Skip links

The Arrival of Medical Chatbots: Impact on Patient Care

Medical chatbots or clinical chatbots are ruling the roost in the medical industry. With emerging practices like remote patient monitoring, 360-degree wellbeing, and emotion analysis applications on the rise, the healthcare industry’s propensity to look for advanced technologies for patient care is understandable.

Today’s medical chatbots are not merely bots that answer pre-programmed queries; they go beyond that. With Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), facial recognition, and other advanced technologies, modern chatbots can assess symptoms, schedule visits, recommend treatments, and determine the next steps post-diagnosis.

To understand the true significance of clinical chatbots, it is imperative to understand what they are, what they do, and what the future holds.

  1. The role of AI and ML in chatbots
  2. An overview of how clinical chatbots are developed
  3. The benefits of healthcare chatbots

1. The role of AI and ML in Chatbots

AI technology: Rule-based chatbots are designed to only provide predefined solutions (that are already fed into it ) to the queries, whereas AI chatbots not only understand commands, but also the language. They also have the potential to learn more and behave appropriately in new situations. They receive the information, analyze it, and decide on the best course of action.

ML technology: Machine learning and natural language processing are the foundations of all chatbots. As a result, machine learning is not a distinct type of chatbot. However, it is a component of AI Chatbot. ML chatbots continually learn from the encountered situations and experiences with almost minimal intervention by humans.

2. How clinical chatbots are developed

The development process of building AI-based healthcare chatbots is multi-layered and complex. Here’s an overview of areas that developers cover while building a healthcare chatbot.

  1. Conversational Designing: Brings together conversational cooperation, intent, context, turn-taking to maintain a natural and free-flowing conversation between the user and the bot.
  2. UI Designing: This entails arranging design elements in basic patterns to make navigating straightforward and pleasant.
  3. Fusion of Human and AI element: It brings the best of both worlds, bots help generate reports of symptoms, and doctors investigate and provide an accurate diagnosis.
  4. Rasa NLU: An open-source library for natural language understanding used in chatbot conversations for intent classification, response generation and retrieval, and entity extraction.
  5. Adding HIPAA compliance: The HIPAA act outlines rules for using protected health information (PHI).

3. Benefits of healthcare chatbots

On-demand availability and monitoring

With the onslaught of diseases today, medical professionals are often overworked and hard-pressed for time. A chatbot can help overcome this shortcoming as patients can use them anytime they want, around the clock. Chatbots also play a crucial role in reminding patients to take their medicine on time and help monitor their health status.

Quick information retrieval

Traditionally, medical institutions spend an enormous amount of time searching for patient information in their record systems. With an AI-based virtual assistant in their fold, they can accomplish these tasks much more quickly and avoid risks of human error.

Booking appointments

Chatbots come in real handy when it comes to booking appointments. They are also efficient in connecting patients with the right doctors and maintaining track of all their appointments and follow-ups if needed again.

Clinical support

Chatbots are also used for symptom-checking and help answer additional questions posed by patients, allowing hospital employees to concentrate on more significant tasks, making way for better healthcare service quality.

Augment your patient engagement techniques with Netlabs Global. Our experts are well-versed in developing cutting-edge chatbots that will serve to improve patient experience in your healthcare organization. Talk to us today to know more.

Leave a comment

Name*

Website

Comment