tasks, from streamlining scheduling to providing informational content. Performing all these tasks involves cost; however, healthcare companies can save costs with healthcare chatbots and voice assistants since these bots can comfortably conduct this multitasking.
6. Patient Feedback
Every healthcare provider wants to provide excellent service to their patients. Chatbots are a great medium to collect patient feedback. With the feedback received, the service provider can improve service areas, not in the top bracket.
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Use Cases of Healthcare Chatbot
A 2019 study of the benefits of chatbots in the healthcare industry suggests that with bots, monitoring becomes easy. It is easy to track and become aware of users’ behavior with the help of AI technology. What’s more, you can maintain anonymity on sensitive issues. With chatbots, you can service multiple users simultaneously and get real-time reactions, notifications, and reminders.
In the next part of the write-up, we will talk about the various use cases of healthcare bots.
1. Provide Medical Information
Healthcare chatbot algorithms are upskilled on extensive healthcare and medical data, including disease indicators, markers, diagnostics, and available treatments. Public datasets are utilized to upgrade the machine learning of the chatbots constantly. This helps the conversational chatbots with different intelligence levels understand the user’s queries and provide responses based on the pre-defined label in the machine-fed data.
For example, various healthcare apps with chatbots can give you all information related to a specific disease, including symptom detection and personal health assistance.
2. Schedule Appointments and Complete Administrative Tasks
Chatbots are included in the medical facility ecosystem so that they can extract information about physicians and their availability, along with the clinic and pharmacy’s working days. The bots ask the patients about their present health condition and their issues through various questions. Accordingly, they find the matching doctors and the clinics they are associated with and all relevant details.
They can also schedule, delete, or reschedule appointments for the patients. Chatbots are also integrated with users’ device calendars to send updates and notification reminders about medical appointments.
3. Medication Guidance
Chatbots are not pharmacists, and they are not their replacements either. However, bots are beneficial when it comes to sharing basic drug information and setting reminders for patients to take medicines. You can interact with chatbots over social media, SMS, websites, and even through your mobile app. So, the reminders are always visible to you, and you do not forget your essential medical activities.
4. Secure Access to Medical Records
With the increase in the medical data year on year, it is becoming challenging for the medical industry to manage the patients’ medical data, including prescriptions, patient records, clinical research, health-based personal tech, and MHR. Even doctors find it difficult to access the vast amounts of Electronic Medical Records (EMR) from a web portal. With healthcare chatbots, it becomes easy to generate medical reports quickly, and, at the same time, keep the information secure and confidential.
5. Check Symptoms and Detect a Disease
The Covid-19 pandemic has changed the way patients are treated. People have become more concerned about the state of their health. Healthcare facilities receive a lot of inquiries about personal health, and they are not prepared to handle the influx of such queries. This has made seeking appointments from doctors difficult.
With AI-powered healthcare chatbots, it has become easier for patients to gather information on their medical conditions. You can share your symptoms with chatbots, and it analyzes those and advise you accordingly on your next course of action.
If the symptoms are severe, the chatbots transfer the case to a human representative to schedule an appointment or facilitate emergency services.
6. Provide Mental Assistance
Healthcare chatbots are also capable of mental health assistance and are trained to provide Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) for patients with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), anxiety, and depression. The chatbots can also train autistic patients to improve their job interview skills and social skills. Users who want to go for such assistance can interact with the chatbots via text, cameras, and microphones.
Specialized healthcare chatbots facilitate superior medical assistance. Creating such bots requires experienced developers. Skien Technologies has years of experience in developing specialized chatbots that can function based on any set of guidelines.
7. Facilitating Payment
When patients are ready to make payments for the medical service, you would not want to put them on hold. Chatbots can be helpful if the payment gateway is integrated with backend billing, ensuring secured payment collection.
8. Managing Coverage and Claim Queries
Chatbots are capable of handling insurance resources and inquiries services and plan members. What’s more, integrating Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and other automated services with healthcare chatbots helps automate healthcare billing and insurance claim processing.
9. Prescription Refills
Healthcare chatbots gather patient data like name, birthday, contact information, present doctor, last visit to the clinic, and prescription information. The chatbot submits all the patient information to the last-visited doctor to decide on the medication and contacts the patients when a refill is required. From the doctor’s perspective, it becomes easy to process prescription refills in batches or automate them without intervening personally.
Future of Chatbots in the Healthcare Industry
As per research, USA, India, Germany, the UK, and Brazil are the top 5 chatbot using countries. The healthcare industry receives 10% of the chatbot benefits. The market size is expected to reach $1+ billion by 2025.
The global Covid 19 pandemic has navigated the importance of healthcare chatbots for providing healthcare assistance without exposing the health workers to any risks. The chatbots are capable of:
- Providing mental health assistance to cope with the extreme pandemic stress
- Interacting directly with patients having severe symptoms and redirecting them to appropriate healthcare facilities and available hospitals with acute-care beds.
- Support patients with Covid 19 updates and symptoms round the clock and answer related queries.
The pandemic experience has shown the world the importance of automation and medical care support through technology. This will have an impact on the healthcare industry’s dependency on AI-based chatbots. However, we all can be sure that healthcare chatbot tech is here to stay with newer and better implementations in the future.
So, if you are looking forward to being the healthcare business leader, implementing chatbots is necessary. Ensure your chatbots deliver the kind of possibilities you are looking at. For this, you must get your chatbots built by developers who have expertise in such technology. At Skein Technologies, we develop chatbots that develop your business.
- We automate multiple business processes
- We significantly reduce costs with resource savings
- We reduce the resolution time and increase customer engagement
- We handle several tasks simultaneously
- We improve customer experience with round-the-clock support
To know more about our chatbot development services, get in touch with our team.
Conclusion
While companies are building futuristic healthcare chatbots, they must think beyond technology. They would have to consider the various factors that can impact the user adoption of medical chatbots. Only then would it be possible to unlock the true power of AI-powered Healthcare Chatbots.
