The Pros and Cons of Healthcare Chatbots

From helping a patient manage a chronic illness to helping visually or deaf and hard-of-hearing patients access important information, chatbots are an option for effective and personalized patient care. Chatbot, integrated into a mobile application, can transmit user medical data (height/weight, etc.) measured (pressure, pulse tests, etc.) through Apple watch and other devices. These solutions can also be programmed to identify whether a situation is an emergency.

• Consistency in a medication schedule is vital for recovery, and chatbots ensure patients stay on track with their prescriptions.
• Chatbots in healthcare contribute to significant cost savings by automating routine tasks and providing initial consultations.
• The rise in demand is supported by increased adoption of innovations, lack of patient engagement, and need to automate initial patient assessment.
• After starting a dialogue, the chatbot extracts personal information (such as name and phone number) and symptoms that cause problems, gathering keywords from the initial interaction.

This ensures the user has the necessary permissions to access the patient’s health records. As a result, only authorized users, including the chatbot, can retrieve or update sensitive health information. Costly pre-service calls were reduced and the experience improved using conversational AI to quickly determine patient insurance coverage. The solution receives more than 7,000 voice calls from 120 providers per business day.

If we were to symbolize the healthcare sector, it would be an ancient colossal ship – strong, steady, but resistant to change. AI chatbots in healthcare aren’t just a novel concept, but rather a groundbreaking revolution, that’s causing significant changes in the entire healthcare landscape. Furthermore, it is important to engage users in protecting sensitive patient and business information. For many people, it might be common sense not to feed ChatGPT PHI, source code, or proprietary information; however, some people might not fully understand the risks attached to it. As users of a growing number of AI technologies provided by private, for-profit companies, we should be extremely careful about what information we share with such tools.

Appointment scheduling is among the most evident and beneficial chatbot use cases in healthcare. There’s no longer a need for a consultant to spend time organizing an appointment for your patients — chatbots can easily do it for you. A patient can specify the desired time for the appointment, which can sometimes be a prolonged process during the call or near the registry. By automating this task, healthcare providers can reduce the administrative burden on staff. As the market for healthcare chatbots grows and technologies allow for innovation and experimentation, now is the perfect time for healthcare providers and companies to consider building a chatbot. It’ll enable a healthcare organization to remain competitive and anticipate patients’ needs.

Where are chatbots used in healthcare?

This integration promises to deliver deeper health insights, enhancing overall healthcare analysis. Chatbots automate routine tasks, reduce administrative costs, and empower healthcare providers to reallocate resources more efficiently. Dealing with red tape is always a stressful ordeal, especially for ill people.

Moreover, healthcare is a sensitive field that necessitates careful attention to the safety, security, and privacy of data and systems. To prevent these concerns and assure reliability and security, it is crucial to plan the use of chatbots in healthcare carefully, with a major focus on the user experience. Despite the obvious benefits of chatbot technology in health care, several potential risks of using chatbots exist, including breaching privacy, providing misinformation, and generating systematically biased responses [2,7-9]. These risks are relevant to the nature of chatbot technology, in which chatbot developers need to maximize a personalized experience and enable chatbots to provide users with precision answers through training chatbots [12]. However, training chatbots requires chatbot technology to have access to a wealth of users’ personal data. To address privacy issues, chatbot developers and researchers must ensure that users’ data are protected using encryption during human-chatbot interactions or when a chatbot needs to retrieve backend data [2].

Nevertheless, the inclusion of both benefits and challenges in our reporting suggests that the review may not be significantly biased toward a positive portrayal of chatbots, providing a more nuanced understanding of their role in health care. This raises concerns about patient safety and the accuracy of health management, emphasizing the need for comprehensive assessment and iterative improvement of chatbot technologies [22,25,68,72,95,254,283]. With 35 countries represented by the studies in this review, the topic is clearly of global interest. However, more than a quarter of the included studies (46/161, 28.6%) originated from the United States, with the remainder conducted in high- or upper–middle-income countries across North America, Europe, and parts of Asia [250].

