Top 10 Chatbots in Healthcare: Insights & Use Cases in 2023

While the industry is already flooded with various healthcare chatbots, we still see a reluctance towards experimentation with more evolved use cases. It is partially because conversational AI is still evolving and has a long way to go. As natural language understanding and artificial intelligence technologies evolve, we will see the emergence of more advanced healthcare chatbot solutions. Many healthcare providers use healthcare Chatbot use cases so that patients can check their symptoms to figure out what’s wrong with them.

You then have to check your calendar and find a suitable time that aligns with the doctor’s availability. Lastly, you have to ensure they enter the right details about your name, your reason for visit, etc. But the unprecedented challenges in the past few years have shown how vulnerable the sector really is.

Retrieve Patient Data

With so many algorithms and tools around, knowing the different types of chatbots in healthcare is key. This will help you to choose the right tools or find the right experts to build a chat agent that suits your users’ needs. The Physician Compensation Report states that, on average, doctors have to dedicate 15.5 hours weekly to paperwork and administrative tasks. With this in mind, customized AI chatbots are becoming a necessity for today’s healthcare businesses. The technology takes on the routine work, allowing physicians to focus more on severe medical cases. Healthcare providers can handle medical bills, insurance dealings, and claims automatically using AI-powered chatbots.

Given the use of chatbots in a variety of settings prior to Covid-19, the existing infrastructure and abundance of prebuilt modules resulted in their rapid development and deployment to address Covid-19 needs. Chatbots streamline patient data collection by gathering essential information like medical history, current symptoms, and personal health data. For example, chatbots integrated with electronic health records (EHRs) can update patient profiles in real-time, ensuring that healthcare providers have the latest information for diagnosis and treatment. Acting as 24/7 virtual assistants, healthcare chatbots efficiently respond to patient inquiries. This immediate interaction is crucial, especially for answering general health queries or providing information about hospital services.

It assesses the current emotional state of the user by asking questions, then suggests activities and exercises for them to do. Chatbots and conversational AI have been widely implemented in the mental health field as a cheaper and more accessible option for healthcare consumers. Chatbots can also be used to send automated reminders about taking medication, filling prescriptions, and upcoming healthcare checkups. This can help service providers better manage patient recovery and healthcare outcomes, as well as reduce healthcare costs by preventing potentially costly medical errors. Here are five ways the healthcare industry is already using chatbots to maximize their efficiency and boost standards of patient care.

Chatbots have already been used, many a time, in various ways within this industry, but they could potentially be used in even more innovative ways. As healthcare continues to rapidly evolve, health systems must constantly look for innovative ways to provide better access to the right care at the right time. Applying digital technologies, such as rapidly deployable chat solutions, is one option health systems can use in order to provide access to care at a pace that commiserates with patient expectations.

Sales Chatbot Use Cases

It’s also very quick and simple to set up the bot, so any one of your patients can do this in under five minutes. You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. The chatbot instructs the user how to add their medication and give details about dosing times and amounts. Straight after all that is set, the patient will start getting friendly reminders about their medication at the set times, so their health can start improving progressively. They can answer reactions to your Instagram stories, communicate with your Facebook followers, and chat with people interested in specific products. A case study shows that assisting customers with a chatbot can increase the booking rate by 25% and improve user engagement by 50%. This case study comes from a travel Agency Amtrak which deployed a bot that answered, on average, 5 million questions a year.

Chatbots in healthcare can also be used to provide consumers with basic diagnostic assistance and as a tool to assess symptoms before an in-person appointment. Many patients find making appointments with their preferred mental health practitioners difficult due to waiting times and costs. Going in person to speak to someone can also be an insurmountable hurdle for those who feel uncomfortable discussing their mental health needs in person.

DATA AVAILABILITY

During COVID, chatbots aided in patient triage by guiding them to useful information, directing them about how to receive help, and assisting them to find vaccination locations. A chatbot can also help patients to shortlist relevant doctors/physicians and schedule an appointment. We identified 6 broad use-case categories and 15 use cases where chatbots were deployed in the Covid-19 public health response.

A Chatbot can be formal, professional, or simply robotic, depending on your preferences. Saba Clinics, Saudi Arabia’s largest multi-speciality skincare and wellness center used WhatsApp chatbot to collect feedback. This is why healthcare has always been open to embracing innovations that aid professionals in providing equal and sufficient care to everyone. As a foundational pillar of modern society, healthcare is probably one of the most important industries there is today.

