Role Of Healthcare Chatbots In Your Healthcare Practice
by Anthony Y. 10/14/2020
When it comes to health and wellness, the human touch is vital for its effectiveness. However, with the integration of technology and innovations that simplify medical functions, wouldn’t it be interesting to know how it would affect the quality of healthcare provided?
One efficient application is the introduction of a medical chatbot to the health industry. Depending on the service provider, a health bot serves a variety of functions. A health chatbot can function as an administrator, a medical practitioner, a panic button, a mental awareness companion, and so much more!
As technology progresses, the applications of a healthcare chatbot become limitless. Because of this, many healthcare providers are leaning towards its integration and, possibly, a solution for immediate health needs. Read further to learn more about healthcare chatbots and how they can benefit your healthcare business.
What is A Health Chatbot?
Also referred to as medical chatbots, health chatbots are an AI (artificial intelligence) powered service that people or patients can communicate or interact with. Using a messenger framework, these chatbots can answer simple queries, understand cases for a simple diagnosis, or act as the patient’s partner, especially for individuals experiencing anxiety episodes.
Depending on how it is programmed, chatbots can help an individual with health-related information. These include understanding symptoms, providing first-aid actions, and other crucial measures to preserve life while help arrives. Despite the practical applications, there’s one particular function that medical chatbots can’t do. It’s to provide a formal diagnosis concerning your current symptoms and health status.
What are The Benefits of a Medical Chatbot?
Since health chatbots are making waves to the healthcare industry, a healthcare provider may consider integrating this function for his organization’s operations. We’ll discuss more the benefits of incorporating a health bot to your services.
Functions as a Clinic or Hospital Administrator
Undoubtedly, clinic or hospital administrators have their hands full of tasks every day. They aid walk-in patients, doctors, and nurses when it comes to administrative functions like paperwork, answering calls, and more. To outsource this routine task, a health bot is integrated to help patients with their queries and scheduling appointments.
Patients do not have to wait several hours before their messages are attended. With a simple user request, patients can secure their spots for an appointment. Furthermore, a medical chatbot can also remind patients about their upcoming appointments.
Your healthcare staff doesn’t have to spend minutes to hours scheduling an appointment, answering queries, or even collecting patient information. With a HIPAA compliant chatbot, your staff can help in other urgent tasks.
Provides Aid as a Healthcare Consultant
People are naturally worried about their health. Questions arising from a simple cold to fever-like symptoms may cause alarm to an individual. Having one’s medical questions answered is a relief, especially if it’s from someone reliable. The convenience of having a health chatbot on your pocket is an undeniable comfort for many.
Moreover, healthcare chatbots take into consideration past medical history when answering queries. After all, a person wouldn’t want to waste hundreds or thousands of dollars for a consultation when a simple inquiry can solve it. However, when symptoms are severe, a chatbot will never replace a doctor’s intervention and treatment.
Keeps Your Health Records Secure
HIPAA Compliance in chatbots is an afterthought for many popular chatbot providers, but SmartBot360 was built with HIPAA Compliance in mind. The stigma for health conditions like HIV/AIDS, mental illnesses, or other transmittable diseases can cause alarm for people. This is why most patients aren’t confident with disclosing their health status to healthcare providers. With a medical chatbot, individuals diagnosed with transmittable diseases can acquire comprehensive medical answers to queries without causing alarm or prying eyes about their statuses.
Functions as All-Around Receptionist
A clinic or a healthcare provider tends to have numerous patients on-site asking about services, rates, and doctor availability. The primary option for most owners to solve this particular concern is to hire another person that will cater to both incoming patients and patients already having their consultations.
The cost of hiring another person is expensive, time-consuming, and with no guarantee of long-term sustainability. The integration of a healthcare chatbot makes it easier for you to entertain patients’ queries and engage visitors without the need for an extra pair of hands. What’s more, the chatbot is available 24/7 which makes it more convenient for the people to access and use. See our dentist chatbot and its uses here.
Acquiring Customer Leads and Providing Excellent Customer Service
A healthcare provider must be consistent with their actions of providing quality service to everyone. More than the clinic’s medical expertise, it should handle customer service beyond exceptional as well. A chatbot makes a client feel entertained and makes them feel valued. An instant response from a chatbot makes information-gathering quick and interactive.
Plus, you can follow-up on the leads gathered by the health chatbot should there be health discounts that they can easily avail. With the rising costs of healthcare everywhere, people would love to feel secure about their health status through loyalty packages or check-up discounts.
Despite having its advantages and useful applications, there are a lot of concerns both people, users and healthcare providers have when using health chatbots.
First, not all chatbots are HIPAA compliant. The use of media integration like SMS, Facebook messenger, or Whatsapp is not HIPAA compliant. Unencrypted messages can be read, especially if it isn’t protected.
However, web bots are more likely to be HIPAA-compliant as they can be encrypted in-transit, have strong passwords, and even provide training for media employees.
If you’re going to integrate a medical chatbot for your healthcare organization, you must keep an eye on the following matters. These include a secure technological framework for web and mobile applications, secures patient data, responsive to user requests and queries, and one that ultimately caters to your patients’ needs.
You can also choose to hire a tech company that specializes in such applications and takes part in every development process. From planning to execution to revisions, it is essential to develop a health chatbot that doesn’t compromise your patients’ security and provides immediate healthcare needs.
For more information about chatbots, you can check out this list of top 40 chatbot resources.