Chronic disease management

Patients might need help to identify symptoms, schedule critical appointments, and so on. Implementing a chatbot for appointment scheduling removes the monotony of filling out dozens of forms and eases the entire process of bookings. They can provide information on aspects like doctor availability and booking slots and match patients with the right physicians and specialists. Over the last couple of years, especially since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the demand for chatbots in healthcare has grown exponentially. They are programmed to provide patients with accurate and relevant health-related data.

Due to interactions with patients, chatbots can collect information about symptoms, most common inquiries, potential areas for growth, and other preferences. This data can be analyzed to identify trends and predict potential health issues, which will eventually allow companies to tailor healthcare solutions to the changing customer demands. Chatbots are integrated into a professional solution launched by a medical facility as a 24/7 available tool for customer support in the healthcare field. Relying on AI, ML, and NLP, chatbots can analyze human speech, understand the message’s intent, and search its pre-programmed response database for a relevant answer, thus providing advice and assistance to consumers of healthcare services. Despite these challenges, they can be effectively managed through proactive measures.

By now, we have painted a vivid picture of what AI chatbots are and their transformative potential in the healthcare realm. The question to ask really isn’t why use AI chatbots for healthcare, but rather, how can we afford not to? With the unstoppable growth of digitization, AI has been making waves across industries, and healthcare is no exception. Developing a medical AI chatbot requires a combination of AI capabilities, healthcare industry experience, and app development skill sets.

You can also ask questions directly to your doctor or healthcare provider before making any important decisions based on what the chatbot has told you. Chatbots are also excellent tools for patients who are uncomfortable with speaking with medical professionals because they can provide them with information without talking to anyone directly. However, this also means that many companies rely on big data and AI to provide their services. They use it as a means to gather personal information about their customers and patients to improve their services. One of the most significant is that they reduce administrative tasks for management. This scalability also makes it easier for doctors to manage patient demand without increasing costs.

“What doctors often need is wisdom rather than intelligence, and we are a long way away from a science of artificial wisdom.” Chatbots lack both wisdom and the flexibility to correct their errors and change their decisions. Chat GPT Also, if the chatbot has to answer a flood of questions, it may be confused and start to give garbled answers. For all their apparent understanding of how a patient feels, they are machines and cannot show empathy.

By ensuring that patients attend their appointments and adhere to their treatment plans, these reminders help enhance the effectiveness of healthcare. Patients can easily book, reschedule, or cancel appointments through a simple, conversational interface. This convenience reduces the administrative load on healthcare staff and minimizes the likelihood of missed appointments, enhancing the efficiency of healthcare delivery.

A chatbot can personalize questions and alter the dialog flow based on the user’s answers. #2 Medical chatbots access and handle huge data loads, making them a target for security threats. A chatbot can send reminders like taking medication or measuring vitals to patients. In case of an emergency, a chatbot can send an alert to a doctor via an integrated physician app or EHR. When aimed at disease management, AI chatbots can help monitor and assess symptoms and vitals (e.g., if connected to a wearable medical device or a smartwatch).

When a patient needs detailed advice or is dealing with a sensitive issue, it’s best that they connect with a healthcare professional. Expect to invest between $30,000 to $100,000 or more to build a healthcare chatbot. This includes the features, complexities, UI/UX design, collaboration model, and the AI developer’s location. You’ll also find it more expensive to develop chatbots with advanced artificial technologies, such as generative AI.

Patients who need healthcare support regularly can get advantages from chatbots also. For instance, medical providers can utilize bots for making a connection between patients and doctors. Log in to nearly every website these days and there is a chatbot waiting for helping you in website navigation of solving a minor issue. Hence, chatbots will continue to help users navigate services about their healthcare. In this regard, chatbots may be in the future will issue reminders, schedule appointments, or help refill prescription medicines. Everyone wants a safe outlet to express their innermost fears and troubles and Woebot provides just that—a mental health ally.

If they have questions about medication side effects or dosage, patients can get information directly from the bot. A chatbot can walk new patients through onboarding paperwork in advance, speeding up check-in the day of the appointment. Some patients may be uncomfortable discussing their condition with anyone but their doctor. Unfortunately, even the most advanced technology is not perfect, and we are talking about AI-powered bots here. Thus, you need to be extra cautious when programming a bot and there should be an option of contacting a medical professional in the case of any concern.