Most doctors’ offices are overburdened with paperwork, so many patients have to wait weeks before they can get their prescriptions filled, thereby wasting precious time. The chatbot can do this instead, checking with each pharmacy to see if the prescription has been filled, then sending an alert when it needs to be picked up or delivered. Many customers prefer making appointments online over calling a clinic or hospital directly. A chatbot could now fill this role by offering online scheduling to any patient through its website or app. By adding a healthcare chatbot to your customer support, you can combat the challenges effectively and give the scalability to handle conversations in real-time. Leveraging chatbot for healthcare help to know what your patients think about your hospital, doctors, treatment, and overall experience through a simple, automated conversation flow.

If you are interested in knowing how chatbots work, read our articles on voice recognition applications and natural language processing. This global experience will impact the healthcare industry’s dependence on chatbots, and might provide broad and new chatbot implementation opportunities in the future. Chatbots can extract patient information by asking simple questions such as their name, address, symptoms, current doctor, and insurance details. The chatbots then, through EDI, store this information in the medical facility database to facilitate patient admission, symptom tracking, doctor-patient communication, and medical record keeping.

• As AI continues to advance, we can anticipate an even more integrated and intuitive healthcare experience, fundamentally changing how we think about patient care and healthcare delivery.
• Only limited by network connection and server performance, bots respond to requests instantaneously.
• Yes, many healthcare chatbots can act as symptom checkers to facilitate self-diagnosis.
• However, there are different levels of maturity to a conversational chatbot – not all of them offer the same depth of conversation.
• 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.
• Medical chatbots might pose concerns about the privacy and security of sensitive patient data.

A national food-services organization in North America had an existing operational Conversational AI solution. In order to improve customer service, the process required some user clarification to better understand the refund scenario. Master of Code offered a team to expand the primary bot solution, providing end-to-end build and support for the service. By implementing the Conversational AI solution for handling refunds, the organization witnessed a significant reduction in the number of refunds provided, ranging from 13% to 28%, depending on the channel and time frame.

Having an option to scale the support is the first thing any business can ask for including the healthcare industry. Patients who are not engaged in their healthcare are three times as likely to have unmet medical needs and twice as likely to delay medical care than more healthcare chatbot use cases motivated patients. Maybe for that reason, omnichannel engagement pharma is gaining more traction now than ever before. Now that you’re well aware of the process of designing and developing a successful Chatbot, it’s no more challenging to handle this task for you.

Patients can also quickly refer to their electronic medical records, securely stored in the app. The app also helps assess their general health with its quick health checker and book medical appointments. They can even attend these appointments via video call within two hours of booking. Integration with a hospital’s internal systems is required to run administrative tasks like appointment scheduling or prescription refill request processing. If you want your company to benefit financially from AI solutions, knowing the main chatbot use cases in healthcare is the key. Let’s check how an AI-driven chatbot in the healthcare industry works by exploring its architecture in more detail.

Think about it—unless a person understands how your service works, they won’t use it. Now you’re curious about them and the question “what are chatbots used for, anyway? Our consulting team will carefully review your responses and craft a personalized maturity report. Multi Utility Assistant or MUSA is an AI-powered virtual assistant (a chatbot) integrated with Fingent Hub – Fingent’s internal employee management system.

Chatbots are integrated into the medical facility database to extract information about suitable physicians, available slots, clinics, and pharmacies  working days. Another point to consider is whether your medical AI chatbot will be integrated with existing software systems and applications like EHR, telemedicine platforms, etc. Furthermore, Rasa also allows for encryption and safeguarding all data transition between its NLU engines and dialogue management engines to optimize data security. As you build your HIPAA-compliant chatbot, it will be essential to have 3rd parties audit your setup and advise where there could be vulnerabilities from their experience. The Health Insurance and Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) of 1996 is United States regulation that sets the standards for using, handling, and storing sensitive healthcare data.

Health monitoring – Patients require more than just immediate medical assistance. Immediate access to care – A Chatbot connects you with the appropriate specialist and notifies care teams about the patient emergencies. Because the last time you had the flu and searched your symptoms on Google, it made you paranoid. But the problem arises when there are a growing number of patients and you’re left with a limited staff. In an industry where uncertainties and emergencies are persistently occurring, time is immensely valuable. Chatbots are transforming the healthcare sector with their several use cases.

That’s why hybrid chatbots – combining artificial intelligence and human intellect – can achieve better results than standalone AI powered solutions. This chatbot solution for healthcare helps patients get all the details they need about a cancer-related topic in one place. It also assists healthcare providers by serving info to cancer patients and their families. Conversational chatbots are built to be contextual tools that respond based on the user’s intent. However, there are different levels of maturity to a conversational chatbot – not all of them offer the same depth of conversation.

We could not access chatbots that required organizational credentials, customer or patient accounts, local phone numbers (except for the USA), or national identification numbers for access. Instead, we relied on the literature and news articles for information on these. Therefore, our analysis of design characteristics has an overrepresentation of publicly accessible chatbots.

