AI Chatbots in Healthcare Examples + Development Guide

While it’s challenging to predict exactly how medical chatbots will shape our future health management, considering their rapid advancement and the growing demand for digital innovation in healthcare, it’s hard to imagine a future without them. Many people believed that having the option to consult with a chatbot would encourage them to seek medical advice earlier—highlighting the critical role that chatbots could play in addressing sensitive health issues. We sought to understand current public perceptions of medical chatbots and the ways people believe they can benefit from this emerging technology. Medical chatbots provide quick and convenient health information by tapping into an ever-expanding array of databases and sources of knowledge. Customized chat technology helps patients avoid unnecessary lab tests or expensive treatments.

While chatbots offer many benefits for healthcare providers and patients, several challenges must be addressed to implement them successfully. Healthcare providers must ensure that chatbots are regularly updated and maintained for accuracy and reliability. AI chatbots are used in healthcare to provide patients with a more personalized experience while reducing the workload of healthcare professionals. In this article, we will explore how chatbots in healthcare can improve patient engagement and experience and streamline internal and external support. Similarly, the widespread use of chatbots for medical purposes could invite cybersecurity and data privacy concerns from patients, for valid reasons.

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Chatbots called virtual assistants or virtual humans can handle the initial contact with patients, asking and answering the routine questions that inevitably come up. During the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, especially, screening for this infection by asking certain questions in a certain predefined order, and thus assessing the risk of COVID-19 could save thousands of manual screenings. Traditional therapy, while beneficial, often faces challenges like high costs and limited availability. This is exacerbated by a growing demand for counselors outpacing the supply of mental health providers.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and automation have rapidly become popular in many industries, including healthcare. One of the most fascinating applications of AI and automation in healthcare is using chatbots. Chatbots in healthcare are computer programs designed to simulate conversation with human users, providing personalized assistance and support.

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Studies have shown that Watson for Oncology still cannot replace experts at this moment, as quite a few cases are not consistent with experts (approximately 73% concordant) [67,68]. Nonetheless, this could be an effective decision-making tool for cancer therapy to standardize treatments. Although not specifically an oncology app, another chatbot example for clinicians’ use is the chatbot Safedrugbot (Safe In Breastfeeding) [69].

In addition, studies will need to be conducted to validate the effectiveness of chatbots in streamlining workflow for different health care settings. Nonetheless, chatbots hold great potential to complement telemedicine by streamlining medical administration and autonomizing patient encounters. From the patient’s perspective, various chatbots have been designed for symptom screening and self-diagnosis. The ability of patients to be directed to urgent referral pathways through early warning signs has been a promising market.

In terms of cancer therapy, remote monitoring can support patients by enabling higher dose chemotherapy drug delivery, reducing secondary hospitalizations, and providing health benefits after surgery [73-75]. Early cancer detection can lead to higher survival rates and improved quality of life. Inherited factors are present in 5% to 10% of cancers, including breast, colorectal, prostate, and rare tumor syndromes [62]. Family history collection is a proven way of easily accessing the genetic disposition of developing cancer to inform risk-stratified decision-making, clinical decisions, and cancer prevention [63]. The web-based chatbot ItRuns (ItRunsInMyFamily) gathers family history information at the population level to determine the risk of hereditary cancer [29].

However, to achieve transformative results, the key lies in perfecting underlying technologies, starting natural language processing. It is a branch of AI that enables machines to analyze and understand human language data. This is a challenging task as humans have developed languages over thousands of years to communicate information and ideas. NLP algorithms work to convert human language into a form that machines can comprehend, involving processes like converting text into binary vectors and creating a matrix representation of sentences.

Watsonx Assistant AI chatbots can field a full range of patient inquiries and respond with intelligent, actionable recommendations and patient guidance in real time. And any time a patient has a more complex or sensitive inquiry, the call can be automatically routed to a healthcare professional who can now focus their energy where it’s needed most. When chatbots are developed by private healthcare companies, they usually follow the market logic, such as profit maximisation, or at the very least, this dimension is dominant. Through the rapid deployment of chatbots, the tech industry may gain a new kind of dominance in health care. AI technologies, especially ML, have increasingly been occupying other industries; thus, these technologies are arguably naturally adapted to the healthcare sector.