Medical chatbots offer a solution to monitor one’s health and wellness routine, including calorie intake, water consumption, physical activity, and sleep patterns. They can suggest tailored meal plans, prompt medication reminders, and motivate individuals to seek specialized care. This chatbot template collects reviews from patients after they have availed your healthcare services.

A survey of 2,000 conducted by the University of Arizona Health Sciences showed that 52 percent preferred consulting with real physicians over AI chatbots. But, importantly, the survey revealed that encouragement from their physicians could help patients overcome their hesitation. Further, chatbots can offer evidence-based techniques, like cognitive behavioral therapy and dialectical behavior therapy. This category refers to chatbot use for the completion of research-related work such as participant recruitment, the consent process, or data collection through surveys. This category refers to the facilitation of medical consultations or the delivery of advice or support by providing counseling or treatment advice, triaging patients’ complaints, and fostering self-management and monitoring.

Equipped with basic AI algorithms, they can deliver pre-set responses to distribute knowledge quickly and effectively. While healthcare professionals can attend to only one patient at a time, chatbots excel in simultaneously engaging and aiding multiple individuals. This scalable approach boosts engagement and gives doctors more time to focus on complex cases. Healthcare chatbots are designed to assist 24/7, ensuring patients can get support whenever needed. This eliminates the frustration of waiting on hold or having difficulty in scheduling appointments during business hours. Finally, the results were presented solely as a narrative summary [77], which might limit the breadth of perspectives and interpretations that a more diverse methodological approach could have provided.

Alexey is also a founder and technology evangelist at several technology companies. Previously, as a CEO of the Gett (GetTaxi) technology company, Alexey was in charge of developing the revolutionary Gett service from ground up and deploying the operation across the globe from New York to London and Tel Aviv. Chatbots should comply with requirements based on the region where they are used.

The case history is then sent via a messaging interface to an administrator or doctor who determines which patients need urgent care and which patients need advice or consultation. By reading it, you will learn about chatbots’ role in healthcare, their benefits, and practical use cases, and get to know the five most popular chatbots. One of the key aspects of it is the increasing use of IVAs in the healthcare sector for patient management and doctor assistance, and also the conversational AI technologies, that are greatly accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak. Chatbots not only deal with patient interactions but also help with internal record-keeping. Many institutions have AI that gets essential data and notifies healthcare experts when required.

An example of this implementation is Zydus Hospitals, one of India’s largest multispecialty hospital chains, which successfully utilized a multilingual chatbot for appointment scheduling. This approach not only increased overall appointments but also contributed to revenue growth. “These tools are helping to make it easier for patients to access information along their journey. And as more physicians and patients use smartphones and websites to get medical information, it’s meeting them where they’re at.” Over about three months, the patients exchanged 4,123 messages with Tess in 270 conversations. A majority of the study participants (96 percent) said those interactions were helpful.

The AI chatbot will need regular monitoring and updates to ensure its accuracy and reliability and to keep validating the ‘AI chatbots for healthcare’ narrative. You will want to harness the power of machine learning and Natural Language Processing (NLP) to process patient responses and create human-like interactions. They track doctor schedules, suggest suitable times for patients, and even manage changes and cancellations smoothly. Patients can book an appointment, ask about clinic hours, inquire about a doctor’s availability, and more through chatbots.

Medical Chatbots, Explained

Healthcare chatbots can streamline the process of medical claims and save patients from the hassle of dealing with complex procedures. With their ability to understand natural language, healthcare chatbots can be trained to assist patients with filing claims, checking their existing coverage, and tracking the status of their claims. Livi, a conversational AI-powered chatbot implemented by UCHealth, has been helping patients pay better attention to their health. The use case for Livi started with something as simple as answering simple questions. Livi can provide patients with information specific to them, help them find their test results.

Relevant is ready to consult you and help you create an informational, administrative, hybrid chatbot, etc. Skillful in healthcare software development, our dedicated developers can utilize out-of-the-box components or create custom medical сonversational AI chatbots from the ground up. Each type of chatbot plays a unique role in the healthcare ecosystem, contributing to improved patient experience, enhanced efficiency, and personalized care.

