The COVID-19 pandemic continues to challenge the global healthcare sector's workforce, supply chain, and infrastructure. The industry's efforts to overcome the healthcare crisis include accelerating digital transformation across the ecosystem to help health systems quickly adapt and innovate.
Digital transformation initiatives involve adopting virtual reality tools, wearable medical devices, 5G technologies, telehealth, and artificial intelligence (AI).
One of the ways AI could revolutionize the healthcare industry is through medical chatbots.
According to a recent survey, 78% of physicians think that chatbots would be most beneficial for scheduling doctor appointments, as well as locating health clinics or providing medication data.
Conversely, around 70% of physicians believe that chatbots cannot effectively care for all patients’ needs and display human emotion.
Despite some’s existing skepticism, the truth is that the healthcare chatbot industry is developing and is expected to reach $542 million by 2026.
What are medical chatbots and how can they help?
Chatbots are a form of AI developed with machine learning algorithms, including natural language processing, to provide real-time assistance for users.
Members of the healthcare ecosystem have already started to leverage these AI-enabled technologies, which have proved to be especially useful in:
- Simplifying patient care
- Cutting unnecessary costs
- Enabling streamlined telehealth delivery
- Reducing overload
- Improving healthcare outcomes
- Facilitating the patient experience
These AI-powered conversational solutions can help patients, insurance companies, and healthcare providers to connect more conveniently within the healthcare ecosystem.
The role of medical chatbots in making relevant healthcare data available to the right people at the right time is an important one.
Among the key challenges healthcare professionals encounter is meeting the patient's demands and providing a streamlined patient experience.
Healthcare chatbots can transform the remote healthcare delivery experience and support patients in understanding their conditions and treatments without visiting a doctor.
How healthcare chatbots can make life simpler in the industry
There are three primary use cases of chatbots in healthcare. Healthcare providers use several AI-powered tools that vary in style, work, communication, and type.
1. Conversational chatbots
Depending on their model, these chatbots deliver different levels of conversation and respond to the patient's intent.
In comparison with the most basic chatbot that can only provide pre-set answers to repetitive questions, AI-enabled conversational bots deliver more personalized responses and resemble human communication. Healthcare organizations use these types of chatbots to optimize remote healthcare delivery and reduce healthcare professionals' overload.
2. Informative chatbots
They provide helpful information to patients through notifications, reminders, or alerts. Automated information and customer support services are generated to help patients stay updated and access more detailed insights about any topic.
This is especially valuable in times of crisis when things change from one day to another and nothing is certain. As doctors and medical staff are under a lot of strain lately and can't meet the patient's need for information, informative chatbots seem like a smart and reliable solution.
3. Prescriptive chatbots
Woebot is a type of prescriptive chatbots designed by the Stanford University to prescribe medical treatments like any other doctor. Unlike conversational bots, these AI-powered chatbots aren't built to respond but deliver therapeutic solutions, prescribe medications for everyday illnesses and even more severe diseases.
Prescriptive chatbots also help patients with their ongoing treatments by assisting them in taking their medicines regularly.
How to develop a medical chatbot
- Decide on the purpose of the project. What are you looking to solve by creating a healthcare chatbot? Maybe you want to keep your patients informed, or you are interested in simplifying the way you plan medical appointments. Whatever the use case for your new medical chatbot, it's essential that you clearly formulate it before you begin your development journey.
- Choose the right web development team. This may require outsourcing your medical chatbot development project to a field expert development team. Optasy offers AI-powered software development services that will help you make the most out of next-generation technologies.
- Build a user-friendly interface. And optimize your application for mobile. This is extremely important in today's digital world, where patients demand seamless and convenient experiences at their fingertips.
What comes next for healthcare and AI?
Patients are increasingly attracted to the idea of remote healthcare, especially in the current medical landscape. With proper algorithms, scripts, and AI integration in standard healthcare delivery, chatbots can continue to develop into powerful tools for medical care and treatment.
The future of medical chatbots rests in intensive research and testing. An excellent example of this kind of evolution is the use of AI in Radiology.
After many years of research, AI-powered applications can now identify imaging results much faster and more accurately than the human eye ever could. This not only improves the quality of care and helps in the early detection of many conditions but also supports healthcare professionals in delivering faster, more reliable medical services.
That being said, the future of AI in healthcare seems bright. Bridging the gap between technology and healthcare delivery is an essential step towards a better quality of care and a more connected healthcare ecosystem.
At Optasy, we support you on your AI-powered journey so that you can:
- Automate repetitive, manual operations across all departments and boost productivity.
- Gain quick and easy access to your data and make data-driven decisions only.
- Have your data automatically turned into actionable insights that you can leverage.
- Add an extra layer of physical and digital security to your business, taking human error out of the equation.
- Have an artificial “brainpower” automatically monitoring your business' overall performance.
If you are interested in more AI-powered and Drupal web development services, contact Optasy.
Photo credit: NCI on Unsplash
