For every minor and major illness, people google their symptoms instead of scheduling an appointment with a doctor. The reason can be the growing healthcare cost or reluctance to visit the doctors who prescribe excess medication. Whatever the reason, Clearly, there’s a huge risk in it. But unfortunately, the practice of googling is only growing. Chances are high that people end up diagnosing themselves falsely and try healing themselves.
That’s when healthcare chatbots come to the rescue. No matter what area of healthcare, there’s a chatbot for that. Be it accompanying lonely patients suffering from mental health or assisting older patients regarding prescriptions, quantity and time for medication, and more.
The AI-driven healthcare companion helps the patient diagnose themselves through a text-based conversation. We are also well aware of why chatbots are the future of healthcare.
The chatbot has been a game changer. The blog will walk you through what a healthcare chatbot is, how it works, and its pros and cons.
What is a healthcare chatbot?
Health care chatbot is an AI-powered conversational solution that connects patients with healthcare providers.
The deployment of healthcare chatbots takes away a huge workload from healthcare staff. As it takes care of repetitive yet major tasks like fixing an appointment, collecting required credentials, or fetching information to the patients.
Some healthcare chatbots have even advanced to a level that it solves the issue by pairing the symptoms diagnosis capability with a database of patient-friendly and accurate information.
How does a healthcare chatbot work?
Healthcare chatbots are trained using machine learning algorithms and are capable of handling open-ended queries. The AI understands the language, intent, and context and responds accordingly. And here’s how it works
1. Provide medical information
Healthcare chatbots are trained on huge healthcare data like disease symptoms, and diagnostic and available treatments. A chatbot can answer common questions related to symptoms and treatments and even conduct a preliminary treatment using user input. It helps reduce wait time and phone calls during busy hours.
2. Schedule healthcare appointments
The integration of the healthcare database allows the chatbot to extract information about suitable physicians, available slots, working slots, working hours, etc.
Then the chatbot collects information from patients about their current health condition and connects them with the right physicians. It schedules, reschedules, or deletes appointments for patients and sends notifications and reminders to update the patient about the appointment.
3. Handling health care insurance inquiries
Chatbot helps verify insurance coverage data for patients seeking emergency treatment. It connects with the healthcare provider to bill the correct insurance company for the service rendered without having to wait for approval from the patient’s insurance provider.
Healthcare Chatbot tells patients about the type of insurance plan the facility accepts and how much they can reimburse for particular services or procedures.
4. Automating prescription refills
Doctors are mostly overburdened with paperwork like writing prescriptions. Patients have to wait for long hours or even days to get prescriptions. That is when Chatbots come in handy. They are perfect for eliminating the time-consuming manual job. They can check each pharmacy to see if the prescription has been filled, and update patients to pick up the medicines. Hence, doctors can focus on their patients.
5. Provide mental health assistance
Chatbots for mental health care are designed to support interpersonal skills as a training component of depression treatment. Chatbots are trained to offer cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) for patients with depression, Post-traumatic stress distress (PTSD), and anxiety. The chatbot interacts with the patient via text or voice.
It offers support and advice, tracts the patient’s responses over time, and offers coping strategies when they’re feeling low. Also, In cases when required, it connects the patient with mental health resources, like hotlines or support groups.
Benefits of healthcare chatbots
Both parties and healthcare providers can reap benefits from healthcare chatbots. Let’s see how.
1. Patient experience
AI-powered chatbots are now the first point of contact in health care. They are more like customers’ online personal assistants who look after customers’ concerns 24/7 at minimum cost. They assist in scheduling appointments and provide generic answers to health-related queries.
And when patients get an instant response and easy appointments. They are happy and satisfied. And Addition to that, physicians get to spend more time with patients.
2. Cost savings and improved efficiency
Healthcare chatbots respond to patients’ concerns at any time, it has a significant effect on overhead costs since chatbots are accessible around the clock. Healthcare facilities no longer require hiring additional staff to take care of queries at odd hours.
A chatbot can efficiently handle simple and redundant queries. This reduces extra expenses for healthcare organizations.
3. Patient access and engagement
Chatbot enables patient access to services with immediate digital and mobile-friendly solutions. Patients can automatically engage whenever they visit your website. It automatically sends a welcome message to website visitors giving them the option to interact with the bot to help them find an answer to their problems immediately.
The conversational AI allows patients to more actively participate in their medical journey and case is essential. It provides patients’ perspectives with immediate, specific, and accurate information to improve patient care services.
Not just that, but the chatbot is never on leave. It is capable of helping people round the clock. Be it people facing emergencies at night or visitors looking for a healthcare center near them.
4. Provide assistance
Healthcare chatbot not only helps patients manage their chronic condition better, but it also assists patients who are visually impaired or who have hearing disorders. It can easily determine whether a certain situation is urgent or not. Hence the patients are taken care of fast
5. Quick access to critical information
Healthcare chatbots offer quick information to patients in an easy format. Information like nearby medical facilities, hours of operation, pharmacies and drug stores for prescription refills, etc. Along with that patients might have questions regarding what to do during a medical crisis or what to expect during a medical procedure. A chatbot is programmed to answer them all.
Challenges and limitations of healthcare chatbot
1. Data privacy and security
While interacting with the Healthcare chatbot, patients share their personal and sensitive information.
And there’s always a chance that malicious hackers try to get access and misuse those sensitive credentials.
However, there isn’t any guarantee of protection regarding unauthorized access and use. There are no facts and figures about how long the data is stored, and whether the data gets deleted when it’s no longer needed or not.
2. Limitations of AI and NLP
It’s challenging for healthcare chatbots to understand and interpret human language accurately when it comes to medical context and terminology. It gets difficult for AI to interpret the context of languages as it contains ambiguity and technical terms.
Other than that, the conversational AI cannot determine the level of pain or frustration the patient is going through.
Also, identifying and extracting specific symptoms and diseases from unstructured texts can be highly challenging for NLP bot models.
3. Integration with existing systems and workflows
Integrating healthcare chatbots with existing systems and workflows can be challenging at times. It may not be the case that the existing workflow is technically compatible and efficient. The systems and workflow might have different requirements as compared to the chatbot. It might not be operable together. Lack of careful planning and consideration has negative consequences. The impact of the chatbot might disrupt existing systems.
4. Failure of trust
When patients rely too much on chatbots, they start losing trust in healthcare professionals. On top of that, trusting too much in chatbots may expose sensitive details to data hacking. Once they get used to a self-diagnosis too often, it hinders the patient from accessing medical care even when truly necessary.
5. Lack of empathy and natural emotion
Empathy is a crucial component of communication when it comes to the healthcare sector. Making patients feel at ease isn’t an easy task. It requires a lot of patience and skills and chatbots lack empathy and natural emotions like humans do.
Wrap up
The use of healthcare chatbots has skyrocketed in the past few years. It has so much to offer for both patients and the health care system. It’s both time-saving and cost-efficient.
And if you’re looking forward to providing patient-centric care and making the patient’s journey flawless, chat360 is for you.
It helps you empower your strategy and operations that will convert prospects to patients. You can load the burden from your staff’s shoulders by getting rid of unnecessary call volume and administrative tasks.