They can take over common inquiries, such as questions about shipping and pricing. Bots answer them in seconds and only route the more complex chats to specific agents. This way, the load on your staff will decrease, the quality of service will stay high, and you’ll keep customers happy. Your business can reach a wider audience, segment your visitors, and persuade consumers to shop with you through suggested products and sales advertisements. Chatbots can also track interests to provide proper notification based on the individual. Then you’ll be interested in the fact that chatbots can help you reduce cart abandonment, delight your shoppers with product recommendations, and generate more leads for your marketing campaigns.

So next time, a random patient contacts the clinic or a hospital, you have all the information in front of you — the name, previous visit, underlying health issue, and last appointment. It just takes a minute to gauge the details and respond to them, thereby reducing their wait time and expediting the process. These healthcare chatbot use cases show that artificial intelligence can smoothly integrate with existing procedures and ease common stressors experienced by the healthcare industry. Healthcare chatbots can also be used to collect and maintain patient data, like symptoms, lifestyle habits, and medical history after discharge from a medical facility.

Scheduling Appointments

Administrators in healthcare industry can handle various facets of hospital operations by easily accessing vital patient information through Zoho’s platform. While clinicians can enhance patient care through unified hospital communication and centralized storage of patient data. That happens with chatbots that strive to help on all fronts and lack access to consolidated, specialized databases. Plus, a chatbot in the medical field should fully comply with the HIPAA regulation. From those who have a coronavirus symptom scare to those with other complaints, AI-driven chatbots may become part of hospitals’ plans to meet patients’ needs during the lockdown. Many health professionals have taken to telemedicine to consult with their patients, allay fears, and provide prescriptions.

Using these safeguards, the HIPAA regulation requires that chatbot developers incorporate these models in a HIPAA-complaint environment. This requires that the AI conversations, entities, and patient personal identifiers are encrypted and stored in a safe environment. That sums up our module on training a conversational model for classifying intent and extracting entities using Rasa NLU. Your next step is to train your chatbot to respond to stories in a dialogue platform using Rasa core. For example, if a chatbot is designed for users residing in the United States, a lookup table for “location” should contain all 50 states and the District of Columbia. In this article, we shall focus on the NLU component and how you can use Rasa NLU to build contextual chatbots.

With a comprehensive understanding of IT processes, I am able to identify and effectively address the diverse needs of firms and industries. Once again, go back to the roots and think of your target audience in the context of their needs. Thirty chatbots were embedded within a specific organization’s platform (e.g., Case 1, Clara on the CDC’s website).

Still, it may not work for a doctor seeking information about drug dosages or adverse effects. NEW YORK — Komal Vilas Thatkare says she doesn’t have anyone to ask about her most private health questions. No matter how much you try to use a bot, it won’t satisfy your needs if you pick the wrong provider. This transforms the banking experience for the clients and most of them want to have the possibility to use digital channels to interact with the bank. In fact, about 61% of banking consumers interact weekly with their banks on digital channels. No wonder the voice assistance users in the US alone reached over 120 million in 2021.

• Depending on the relevance of the report, users can also either approve or reject it.
• They can answer reactions to your Instagram stories, communicate with your Facebook followers, and chat with people interested in specific products.
• Projections indicate that the number of voice chatbots is expected to exceed 8 billion by 2023.
• If you’re looking to get a personalized consultation and diagnosis validation from a doctor, it will cost $99 for each consultation.
• On top of all that, we’ll discuss the use cases that these chatbots can have.
• But, you should remember that bots are an addition to the mental health professionals, not a replacement for them.

This AI-driven technology can quickly respond to queries and sometimes even better than humans. A medical bot can recognize when a patient needs urgent help if trained and designed correctly. It can provide immediate attention from a doctor by setting appointments, especially during emergencies.

For someone with no prior experience in the technical field, developing a healthcare Chatbot might be a tremendous challenge. Large healthcare organizations are always on the lookout for new staff to hire onboard. They frequently generate a lot of documentation that needs to be filled out and credentials that need to be double-checked to process these applications.

Use cases should be defined in advance, involving business analysts and software engineers. Healthcare chatbots help patients avoid unnecessary tests and costly treatments, guiding them through the system more effectively. Most risk assessment and disease surveillance chatbots did not follow-up on symptomatic users. Privacy concerns and regulations may have precluded this since following up requires that chatbots capture identifying information. The final use case, proactive monitoring (3 cases), involves proactively monitoring at-risk populations, such as the elderly,28–31 by checking whether users are experiencing symptoms or have been exposed to the virus.

As shown in Figure 3, the chatbots in our sample varied in their design along a number of attributes. Physicians worry about how their patients might look up and try cures mentioned on dubious online sites, but with a chatbot, patients have a dependable source to turn to at any time. AIMultiple informs hundreds of thousands of businesses (as per similarWeb) including 60% of Fortune 500 every month.