Listen to this articleSome providers still doubt whether patients themselves need patient portals to get data about their health status. Others tend to disregard the demand in mHealth applications to ensure convenient care delivery. Now, chatbots are new in healthcare town. Would they have to fight rejection as well?
One of the reasons why healthcare struggles to balance costs and patient health outcomes is rooted in the lack of patient compliance. As soon as patients step out of the facility doors, they have to face new routine, medications, nutrition limitations, and exercise therapy all by themselves. As a result, they often fail to adhere to treatment.
For the past few years, providers invested in healthcare software development to bridge the gap in communication with patients between appointments. Earlier, caregivers adopted patient portals; later they advanced with mHealth apps that allowed a more interactive way to improve compliance and involve patients in everything related to their wellbeing. A patient could track their vitals, record nutrition, and symptoms, and keep up with the treatment plan and physical exercises all in one app.
But with all the benefits that mobile patient apps bring in, they are still not enough to ensure compliance. For some patients, any reminder about their disease or limitations related to it is painful. Patients often stop taking prescribed medications only because they don’t want to do it or because they already feel well. Thinking about illness is hard.
How Conversational UI Can Assist Patients
AI development companies, such as Iflexion, put major stakes on chatbots, which are automated agents designed to simulate conversation in mobile messaging apps. Since messengers are among the most used applications today, different industries harness the power of the “conversational UI” (another name for chatbots) and apply it anywhere from ecommerce to politics. The question is whether this technology can be equally effective in healthcare and beat mHealth apps in patient engagement.
Chatbots can open the door into AI-driven healthcare, where patients will communicate their symptoms to a conversational agent and get a consultation from it using their preferred messaging app. A chatbot may ask a series of casual questions about the user’s age, gender, and health complaints. The backend will instantly fill in the patient profile, which can later be used to automatically complete medical forms for admission or an appointment.
By asking a patient personalized questions and completing his or her profile, the UI identifies symptoms and determines the probability of a particular disease based on them. Then, the chatbot can suggest treatment options or advise the patient to schedule an appointment with their physician to take additional tests.
Allowing patients to get a consultation via a messenger is much more effective than asking individuals to download and open another standalone app. Instead, patients will have their own pocket healthcare assistant already set up and waiting for their requests. No additional actions needed.
This idea can also help older patients, who may be confused with a complex mHealth app’s UI, but certainly, know how to write a message to their children or provider. As a result, speaking with a chatbot about their health concerns feels more natural to them.
What Makes Chatbots Stand Out
Overall, chatbots seem to allow cutting down on unnecessary consultations and creating an advanced medical data model. However, they can feel “robotic,” which hinders compliance in the same way as it happens with mobile patient applications.
To make chatting applications feel realistic, the healthcare software development industry taps into the recent advances in AI:
-Repositories of public chat scripts, which allow chatbots to learn, understand, and mimic human conversations with random words, exclamation marks, and other “human” features.
-Tools that embed NLP, sentiment analysis and concept extraction technologies into chat scripts.
-Algorithms that detect emotions in the natural language to add empathy to chatbot conversation.
-Improvements in image recognition allowing chatbots to process pictures, hand-written notes, and even QR codes.
Healthcare Chatbots Around the Globe
Project RED from the Boston University Medical Center developed nurse Louise, who can explain a condition to patients, teach them how to take their medications, and go over their home care needs at the hospital discharge time.
Your.MD is a robotic health assistant from the UK. It allows a patient to enter symptoms and answer additional questions to pinpoint the diagnosis. Upon receiving information about the suggested condition, the patient can be referred to a local caregiver. This chatbot can also provide patients with therapeutic education on sexual health, mental health, wellbeing, family health, nutrition, and exercises. Your.MD is available on major messaging platforms, such as Skype, Telegram, and Kik. Patients can also download Your.MD mobile app for iOS or Android, which allows them to synchronize data from health and fitness apps to see the progress.
Coming from Stanford University, MedWhat is an artificial intelligence medical assistant. It can answer medical questions, help patients with their daily health and wellness routine, and manage reminders. With the help of MedWhat, patients can have a Health Record profile with the history of answered questions, diagnoses, and health state information, including steps count, weight, and sleeping hours. This AI assistant can also help physicians and nurses with personalized medical questions tied to patient EMRs and medical literature. It is currently available as a standalone app for Android, iOS, or Windows Phone.
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Engaging Patients via Chatbot
As we know, compliance starts with the interaction between a health specialist and a patient. The level of a patient’s dedication to their own health gradually lowers as they step out of the facility and start fighting the condition all by themselves. While mHealth patient apps are more effective in maintaining the distant patient-caregiver bond than patient portals, they still aren’t easy and natural for many patients.
Chatbots seem to be the next distant care delivery tool. By offering conversation-like experience, they may have what it takes to make patients adhere to treatment. However, we still need to remember that a strong relationship between a physician and their patient is the starting point in ensuring compliance.
Written by: Yaroslav Kuflinski is an AI/ML Observer at Iflexion
Yaroslav Kuflinski has profound experience in IT and keeps up to date on the latest AI/ML research. Yaroslav focuses on AI and ML as tools to solve complex business problems and maximize operations.
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