Role and Benefits of Chatbots in Healthcare
Tags: Health, Chatbots, Healthcare, Bots, Benefits Of Chatbots

Role and Benefits of Chatbots in Healthcare

Artificial intelligence entered into healthcare with a big wave. With the introduction of chatbots in healthcare, they enable them to easily sail in the most demanding professionals. Chatbots are an excellent tool that offers a massive boost in multiple industries and, similarly, now showing its power in the healthcare sector.

Around 7 billion and more people on the earth are many people who need medical attention now and then. With such an enormous demand, health care industries or providers are looking out for solutions to ease the burden and simplify the process. Hence, AI-powered medical chatbots are just the right solution.

Imagine- You never miss an appointment with your doctor anymore. Neither do you skip a dose of the medicine? Hence, Healthcare chatbot brings every detail and information on time. And this is the situation healthcare wants to achieve.

Bots here are like performing the role of virtual nurse or doctor. There are numerous chatbots in the healthcare sector today to transform patient care services more efficiently.

What are medical chatbots?

A chatbot is a software or computer program built with AI, machine learning consisting of NLP (Natural Processing Language), to initiate conversation and engage users to provide assistance and information to the patients.

AI bots have already gained massive popularity in e-commerce, banking, real estate, and customer-oriented businesses. People get engaged every single day without even knowing. From catching up on news headlines to navigate shopping or banking applications, chatbots revolutionize the way we trade.

Similarly, healthcare providers are also thinking of leveraging these fantastic tools to formulate an excellent patient care experience and eliminate unnecessary expenses. Whenever a person is hit with medical chatbots and gets intelligent assistance, it means bots are in action.

Benefits of medical chatbots

There are many advantages of using chatbots in healthcare, and almost all stakeholders share the benefits mutually.

Healthcare chatbot reduces medical professionals’ workload by diminishing hospital visits eliminating unnecessary procedures and producing admission and readmission entries. hence for patients, this technology comes with a bunch of benefits:

1. A short period was spent shuttering to the hospital.

2. Less money spent on essential elements or unnecessary tests

3. Easy and fast access to healthcare organizations by few clicks.

The medical chatbots help the global healthcare market to grow at a CAGR of 25.1% from 2019 to reach $703.2 million by 2025, as per Meticulous Research.

This technology is gradually eliminating waiting timings at hospitals, appointment and consultation meetups, and helping patients to connect with the right doctor instantly. Also, give more time to understand the patient’s treatments even without visiting a hospital.

Private and public hospitals also deploy chatbots to clerk patients before coming to the consulting room by asking a few relevant questions, suggesting symptoms, and other sufficient medical histories to understand the situation more precisely.

Subsequently, the information is sent via a chat interface to the medical practitioner, who tries to determine which patient needs to be seen first and requires temporary assistance.

The most important thing is that they cannot replace a doctor’s expertise, nor can they take over medical assistance. But blending the best of both chatbot technology and the healthcare industry can improve the medical sector’s efficiency, simplifying, and fast-tracking patient care.

Hence, this is how artificial intelligence is acquiring the medical sector and fulfilling its desire to be well-defined and proficient in inpatient care.

Healthcare- A Prodigious Market

You can see the massive growth and size of the healthcare industry from the before statistics.

(To be made)

In 2017 the global healthcare industry was worth $7.724 trillion, and it will likely reach $10.059 trillion in 2022, as per the Deloitte report.

It was stated in “Frost & Sullivan’s 2019 global healthcare market predictions” that by the end of 2019, the manufacturer revenues in this sector was over $1.96 trillion.

It shows that the healthcare industry is transitioning to a more value-oriented model due to the patients’ growing demand. Experts and researchers say the global healthcare sector will be spending more on value or outcome-based products and services. And that’s why chatbots in healthcare came into action.

Healthcare chatbot use cases

Developing a bot for the healthcare industry isn’t as easy as any other business bot. The biggest challenge for the developers was to build useful medical chatbots that can achieve the desired goals.

Therefore, two things that should be considered are the user’s intent and user’s need. With this, we can formulate the right bots.

So, let’s talk about the three primary use cases of chatbots in healthcare.

Every bot case varies in their style, work, communication, and type of solution.

1. Conversational chatbot

These are designed to be contextual tools and respond following the user’s intent. Besides, different bots deliver different levels of conversation, depending upon their model.

For instance, the basic chatbot provides pre-set answers to stated or repetitive questions. They can’t follow through.

Whereas a conversational chatbot is a high-end tool powered by AI. It delivers more personal responses and resembles real human conversation. It uses NLP And NLU, making it the most suitable for the healthcare sector and will smartly respond to patients.

2. Informative chatbot

Bots that provide helpful information to users through notifications, pop-ups, reminders or alerts, and news. Generally, it includes automated information and customer support services.

Some of the healthcare bots are about flu symptoms, notified with information about flu treatment, preventions, and the current outbreak in a particular area.

Even health news websites also deploy medical chatbots to help their users stay updated and access more detailed information about any topic.

For instance, while reading about any medical help, a bot may notify with this: “Do you need any help with the treatment? Connect with our medical specialists.” So this is how it works, isn’t it awesome!

3. Prescriptive chatbot

Generally, they are conversational by design and aren’t built to respond but deliver therapeutic solutions to the users and help with their health needs.

These chatbots prescribe medical solutions like any other doctor. One of the best examples of this type of healthcare chatbot is Woebot. Stanford University is designed to offer mental health assistance through CBT (cognitive behavioral therapy) techniques. The main area of concern for building it was for the people who suffer from anxiety, depression, or mood disorders. This Healthcare chatbot supports people by refurbishing their behavioral patterns.

Here, bots also prescribe solutions or medications for everyday Continue