Today, businesses around the world are adopting chatbots to optimize customer interactions and improve their shopping experience. The results of the Mindbrowser's 2017 Chatbot Surveysurvey showed that after eCommerce, the industries that would benefit the most from conversational bots would be insurance and healthcare, at 75% and 73% respectively.
A chatbot processes natural language to assess the patient's needs and, based on the programmed "knowledge" it possesses and machine learning technology, can provide a relevant response at specific times. It is worth looking at some of the applications it has in healthcare.
Automation of customer service
Customer service is one of the greatest challenges a health system can face. Every day, hundreds or even thousands of users contact customer service to schedule a consultation or cancel it, renew prescriptions, transfer incapacities, and countless other administrative procedures for which each medical center must have a large team of customer service agents.
A chatbot can perform this task effectively, especially when it comes to assigning and canceling appointments. In fact, it can be programmed to send patients appointment reminders. And its main advantage over human customer service staff is that it can run 24/7 without interruption, execute any number of interactions at the same time and resolve them immediately.
Patient engagement
Conversational bots also allow medical centers to maintain constant contact with their patients, thus strengthening the relationships that are woven around the provision of a service as important as healthcare. Consultation of test results and medical professionals who attended the patient in the past, as well as the delivery of tips for health care are things that a chatbot can perform automatically.
Additionally, using each patient's medical history, the conversational bot can be programmed to remind the patient of relevant treatment points, such as taking medications at a certain time or the impending date for a mammogram or prostate exam.
Basic queries
Often, patients ask questions that do not require the attention and time of a healthcare professional, but must be answered in a timely manner because they represent some concern for them. Examples include new parents who harass physicians about the baby's excessive crying, the ideal temperature the baby should be, the perfect age to feed the baby, the vaccination schedule, and so on.
All these questions are important, but they don't necessarily have to be answered by a human expert. A health chatbot, properly programmed with intelligence and with an arsenal of medical knowledge in its databases, can ask the user about the baby's age, symptoms and medical history and provide very good feedback about it.
Medical diagnostics
Conversational bots and artificial intelligence applied to the healthcare system can also be used to diagnose a user based on their symptoms. The user communicates via chat and comments his symptoms. The bot analyzes them using advanced artificial intelligence, issues a medical diagnosis and, if necessary, transfers the communication to a trained professional or assigns a consultation for further assessment.
Information on medicines and drugs
People often search online for information about medications prescribed by a doctor or to treat an ailment. Chatbots could answer common questions about medications, such as their composition, contraindications, recommended dosage and side effects. They could even recommend over-the-counter medicine for simple conditions, such as the flu or muscle discomfort.
In an interview with Techemergence Your.MD, Dr. Matteo Berlucchi, CEO interview with Techemergenceinterview with Your.MD, Dr. Matteo Berlucchi, CEO of Your.MDIn an interview, Dr. Matteo Berlucchi, CEO of Your.MD, stated that 3 out of 5 visits to the doctor would be unnecessary if the patient had access to the right information to make the best decisions for his or her health. By implementing them, the medical center not only reduces care expenses, but also simplifies processes and improves the user experience by offering quality care through the devices they use most every day: their smartphone and PC.
To offer a comprehensive customer experience in both online and physical channels, clinics, hospitals and healthcare centers can complement chatbots with automated customer service panels installed at their different locations. These, in addition to facilitating immediate attention to the user, allow them to prioritize their needs and resolve them in order of importance and in much shorter times than under a traditional service model.
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