Disrupting the Status Quo: The Impact of Chatbots on Healthcare

“Technological change is not additive; it is ecological. New technology does not merely add something; it changes everything.”

Neil Postman – a well-known American author, culture critic, educator, and media theorist, declared the above statement with absolute conviction.

And Netsmartz agrees!

AI technology has largely been disrupting many industries in the 2020s. The healthcare industry is no different.

The Grand View Research stipulated that the global artificial intelligence in the healthcare market size was valued at USD 15.4 billion in 2022.

Brace yourself for an upward trajectory! This trend is projected to skyrocket with a 37.5% growth by 2030.”

The growing demand for digital information and access to patient data is a driving force for the growth of AI in healthcare. The growing global geriatric population, shifting lifestyles, and increasing incidence of chronic conditions have significantly driven the demand for early disease detection and improved understanding – all of which are possible today through AI technology, machine learning, predictive analysis, and data mining.

Today with the help of technology in healthcare – various lower-level responsibilities are automated, saving plenty of time for medical professionals facing a severe time crunch. Not to mention how organized data saves time and nine far too often.

Today we’re seeing how healthcare chatbots are instrumental in disrupting the way healthcare service achieves an added layer of excellence. They can gather, store, and monitor while offering various informative support that guarantees patients a more cohesive healthcare experience. Healthcare chatbots are revolutionizing the healthcare sector with their efficiency.

Learn more about how we can help you with your custom healthcare software development needs.

The Global News Wire claims that the healthcare chatbots market size will surpass USD 944.45 billion by 2032 at a steadily growing rate of 16.98%. This number is only a projected ballpark, and if you’re interested in how healthcare chatbots can change how this world functions, read on.

Benefits of Healthcare Chatbots

The use of healthcare chatbots has been a luxurious experience and asset for the industry in multiple ways. Here are a few key benefits that you should be aware of.

1. Round-the-Clock Availability

Not everyone needing medical attention may always be attended to by medical professionals. Anyone can require immediate medical assistance. One may need to recognize symptoms etc. Healthcare chatbots are extremely useful in such situations. They are easily accessible round-the-clock without the need to set up an appointment or wait in long queues.

2. Data-Collection and Easy Engagement

Healthcare thrives on empathy, and by probing users, chatbots can gather data to provide a bespoke experience for each patient using the service. It also helps enhance business processes in the future.

You may argue that – websites are equally yoked to help provide answers to patients. However, they are not equipped to provide a curated personal experience as a chatbot can. A healthcare chatbot can easily engage with patients and is perfect for data collection for future use.

3. Attending to All Parties

Medical professionals can only provide one-on-one care. They are heavily constrained in their ability to provide medical care to multiple patients in the span of the same time. On the contrary, medical chatbots can assist several patients simultaneously without compromising service.

Chatbots can also help patients effectively communicate with healthcare specialists by scheduling phone calls, remote video calls, relay messages, and even emails. Doing so helps facilitate increased patient engagement and provides opportunities to concentrate on patients who need more care.

4. Instantaneous Information Availability

The medical field operates on the premise that – ” time is of the absolute essence!”

Each second matters, and the presence of healthcare chatbots enhances the efficiency of the need for timely delivery of information to concerned medical professionals in dire need.

For instance, on prompt, chatbots can provide patients’ medical history in case a patient runs into an unpredicted attack. Chatbots are very helpful in such cases; they could eliminate the need for unwanted research tests. 

Key Use Cases: Uses of Healthcare Chatbots

Now that you understand how healthcare is revolutionized with the presence of chatbots, you can now further learn more about chatbot use cases.

Here are some use cases that have transformed the healthcare sector in the last couple of years.

1. Aids Easy Scheduling of Appointments

The most often performed task in the healthcare industry is scheduling appointments. However, using a separate application to schedule appointments is challenging for many patients. Many applications require multi-level information requirements to access the doctor’s appointment book. The more complex the process, the more likely patients will cancel their plans.

The best way to avoid this aspect is to use chatbots to schedule appointments. A minimal and well-designed healthcare chatbot can help you better plan your appointments based on your doctor’s availability.

