The future of healthcare looks promising as technology looks to enable a whole new era of automation to add speed and accuracy to the industry. For instance, using chatbots in the healthcare industry is a promising way to serve patients and clients better and give medical professionals the time and headspace to focus on more specialized work.
We’ve seen chatbots change the landscape of customer service, sales, and business. But now, innovation is starting to transform healthcare as we know it as well.
Doctors and healthcare professionals spend an enormous amount of time on administrative work, which steals from their capacity to provide quality care to patients. We’re in an era where chatbots are taking away administrative burdens so that more time goes straight to the patient.
Benefits of Chatbots
What are some of the benefits of chat software and chatbots, and how can these tools enable healthcare experts and workers? Let’s discuss some of the more glaring ones.
Efficiency
Technology is often ground-breaking because it allows humans to be more efficient, taking out repetitive and time-consuming work that provides little value. Take, for instance, information dissemination. If a doctor’s assistant had to inform all patients of a change in appointment because their specialist would be away, it would take several minutes or even hours to do so. With artificial intelligence-based chat broadcasts, that work could be reduced greatly.
Faster response rates
The wait times in healthcare are a pain point that many patients and professionals had to struggle with. But since chatbots respond instantaneously when programmed, they can decrease wait times on responses on queries and requests. Moreover, chatbots generate 35-40% response rates, a promising number that doesn’t just indicate speed but engagement as well.
Higher engagement
With higher engagement, medical professionals can have more touchpoints with patients at once.
People in need of medical care don’t just need physiological first aid. They need attention too. And since chatbots provide another layer of engagement, patients who feel neglected become more of a rarity.
Higher engagement can also lead to better data points. People who engage with a chatbot often provide information that could be processed and analyzed to help healthcare institutions and professionals make more informed decisions. For instance, as patients report their symptoms, healthcare professionals could track that data and determine what medications need to be stocked up to treat those conditions.
More results
Behind all technological innovation is a desire to bring more results, whether on the philosophical or business side of things. Up to 41.3% of consumers say that chatbots influenced their purchases. So for healthcare companies in pharmaceuticals, for instance, chatbots could be a great way to increase sales while also minimizing costs on sales representatives and incentive programs.
Use Cases of Chatbots in Healthcare
There are many possible applications of healthcare chatbots when given time to think about the many ways that artificial intelligence could make healthcare easier for us. Let’s discuss some potential use cases of chatbots in healthcare and the benefits of deploying such programs.
Give medical information
Some organizations have created a chatbot for the healthcare system using artificial intelligence to provide information to a patient. Computer learning and proper query planning could give more contextual information to patients who might need assistance for non-emergency cases.
Chatbots respond faster to simple queries that could be templated for patients who might not need a specialist to assess therefore bringing quicker alleviation. Surprisingly enough, chatbots can handle up to 68% of conversations from start to finish, meaning most people are okay with conversing with a bot as it adequately provides the information needed to act on certain situations.
Collect patient data
Chatbots don’t just give information faster. They also take them faster too. The research and development applications of chatbots have brought healthcare learning to another level. Medical institutions can now put out surveys, and data collection reports with more accuracy and speed. This comes with a smaller effort, as well as it takes out the need to manually contact respondents.
Chatbots can also analyze data points to a certain extent and provide data-crunching capabilities for better reporting. This application takes out the time and effort needed to compute data while also decreasing the chances for miscalculations caused by human error.
Take appointments
Setting an appointment with a doctor, or any professional for that matter, can be a nuisance at some level. The back and forth could easily take a significant portion of an admin’s time. But chatbots can take appointment requests and easily determine which time slots are still available, making appointment setting more efficient.
In a time where cloud-based technology and internet capabilities reign, people can also book appointments wherever they are and eliminate the need to make a phone call or come to an office specifically just to get on a doctor or health expert’s schedule.
Insurance inquiries and sales
Another sub-sector of healthcare that chatbots could revolutionize is the insurance industry. Sales and marketing are major factors for health and life insurance-based services and companies, but responding to inquiries could be extremely tedious and time-consuming. The rise of conversational marketing through highly-trained chatbots could give interested clients the information needed to make informed decisions.
Chatbots could also improve the after-sales aspect of insurance by providing insured clients with access to doctor directories, services covered, benefits included, exclusions indicated, and so on without having to call a certified agent.
Taking on requests for prescription refills
Designing conversational interfaces for healthcare could also eliminate the manual back and forth on prescription refill requests, helping both the patient and the healthcare provider save precious time and effort on a process that would be otherwise tedious without technology. The rate of accuracy could even be higher and approval more efficient if medical professionals start thinking about using chatbots to streamline prescription request-related conversations.
Finding specialists in your area
Finding the types of doctors patients need for certain scenarios could be tedious, which chatbots could solve. When medical facilities and institutions deploy chatbot directories for specialist doctors, people get all information related to getting an appointment with them, including clinic hours, contact information, specializations offered and so on. In cases where people might not be aware of what kind of a doctor they need, a highly trained AI facility could also be created to educate people on the different specializations for various cases.
Basic wellness advice
Creating a healthcare chatbot using machine learning could also become a basic database for wellness planning. It’s no secret that prevention is better than cure, so people need streamlined access to wellness services such as nutrition planning, lifestyle coaching, and so on.
Much of the education aspect to wellness and lifestyle can also be automated by creating a chatbot that could guide people through contextual information relating to their diet, sleeping habits, stress management practices, and other behaviors. The possibilities are endless for wellness when chatbots get created to streamline the education process.
How to choose the right chatbot platform
Clearly, chatbots are crucial to online healthcare services, but it’s important to choose the right platform to host your chatbots. While healthcare providers are focusing on giving the best care to patients, the chatbot should also lend a helping hand in delighting patients. The ideal platform to host your chatbots should have:
Artificial Intelligence
An AI-powered intuitive chatbot will understand the patient’s questions without deflecting to a representative. But not all chatbots are powered by AI and, without it, there will be a heavy dependence on building bot flows which are ultimately time-consuming.
Multilingual Support
Since digital healthcare is global, your patients might want to communicate in their preferred language. Chatbot platforms that provide options for several languages will help you offer support broadly. Moreover, it’s important to find a platform that has a varied list of multilingual support, so you can build the chatbot in your local language.
HIPAA and data security certifications
If you choose to use chatbots to collect patient information, it falls on you to ensure the safety of their data. This is why it’s important to choose a chatbot platform that is compliant with global security standards so your patients can rest easy knowing that their information is secure.
Freshchat is the right choice to host your chatbot. Freshchat’s chatbots are powered by AI and use machine learning to intuitively communicate with patients, the chatbot learns from every patient interaction to provide better answers to the next. The chatbot can be built in over 50 global languages with little-to-no coding requirements. Most importantly, the chatbot is compliant with HIPAA, GDPR and other data security certifications. Give Freshchat a go with the 21-day free trial.
Era of Smart Healthcare?
Artificial intelligence is good for the employment workforce. As it takes away certain administrative tasks, it also creates more jobs that are less time-sensitive and high-impact, such as patient relationship management and other more “human” jobs. With technology improving, we’ll soon see more advancements that can benefit healthcare professionals and patients.