Moreover, the process is non-intrusive and takes place in a non-judgemental environment. As we witness an increasing number of businesses adopting chatbots to automate their processes, it’s clear that AI software development and the use of chatbots are set to become key drivers of transformation in the healthcare industry. A US-based care solutions provider got a patient mobile app integrated with a medical chatbot. The chatbot offered informational support, appointment scheduling, patient information collection, and assisted in the prescription refilling/renewal. AI chatbots provide basic informational support to patients (e.g., offers information on visiting hours, address) and performs simple tasks like appointment scheduling, handling of prescription renewal requests.

Moreover, Healthily is a comprehensive resource for locating online medical services, whether it’s pharmacies, test centers, doctors’ offices, or mental health app recommendations. Platforms like Capsule and Truepill have already integrated chatbots to automate prescription refill processes, ensuring seamless experiences for patients. This feature proves especially beneficial in online pharmacy applications, offering hassle-free prescription management with just a few interactions with the chatbot. Most physicians believe that chatbots are beneficial in scheduling medical appointments (78 percent), locating health clinics (76 percent), or providing medication information (71 percent), a survey that polled 100 physicians shows. One of the most significant clinical use cases for chatbots is patient triage. Chatbots can be designed to gather patient information, such as symptoms, demographics, and medical history, provide insights into possible diagnoses, and connect patients to the appropriate level of care.

With the ongoing advancements in Generative AI in the pharma and medical field, the future of chatbots in healthcare is indeed bright. This technology infuses bots with the capability for deeper engagement and personalized interactions. As conversational agents evolve, they foster trust, empower patients, and contribute to enhanced health outcomes.

Acropolium provides healthcare bot development services for telemedicine, mental health support, or insurance processing. Skilled in mHealth app building, our engineers can utilize pre-designed building blocks or create custom medical chatbots from the ground up. Acting as 24/7 virtual assistants, healthcare chatbots efficiently respond to patient inquiries.

By leveraging AI and natural language processing, chatbots can provide personalized advice, prescription refilling, and reminders to patients that are tailored to their specific needs. Chatbots in healthcare can collect patients’ age, location, and other medical information when providing guidance on how to handle a particular condition or issue. https://chat.openai.com/ They can even track health data over time, offering increasingly more accurate insights and recommendations based on a patient’s healthcare journey. Healthcare AI chatbots facilitate the collection of patients’ essential personalized health information, including personal details, symptoms, current healthcare providers, and insurance coverage.

Each of these use cases demonstrates the versatility and effectiveness of healthcare chatbots in enhancing patient care, streamlining operations, and improving overall healthcare delivery. They provide preliminary assessments, answer general health queries, and facilitate virtual consultations. This support is especially important in remote areas or for patients who have difficulty accessing traditional healthcare services, making healthcare more inclusive and accessible.

Many are finding that adding an automation component to the innovation strategy can be a game-changer by cost-effectively improving operations throughout the organization to the benefit of both staff and patients. Embracing new technologies – such as robotic process automation enabled with chatbots – is key to achieving the interdependent goals of reducing costs and serving patients better. They found that the chatbots had three different conversational flows, with ‘guided conversation’ being the most popular. In this conversational flow, users can only reply using preset inputs provided through the interface.

Unlike an informational chatbot, which only broadcasts information, a conversational chatbot can interact with patients more intelligently. Moreover, medical chatbots can be programmed to identify symptoms and proactively recommend the next action. With the help of medical chatbots, patients can receive prompt medical attention and treatment, significantly improving their chances of recovery. One of the biggest advantages is their ability to provide constant companionship to patients. Chatbots are useful for accessing medical advice and assistance at any time of day or night, regardless of their location.

For startups, charting out the chatbot’s interaction path is challenging because the line separating a helpful chatbot and one detrimental to patient experience is sometimes unclear. Patient communication can be complicated, considering the various circumstances they might face. Just like medical professionals, AI chatbots need to be tactful when conversing with patients. They shouldn’t come off as overbearing, insensitive, or disrespectful when providing information or gathering feedback from patients. Before you build your healthcare chatbot, it’s important to be mindful of legal, technical, and security challenges that you may encounter. Moreover, generative AI, which powers advanced chatbot applications, is still an evolving technology.

