Chatbot In Healthcare: Top Benefits and Key Use Cases

What are Chatbots in Healthcare Industry?

A Chatbot is an AI-supported software that enables conversation with users via text or audio mode. As the name suggests, medical chatbots are automated tools that ease the task of healthcare providers and enhance their performance by communicating with users in a more humanized manner.

These intelligent chatbots are now turning out to be the most reliable and trustworthy substitute for the healthcare industry to assist patients 24×7. The AI-enabled chatbots can even prioritize patients and guide them in attaining relevant assistance while analyzing their preliminary symptoms.

The chatbots are highly intelligent as they can also assist patients where they can get the right medical care. As there are many users unaware of the right place from where they can get accurate assistance, like by visiting a doctor or contacting through telemedicine mode.

Chatbots help to analyze the patient data and perform virtual discussion with the patients, based on that it proposes the suggestions and even assist in a detailed form, so that patient doesn’t have to visit the clinic physically. These AI chatbots help service providers accurately diagnose the disease, without any delay. It also provides immediate assistance in case of emergency and can save lives.

The major Chatbot objective is assisting the patient, diagnosing their basic symptoms, and guiding patients to the right resources, rather than diagnosing the patient in detail. In addition to that, these chatbot assistants also help health professionals to understand the brief details about the patient’s symptoms and needs, instead of wasting the time discussing the same details with the patient.

Benefits of Healthcare Chatbots

With the increasing dependence of almost every industry on technology, the healthcare industry is also relying on the same and realizes the importance of using Chatbots in their businesses. The chatbots in the healthcare industry are automating the repetitive and basic-level tasks that are used to perform by the medical representatives. These chatbots are also reducing manpower by taking care of all these simplistic and repetitive tasks and allowing healthcare professionals to concentrate on complex tasks effectively.

The healthcare chatbots offer the following benefits to healthcare professionals and their patients.

1. Round the Clock Availability

Considering the doctor and the patient ratio of any country, it is very difficult for any doctor to dedicate enough attention to each patient. As a matter of fact, the doctors used to be under a tight schedule, and it becomes impossible for them to be available for every patient all the time. However, healthcare chatbots can be available 24×7 and can fill this gap to a great extent.

The bots are specifically dedicated to assisting and monitoring an individual patient’s condition throughout the treatment process. When the doctor is busy saving other patients’ life, the chatbot can help patients in guiding them with medical information and condition, a reminder about the medicine, and monitoring their health condition in real-time.

2. Update Patients Regularly

The chatbots are quite a convenient and beneficial tool for patients, as they can receive regular updates of any scheduled appointment or operation dates, through emails or text messages. Additionally, the patients can also get automated reminders for the medications, and health maintenance tips by analyzing their current vitals and also provides crucial medical details. All these details and reminders are shared with the patient in real-time.

3. Build a Trustable Relationship with Patients

Chatbots provide proper assistance to every individual, as every patient is important to them. Hence, they ensure to build a trustable relationship with the patient by providing a prompt and efficient response. It is like a system, where a definite staff is assigned to assist the patients only. They are responsible for taking care of every patient’s satisfaction level, instant reporting, ensuring zero waiting time, providing a relevant response to each patient’s query, and minimizing the patient’s effort.

Well, all this can be easily taken care of by the chatbots and free up all the medical staff from performing such activities and treat more patients with ease.

4. Manage Frequent Queries

Frequent inquiries and the crowd of patients can overload the medical support team and it might be possible that they even miss out on some patients. As a result, the queue of patients will get longer who are looking for genuine and reliable answers to their basic queries. Humanly assisting a patient require time and can provide assistance to only one person at a time, whereas machine/chatbots can answer multiple queries within seconds and can respond to more than one user at a time. This automated yet humanized assistance enhances the user experience and decreases the workload of the support team.

Key Use Cases of Healthcare Chatbots

1. For Scheduling Appointments

Hospitals and clinics usually employ staff to schedule appointments and answer the basic queries of the patients. Sometimes, dealing with similar types of queries makes the respondent uninterested, whereas with chatbots such situations never arise. These repetitive tasks are time-consuming and even require additional staff to deal with the rising number of queries. Therefore, to deal with such issues, Chatbots are the best solution providers.

The chatbots are used to automate the entire process, ranging from query resolution to appointment booking, setting reminders, and notifications. The bots can even gather critical data about the patients and assist doctors in making precise diagnoses and suggesting prescriptions accordingly.

2. For Tracking Patients Health

There are many patients who require regular assistance and continuous vitals monitoring to maintain a healthy lifestyle, for that chatbots are the most appropriate tools. These bots can be individually used for a patient and linked to the doctor, so that doctor can keep monitoring the patient regularly without visiting and being with the patient. The bots make patient’s life quite flexible, as they can move and go out, instead of being confined to hospital beds only.

Such bots can track all the data of the patients and provide a detailed record of their health. The data enables doctors to analyze the patients’ condition and suggest updates in the prescription, if required.

3. For Providing Mental Health Support

The inadequacy of mental health service providers in the industry has demanded technological interventions. These bots ensure to provide the humanized experience to give the user an experience of conversing with a real and genuine expert. Such bots are usually termed, Therapy chatbots that provide mental health assistance.

The therapy chatbots are not supposed to replace the licensed health professionals, rather extend a supportive hand to them. The chatbots can provide guided assistance of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) for patients experiencing issues, like anxiety, depression, and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Users can interact with mental health support chatbots via text messages, audio, or video medium.

4. For Answering FAQs

The Answering FAQs chatbots are used to incorporate an interactive medium for users in the healthcare industry to provide medical information instantly. The healthcare chatbots can handle a number of queries at a time and usually provide answers to the common queries only. The bots use AI to identify the question and provide the appropriate response to the patient within seconds.

The chatbots feature can also be made interactive for users to answer basic queries and make the information available for users easily and quickly. In generalized terms, the chatbots function like a one-stop-shop for the patients or users to gain access to all the basic queries instantly. The patient doesn’t have to struggle in finding the details they require, it becomes possible with the intelligent answering of the FAQs chatbots.

5. For Hiring & Training

To eliminate the time-consuming process and the bottleneck situations in recruiting and training candidates chatbots could be quite effective and improve candidates’ recruitment experience as well. Manually, it becomes difficult and time-consuming to filter, sort, and shortlist the right candidates, however, the chatbots can definitely streamline the hiring process.

Likewise, in staff training, the chatbots can enable remote training and assist multiple users at a time. Users can also attend the training class at any time at their convenience rather than following the time schedule. Through these chatbots, the companies and the hiring team can save a lot of time and money on hiring and training candidates.

Conclusion

Chatbots are the future of the healthcare industry. The AI-enabled tool is highly intelligent and learns from its experiences to assist users in a much better way. However, every activity can’t be automated. The overall patient experience can be enhanced by ensuring a perfect blend of chatbot technology and human assistance to empower the hospital process to run seamlessly.

There is still a lot of room for improvement in chatbots and the growth in the healthcare industry by integrating innovative technologies and reducing the workload. To build a futuristic healthcare chatbot, the companies are not only aiming at technology but also considering various factors that can influence the user to adopt chatbots.