Chatbots can communicate effectively with CRM systems to help medical staff keep track of patient appointments and follow-ups.

2. Aids by Providing Medical History and Information

The key to correct diagnosis and tracking your health progress depends on reliable data. Training chatbot algorithms using healthcare data, disease symptoms, indicators, and diagnoses is easy. Chatbots require regular public datasets to help keep the data and train the AI. These AI chatbots can easily comprehend user queries and respond based on the labels found in the training data.

It saves time and the hassle of multiple visits to the doctor to feed in updated patient data and information.

3. Aids by Helping Ascertain Symptoms

Before healthcare chatbots, patients had to visit a medical center to ascertain their symptoms physically and have their doctors check them out. On the contrary, with the development of chatbots, patients can feed on their physical symptoms. The NLP-based chatbots can interpret the various inputs and requests and provide a curated accurate diagnosis to help determine whether you need to visit a medical practitioner to investigate the ailment further.

4. Aids in Coverage & Claims

Chatbots can take over mundane tasks that don’t essentially require human interference. You can now train healthcare chatbots to help patients with their insurance claims. It is a relatively easier way to obtain patient information, whether or not they wish to avail coverage, file for claims, or even track the status of an ongoing claim.

5. Provides Instantaneous Response

Some of the most visited sections of any healthcare website are the ” FAQs” section. These questions are perfect for chatbots to handle daily. Chatbots can easily answer any general query that patients may have. More and more healthcare service businesses are adding value to their websites by adding chatbots to answer customer queries.

6. Automated Prescription Refills

One of the mundane tasks that healthcare chatbots can take over is automating medication refills. By relying on chatbot technology, it reduces the amount of overwhelming paperwork needed to process prescription refills. Chatbots can skip the process of going through a paper trail and check with pharmacies to determine whether your prescriptions have been filled and notify you to set up a pickup or determine delivery.

The Woebot chatbot effectively handles this aspect of the mental health industry. It also offers CBT services, focuses on mindfulness, and also provides dialectical behavior therapy.

7. Provide Wellness Program Recommendations

Healthcare businesses can rely on medical chatbots to boost awareness about their programs. These chatbots are trained to comprehend user intent through NLP and use sentiment analysis to suggest suitable healthcare programs for plausible patients. It promotes health and wellness and business for the healthcare industry.

8. Assist in Easy Scalability for Healthcare Industry

Every firm within the healthcare industry aims to scale according to the demand they face. Healthcare facilities face heavy foot traffic just about every day of the week. The best way to manage this rush hour is to provide them with a support system that takes on any unexpected increase in traffic.

By integrating a healthcare chatbot as part of your customer support, you can help address any oncoming issues and can handle real-time scalability problems. Healthcare chatbots increase customer service efficiency in the healthcare industry, making working hours more productive for healthcare professionals without adding much to their plate daily.

The Future of Healthcare Chatbots

One of the main obstacles that impede the acceptance of chatbot technology is that conversational AI is still in its early stages and has a long way to go before the industry can fully adopt it.

With time and training, these health bots will become more accurate and adequate to take on more responsibilities which will garner its successful acceptance in the industry.

However, some tangible future expectations for these health chatbots are

• They will soon be able to provide real-time health status monitoring and automatically aid requests during a crisis, much like how wearables can take on the task of actively monitoring health status on the go.
• They will aid in managing chronic illnesses, mental health, and wellness issues and reign in behavioral and psychological disorders.
• Most prevalent diseases today could have been averted were they detected early on. Early detection helps in the proactive prevention of further health-related damage. Healthcare chatbots can soon help proactively identify symptoms, cross-reference patients against medical history, seek out previous case scenarios, and recommend the best course of action for the future.
• Chatbots can help serve as virtual assistants and promote self-care.

How Can Netsmartz Help You?

With the increasing reliance on AI in healthcare and the growing patient trust in chatbots, the market size of chatbots in healthcare will skyrocket in the coming years. If you are gearing up to be a part of this market share and want to help your medical practitioners and patients; beat your competition to the curb – then Netsmartz can help you build a bespoke healthcare chatbot for your healthcare facility.