Most of the studies (157/161, 97.5%) identified specific limitations of chatbots in health care, presented as 12 subcategories grouped into 5 categories, as summarized in Table 4. Most of the studies (157/161, 97.5%) described the benefits of using chatbots in health care. The content analysis yielded 7 different subcategories of benefits (presented in italics), grouped into 5 categories, which were organized into 2 broad themes, as summarized in Table 3. One way to achieve this is through the use of FHIR (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources) servers.

All studies stated the role or roles of the chatbot used, with at least 1 role per study. Our analysis yielded 14 subcategories of primary roles (presented in italics), grouped into 5 categories, which were organized into 2 overarching themes, as summarized in Table 1. More than a quarter of the studies originated from the United States (46/161, 28.6%; Figure 2).

You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. As we continue our tour across the ‘artificial intelligence in healthcare’ landscape, the next crucial station is ‘How to design an efficient healthcare chatbot?. This metric gauges whether the bot was able to completely address the user’s query or task in the first interaction itself. This can vastly improve user satisfaction and efficiency of service.→ Ada Health’s AI bot leverages deep learning algorithms and an extensive medical knowledge base to solve most user queries on the first contact. It’s clearly beyond the shadow of a doubt that AI chatbots have several high-impact applications in healthcare and are leading the way toward a digitized and efficient healthcare model. It encompasses mixed reality smart glasses that can overlay digital records during patient checkups or surgeries or even provide real-time guidance to doctors during complex surgeries. Furthermore, AI chatbots can sift through these massive data sets to extract invaluable insights.

Furthermore, the deployment of AI in medicine brings forth ethical and legal considerations that require robust regulatory measures. As we move towards the future, the editorial underscores the importance of a collaborative model, wherein AI chatbots and medical professionals work together to optimize patient outcomes. Despite the potential for AI advancements, the likelihood of chatbots completely replacing medical professionals remains low, as the complexity of healthcare necessitates human involvement.

To protect sensitive patient information from breaches, developers must implement robust security protocols, such as encryption. Addressing these ethical and legal concerns is crucial for the responsible and effective implementation of AI chatbots in healthcare, ultimately enhancing healthcare delivery while safeguarding patient interests [9]. Healthcare chatbots can also facilitate communication between healthcare professionals and patients, improving coordination. For example, medical AI chatbots can help patients schedule medical appointments, track their symptoms, and receive reminders for follow-up care. This can help ensure that patients receive the care they need when needed and help healthcare providers deliver the best possible care.

Furthermore, if there was a long wait time to connect with an agent, 62% of consumers feel more at ease when a chatbot handles their queries, according to Tidio. As we’ll read further, a healthcare chatbot might seem like a simple addition, but it can substantially impact and benefit many sectors of your institution. Healthcare chatbots enable you to turn all these ideas into a reality by acting as AI-enabled digital assistants.

This is a clear violation of data security, especially when data are sensitive and can be used to identify individuals, their family members, or their location. Moreover, the training data that OpenAI scraped from the internet can also be proprietary or copyrighted. Consequently, this security risk may apply to sensitive business data and intellectual property. For example, a health care executive may paste the institution’s confidential document into ChatGPT, asking it to review and edit the document.

Individuals with disabilities (8/22, 36%) focused on the unique health care needs of people with disabilities. Addressing specific demographic groups and family dynamics, this category comprised 15.5% (25/161) of the included studies. Parents and children (7/25, 28%) centered on the health issues of children and adolescents.

Healthcare chatbots represent a shift towards greater accessibility in healthcare and health services for all. With the easy availability of massive amounts of health-related information, patients today are more informed than ever. AI chatbots step in by providing accurate, referenced, and personalized healthcare information to users. They can provide advice, clarify doubts, and explain medical terms in an easy-to-understand manner. Harnessing the power of AI chatbots for healthcare is synonymous with stepping into an era where healthcare delivery is efficient, personalized, and most importantly, patient-centric. Overall, the future of healthcare chatbots is exciting, with new possibilities emerging every day.

Reviewing current evidence, we identified some of the gaps in current knowledge and possible next steps for the development and use of chatbots for public health provision. With the help of AI in your chatbot, you are automating exactly this sequence and many others. The cost to develop healthcare chatbot depends on factors like platform, structure, complexity of the use of chatbots in healthcare design, features, and advanced technology. For instance, chatbots can answer queries like what the payment tariffs are, which documents are important to get treatment, what the business hours are, and how much the insurance covers. Now several providers change this segment into an interactive chatbot feature on their homepage dedicated to answering basic queries.

