How Chatbots in Healthcare IMPROVING Healthcare?

Chatbots in healthcare can be extremely beneficial for people as healthcare professionals have limited resources and cannot be in assistance for supporting patients in everyday life. On-Site consultation of doctors is not always available thus chatbots could be really beneficial by providing personalized health and therapy information to patients.

Objective of healthcare Chatbots

According to the last reported statistics, the USA one of the most developed countries in the world has only 26 Physicians per 10,000 population which is less than the ideal number. The numbers go way down to a less developed country.

Here are statistics about physicians per 10,000 for some developed countries,

Source: WHO

We can see the numbers are not even great for developed counties wherein underdeveloped and developing countries the number us way less. Healthcare has always had a deficiency of professionals and larger congestion of patients.

Chatbots will not remove the problem completely but if those bots could even help for some normal medication and diagnosis, wouldn’t it reduce a lot of pressure from the healthcare professionals?

In some places, healthcare professionals even need to work for 60h per week just to handle the enormous pressure of patients.

Healthcare Chatbots could reduce the number of unnecessary visits from patients lowering the workload of professionals a little. It is one objective of Chatbots in healthcare.

Chatbots can help patients also by providing suggestions for diagnosis and basic recommendation of treatments based on the patient’s syndrome and medical history. Chatbots can really help in

• Scheduling Doctor’s Appointment
• Locating the nearest health clinic for immediate support
• Providing basic medication information for normal symptoms

Modern Chatbots in Healthcare – Used cases

The numbers of chatbots in healthcare are increasing every day as these bots are able to provide more personalized health suggestions which people often find pretty much satisfactory.

Symptom Checker Chatbot

Yes, a lot of information about symptoms is available on the internet. But, the sad part is that not all accurate information can be gained from a simple web search.

That is where the symptom checker chatbots come in handy. These bots are backed with real-life medical data. When a query is placed on it, it analyzes a lot of data and provides the closest and accurate information about the symptoms.

These bots analyzed the symptoms and provide the most viable suggestion for the next steps to be taken regarding the symptoms. As they trained with real-world medical data the evaluation of symptoms is mostly a lot better helpful. Some of the Symptom checker chatbots are

• Buoy Health
• Sensely
• Gyant

Cancer Chatbot

Cancer is a dangerous disease and requires a lot of effort to deal with it. The basic information about cancer is not much available as real data. CancerChatbot by CSource provides all the necessary and detailed data about cancer.

When cancer patients search for something about cancer, this bot fetches all the real-world data supplied by other cancer patients. The data provided in the CancerChatbot is reliable as those data are from real-world cancer patients and associated persons.

Florence Chatbot

Florence is one of the most used chatbots in the area of healthcare. It has gained a lot of people attending over time. She is a personal health tracker who reminds me of taking medicine pills on time. She Is powered by an automated intelligent messaging system.

She was named after the founder of modern nursing, Florence Nightingale. She is available over some social media platforms like Facebook Messenger, KIK, etc.

Florence was created in June 2016, by a German researcher David Hawig.

Safedrugbot

Safe drug dosage is immensely important for critical diseases as overdosage usually has a lot of side effects. Safedrugbot is more like an assistant of medical professionals which helps the professionals in determining the right drug and dosage by searching the vast drug database.

It is more healthcare professional friendly as it helps them to choose the proper drug. It is more helpful while dealing with pregnant and breastfeeding women.

Disadvantages of Healthcare Chatbots

Chatbots are offering so many advantages to patients, but it has some disadvantages too.

For treating patients, human interaction plays a pretty important role as more details about patient’s symptoms come out in doctor-patient real-life interaction. It is one universal fact for treating patients more effectively.

According to a Survey, Some Physicians thinks that,

• Chatbots cannot effectively care for all patient’s needs.
• Cannot display human emotion
• Cannot provide detailed diagnosis and treatment
• Chatbots could be a risk to patients if they self diagnose too often and do not accurately understand the diagnosis.

These are some real physicians’ opinions about the disadvantages of chatbots in healthcare.

Future Scope of Medical Chatbots

There is no doubt that chatbots will be a pretty big part of our healthcare system in the near future. The adoption of bots is increasing rapidly and the easy to use, easy to access and availability features are triggering its rapid growth.

Symptom checking bots, medicine suggesting bots, cancer disease information providing bots, medicine reminder bots, there are plenty of features of chatbots in the healthcare. The widespread use of bots could reduce the pressure from the professionals which would increase the quality of our care as professionals will be able to spend adequate time with patients and more support will be available for serious patients in need of medical care.

Many healthcare is now adopting technologies and developing advanced artificial intelligence integrated bots at a faster pace and making them open source so that those could be accessed without any trouble.

So, yeah there is an enormous scope of medical chatbots in our future which will benefit everyone.

Conclusion

A healthcare facility in underdeveloped and developing countries is very limited. There has always been a scarcity of medical professionals in many counties and there still is!

Chatbots can ease up the basic problems people are having. They can analyze real-life tons of symptoms data and its AI system will help in choosing the most appropriate diagnosis and medication solution. As chatbots deal with the most appropriate real-life data, the accuracy is higher and more helpful for the normal problems that we face in real life.