Fourth, it offers quality-of-life surveys, oral health surveys and health coaching. In the aftermath of COVID-19, Omaolo was updated to include ‘Coronavirus symptoms checker’, a service that ‘gives guidance regarding exposure to and symptoms of COVID-19’ (Atique et al. 2020, p. 2464; Tiirinki et al. 2020). In September 2020, the THL released the mobile contact tracing app Koronavilkku,Footnote 1 which can collaborate with Omaolo by sharing information and informing the app of positive test cases (THL 2020, p. 14).

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The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interests with respect to the authorship and/or publication of this article. Further information on research design is available in the Nature Research Reporting Summary linked to this article.

Jelvix’s HIPAA-compliant platform is changing how physical therapists interact with their patients. Our mobile application allows patients to receive videos, messages, and push reminders directly to their phones. The platform’s web version will enable them to shoot videos/photos using a webcam. Thus, responsible doctors monitor the patient’s health status online and give feedback on the correct exercise.

Further, the risk of bias in this domain was judged as serious in one study, as the classification of the intervention status could be affected by knowledge of the outcome in that study. Thirdly, while the chatbox systems have the potential to create efficient healthcare workplaces, we must be vigilant to ensure that credentialed people remain employed at these workplaces to maintain a human connection with patients. There will be a temptation to allow chatbox systems a greater workload than they have proved they deserve.

• Both chatbots have algorithms that calculate input data and become increasingly smarter when people use the respective platforms.
• Additionally, the use of healthbots in healthcare is a nascent field, and there is a limited amount of literature to compare our results.
• The effectiveness and safety outcomes of chatbots may be different when considering long-term, relative to short-term, findings; it is essential to assess long-term outcomes.
• Characteristics of the comparators and measured outcomes in each included study are presented in Multimedia Appendix 6.

ChatGPT and similar large language models would be the next big step for artificial intelligence incorporating into the healthcare industry. With hundreds of millions of users, people could easily find out how to treat their symptoms, how to contact a physician, and so on. But, as we move forward, we must remember that medical chatbots should be offered as a complement, not a replacement, to face-to-face interactions with healthcare professionals. Some experts also believe doctors will recommend chatbots to patients with ongoing health issues. In the future, we might share our health information with text bots to make better decisions about our health. In the case of Tessa, a wellness chatbot provided harmful recommendations due to errors in the development stage and poor training data.

The increasing use of bots in health care—and AI in general—can be attributed to, for example, advances in machine learning (ML) and increases in text-based interaction (e.g. messaging, social media, etc.) (Nordheim et al. 2019, p. 5). Chatbots are based on combining algorithms and data through the use of ML techniques. Their function is thought to be the delivery of new information or a new perspective.

• Patients suffering from mental health issues can seek a haven in healthcare chatbots like Woebot that converse in a cognitive behavioral therapy-trained manner.
• Search terms in this review were related to population (eg, mental disorder, mood disorder, and anxiety disorder) and intervention (eg, conversational agent, chatbot, chatterbot, and virtual agent).
• With state and local restrictions, people remained inside their homes more frequently to reduce the risk of spreading the coronavirus.
• As an important component of proactive healthcare services, chatbots are already used in hospitals, pharmacies, laboratories, and even care facilities.

Leading natural language understanding (NLU) paired with advanced clarification and continuous learning helps achieve better understanding and sharper accuracy for patients. Deliver your best self-service support experience across all patient engagement points and seamlessly integrate AI-powered agents with existing systems and processes. As a result of patient self-diagnoses, chatbot in healthcare physicians may have difficulty convincing patients of their potential preliminary misjudgement. This persuasion and negotiation may increase the workload of professionals and create new tensions between patients and physicians. Capacity is an AI-powered support automation platform that provides an all-in-one solution for automating support and business processes.

The search was further limited using the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) categories “Medical Health” and “Healthy Living”. The IAB develops industry standards to support categorization in the digital advertising industry; 42Matters labeled apps using these standards40. Relevant apps on the iOS Apple store were identified; then, the Google Play store was searched with the exclusion of any apps that were also available on iOS, to eliminate duplicates. Chatbots ask patients about their current health issue, find matching physicians and dentists, provide available time slots, and can schedule, reschedule, and delete appointments for patients.

Therefore, AI technologies (e.g. chatbots) should not be evaluated on the same level as human beings. AI technologies can perform some narrow tasks or functions better than humans, and their calculation power is faster and memory more reliable. Seventy-four (53%) apps targeted patients with specific illnesses or diseases, sixty (43%) targeted patients’ caregivers or healthy individuals, and six (4%) targeted healthcare providers. The total sample size exceeded seventy-eight as some apps had multiple target populations. A conversational AI chatbot called Scout was created by the health technology company Gyant.