The Global Healthcare Chatbots Market, valued at USD 307.2 million in 2022, is projected to reach USD 1.6 billion by 2032, with a forecasted CAGR of 18.3%. The patient can ask their question of the machine without the self-consciousness that comes with speaking to a person. Lessening the workload for administrative staff allows small practices to operate with a leaner workforce. Allowing staff to use their working hours more productively also reduces the need for overtime. Nextech is developing a virtual assistant chatbot that will be able to successfully handle up to 85% of routine conversations, freeing up staff for more important work. The automatic prescription refill is another great option as the patient does not have to go to a doctor in person and fill in lengthy forms.

Patients prefer to fill forms online and receive updates via text rather than wait in long hospital lines with no bandwidth or assurance for busy providers. Conversational chatbots in Healthcare are all the rage in the healthcare scenario due to the seamless experience of human-like conversations and speed of communication. Trends like hyper-personalization, AI developments, multichannel integration, and focusing on past experiences define the current trajectory. This can be recalled whenever necessary to help healthcare practitioners keep track of patient health, and understand a patient’s medical history, prescriptions, tests ordered, and so much more. Soon enough, organizations like WHO and CDC started adopting conversational AI-powered chatbots to provide curated information to a wide audience with ease.

Chatbots streamline healthcare workflows by automating administrative tasks such as scheduling, patient intake, and follow-up communications. This optimization enhances clinic operations, reduces administrative burdens, and improves service delivery. Chatbots in healthcare provide uninterrupted support, answering patient inquiries at any time of the day or night. This 24/7 availability ensures that patients receive immediate answers to their questions, reducing wait times and significantly enhancing patient satisfaction. Each type of chatbot serves distinct functions and meets different needs within the healthcare system, contributing to more personalized care, enhanced access to information, and overall improved efficiency in healthcare services. Healthcare providers use chatbots to efficiently gather patient feedback on services and experiences, which is crucial for continual improvement and patient satisfaction assessment.

However, with the use of a healthcare chatbot, patients can receive personalized information and recommendations, guidance through their symptoms, predictions for potential diagnoses, and even book an appointment directly with you. This provides a seamless and efficient experience for patients seeking medical attention on your website. Many are discovering that incorporating automation into the innovation plan can be a game changer by cost-effectively boosting operations throughout the company to benefit both staff and patients. Embracing new technology, such as robotic process automation with chatbots in healthcare, is critical to meeting the interdependent goals of cost reduction and improved patient care. Chatbots often deal with sensitive patient data that require strong security measures to ensure confidentiality and compliance with regulations like HIPAA. So it’s crucial to store data safely, encrypt it, and control who can see it to protect patient details.

If you’re not sure where and how to kickstart your AI chatbot project, consider partnering with Uptech. More importantly, we’re also leading digital transformation with AI technologies. Explore generative AI in healthcare use cases, possible challenges, and best practices in our article. Patients can request prescription refilling/renewal via a medical chatbot and receive electronic prescriptions (when verified by a physician). Additionally, a chatbot should include necessary compliance features, such as data encryption and user consent mechanisms, in its design.

Healthcare chatbots can offer users info about nearby healthcare facilities, hours of operation and nearby pharmacies. They can also be programmed to answer simple questions about a particular condition, such as what to do during a crisis or what to anticipate during a procedure. Healthcare chatbots can answer queries that don’t require highly trained healthcare professionals to answer. If you’ve ever wondered whether your cough is just a symptom of the common cold or something worse, asking a chatbot could help save you from booking an unnecessary appointment.

This involves retrieving current data, updating medical histories, and adding new information gathered during the chatbot interaction. With the right software design, your medical chatbot can securely retrieve and utilize patient’s medical data within one session. China, Spain, and Japan have the highest percentage of clinicians who believe more patients will use chatbots to manage their treatment by 2031 (56, 55, and 54 percent respectively). Without it, patients may feel frustrated, confused, and even neglected, which can spiral into delayed recoveries and soaring churn rates. Healthcare chatbots prioritize safety and security, employing encryption and strict data protection measures.