Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the new buzzword dancing around the global healthcare industry these days. This technology provides us with several AI-powered medical tools and solutions that have the potential to bring a revolution in the clinical sphere.
Healthcare chatbots are especially getting more and more popular in comparison to other AI products. There has been a plethora of information spinning around the internet providing clinical practices and caregivers with crucial tips to streamline the development, deployment, and maintenance of these bots.
But very few of them talk about the perks these medical bots have in stock for the patients because they promise to boost their overall experience by being highly responsive and personalized. Let’s explore what are these bots and how they can serve their purpose for the patients.
What Are AI-Powered Medical Chatbots?
The clinical bots work on the principles of AI in healthcare and primarily gather information from the internet or the database to guess, analyze, and answer the queries of the patients. These bots are conversational in nature and perform several complex customer service tasks such as helping patients in scheduling or book appointments, taking pills, refilling prescriptions, etc. Now, let’s look at the six ways in which these chatbots enhance the patient experience:
-
Streamlining Follow-up Medical Care
It’s not practically possible for the caregivers to provide the patients with quality care even after they leave the clinical premises. But bots can be an efficient solution to this problem. They can be used to encourage patients to keep a proper track of their progress and record their changing symptoms. It will be much easier for the patients to discuss these details when they visit a doctor’s clinic for a follow-up or routine check-up.
-
Completely Secure & Safe For Patients
The majority of the clinical bots are built in compliance with HIPAA standards. It means that they are developed by keeping security protocols in mind and following all the rules to keep the Protected Health Information (PHI) safe.
The HIPAA Safeguards for Dentists requires a dental practice to conduct a written risk assessment and develop safeguards to protect electronic patient information. This is why there’s no need to worry when exchanging your confidential health-related details via bots. Your privacy will be respected and more importantly, the data will not get compromised. Clinical bots are considered to be much more secure than search engines. It’s because these search engines don’t guarantee to keep private data secure.
-
Acts As Virtual Nurses To Patients At-Home
Chatbots are extremely helpful to patients who have just come back home from a hospital. These bots can perform all the tasks of a nurse and provide them with quality at-home care. Also, they can help them in connecting with their doctors as and when they require.
For instance, Florence is a medical bot that acts as a personal assistant to the patients. It encourages them to stick to their determined schedule and take pills on time. Also, it provides them with relevant information on different topics related to healthcare.
-
Resolve Medical Queries By Providing Relevant Insights
Patients can ask different health-related questions to these bots and can get informative answers. These bots can compare similar drugs and provide patients with their potential side effects. Also, they can discover the best solution to the general health problems of the patients by exploring herbal remedies or digging deep into medical resources.
For example, Eliza is a medical chatbot which is an electronic therapist to whom patients can ask relevant questions. Similarly, HealthTap is another clinical bot that can give answers to patient’s queries. Also, it can help them in checking their symptoms and finding a relevant specialist doctor to treat the same.
-
Provides Patients With A Personalized Experience By Making Use Of The Data At Hand
When dealing with search engines, patients have to sift through several articles because they show generic results by not considering the medical history of the particular patient. But healthcare bots have the potential to gather and analyze the past medical details of that patient such as last appointment details and current symptoms. On the basis of collected information, bots can provide patients with a personalized experience that is tailored in accordance with their personal requirements.
-
Cost-Efficient Alternative
Without a doubt, the chatbot is a cost-efficient alternative for patients as it allows them to save a lot of precious time and money which they would have to otherwise spend on visiting a doctor’s clinic personally in order to perform simple tasks such as refilling prescriptions, discuss current symptoms, get an answer to a generic health-related query, etc.
We are dwelling in an advanced tech-savvy world and here it’s highly recommended to be in sync with the current technologies and have an idea to exploit their potential for one’s own benefit.
