Leverage Healthcare Bot Development to Enhance Patient Experience

Table of Contents:

• The Role of Chatbots in Healthcare
• Types of Chatbots in Healthcare
• Business Benefits of Chatbots in the Healthcare Industry
• Crucial Factors to Consider When Implementing a Chatbot
• Chatbot Use Cases in Healthcare
• Rishabh’s Experience in Healthcare Bot Development
• Technologies to Develop Healthcare Chatbot
• The Future of Chatbots in Healthcare

Emma never misses an appointment with her doc anymore. Neither does she forget to take her prescribed medications on time! A medical bot acts as her assistant that tracks and reminds Emma about her appointments, antibiotics, diet, exercises, and body weight. Interesting, isn’t it?

These medical bots are AI-powered digital assistants that help healthcare providers, insurance companies and patients easily connect and communicate. They also play a vital role in making crucial health information easily accessible to the right stakeholders, at the right time.
Smart chatbots assist medical professionals and improving healthcare processes by generating actionable insights and enhancing the patient experience. They also track patient satisfaction & schedules appointments, cancellations, no-shows, and follow-ups.
Intuitively designed to make patients feel heard, valued, and validated, these chatbots, go a long way in providing empathetic & supportive care, intelligently. They serve as:

• Hospital administrators
• Healthcare consultants
• Elderly care providers
• Self-care coaches
• Emergency alarm

But, before you approach a technology partner to develop a chatbot for your healthcare facility, it is important to know the different types.

• Conversational or AI Chatbots: Conversational agents employ natural language processing (NLP) & ML algorithms to learn human intent and language. This is how automated responses answer patient queries most comprehensively.
  They are typically used to schedule an appointment, manage insurance inquiries or provide medical information.
• Rule-based bots (Q&A-focused): They follow predefined paths as a flowchart where users select an option and the chatbot responds with an appropriate answer. Depending on the nature of the requirement this could be kept simple or the workflow can be as complex as needed.
  They are essentially used by providers to manage multiple appointments, patient engagement, registration, initial screening, and maintaining health records. Patients & payers can additionally utilize it to get queries addressed, look up claim status & get notified on specific treatments.
• Informative Chatbots: The automated client support bots offer resourceful information to users via push notifications and pop-ups. They are typically used by health news sites and mental wellness websites that provide detailed information about specific medical topics.

Leveraging an AI-enabled bot in any healthcare setting offers a bunch of benefits. Some of the biggest advantages include:

1. 24X7 Access to Patients: Live agents ensure that access to your medical practice is not restricted to office hours. Your existing and potential patients can receive all the information they need at any time of the day or night.
2. Big Savings: According to experts, healthcare bots will save $3.6 billion globally by 2022, up from a valued $2.8 billion in 2017.
3. Scalability: To address multiple requests simultaneously you need to have more people on board. But intelligent bots can efficiently handle anywhere between 1 to 1000 interactions at one time, without any glitches.
4. Reduced No-Shows: According to Forbes, a single missed appointment can cost a medical practice $200 on average. Digital assistants can send reminders to patients and greatly reduce the possibility of the patient not turning up at the scheduled time.
5. Efficient Record-Keeping: Virtual agents also assist with record keeping. The use of AI chatbots in healthcare helps drive informed decision-making with instant notifications to health specialists on vital data.

Modern patients want quick and easy access to health information. And, they want their interactions to be personalized and engaging. If you want to build an infobot that delivers on their expectations, here are some crucial factors to consider.

1. Secure Tools to ensure Data Privacy: Be sure to add robust security tools and take reliable measures to resist cyber-attacks.
2. Compliance Management: Being compliant to HIPAA, PHI, FHIR and more for data management, interoperability and exchange.
3. The Right UI: To make the design easy to navigate, you need to select the right UI that is based on clearly labeled elements and appropriate use of buttons, colors, fonts, capitals, and italics.

Whether it is healthcare consultation systems, custom telemedicine software, developing other custom healthcare solutions or HIPAA compliant chatbots, our developers have industry-leading expertise to help you with all things tech!

Beyond types, you must be wondering how are chatbots used in the healthcare industry? Here are a few important use cases:

• Managing Population Health During Global Pandemics
  Predicting an infection or illness requires analyzing various parameters and symptoms. And during a global pandemic wherein a life-threatening virus is spreading rapidly, the first thing that people want to do is contact their GP.
  However, handling an influx of inquiries and managing appointments for those with symptoms is challenging. Having a virtual agent in place to offer these services can make the process safe, easy, and efficient.
  Patients can simply share their symptoms and the bot can analyze them to provide appropriate information or educate them on actions to take. If the condition is serious, it can escalate the issue to a human representative or request emergency assistance.
• Supporting Clinicians at Point-of-Care
  Virtual assistants support doctors with retrieving drug information in real-time. It includes the list of active ingredients within medications as well as recommended options for prescription drugs. This makes it much easier and faster for physicians to prescribe a particular drug with a proper dosage and medicine instructions.
• Helping Patients with Self-care or Urgent Care
  Many patients are now relying on digital assistants that remind them to take their medications on time and provide personalized nutritional information. They are fully equipped to check vital stats of patients’ bodies, monitor their health conditions, and make the right healthcare recommendations.
  Apart from keeping patients engaged with their health goals, they can also identify patients that need urgent medical attention. They pass on all the chat transcriptions to the doctors, so patients don’t need to repeat themselves and get the care they need; when they need it the most!
• Managing Care for Chronic Conditions
  Digital assistants are an asset for care management. They help deliver vital information to patients suffering from chronic illnesses. For instance, if a patient has an upcoming colonoscopy, the bot will deliver educational materials to the patient and address any queries or concerns that he/she may have about the procedure or illness.
  The goal of deploying these bots is to prepare patients for surgeries and reduce the number of invasive medical procedures that are canceled at the last minute. These conversational agents are also playing a vital role in oncology care by sharing relevant tips with patients undergoing chemotherapy.
  Further, they even advise caregivers and family members on how they can help their loved ones who are battling cancer. Even health plan providers are leveraging bots to help clients understand the benefits for policy members.
• Providing Secure Access to Health Records
  They can be integrated with your existing EMR/EHR systems that store, share, manage and maintain the health data of patients. These documents can then be securely accessed by a physician or the patient whenever there is a need.
• Processing Bills and Claims
  When your patients are ready to process the payment, the last thing you want to do is make them wait. A virtual assistant is always available and when integrated with the backend billing system of your practice, it can securely manage inventory and collect payments.
• Collecting Patient Feedback
  The goal of any medical practice is to provide the best possible care to patients. Such intelligent bots are the best way to collect anonymous patient feedback for consistent improvement that ultimately contributes to patient satisfaction.
• Providing Mental Health Assistance
  Digital assistants that are developed to provide mental health assistance are trained to conduct cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) for people suffering from anxiety, depression, and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). They can also train patients with autism via text, cameras, and microphones to enhance their social skills. Bots have been successfully deployed to provide meditation sessions & Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT).
• Requesting Prescription Refills
  Interactive agents are designed to collect end-to-end patient data. From their contact information and the current doctor to their last physical visit and prescription information. All of this data is submitted to the doctor to aid clinical decision-making and seamless processing of prescription refills. It also enables the doctor to contact patients when their refill is available and automate the refills in batch for cases where intervention is not necessary.
• Accessing Test Results
  An interactive agent can authenticate online visitors and connect them with external systems to provide secure and timely access to sensitive medical information like test results. Just make sure that it is a HIPAA-compliant chatbot.

We can develop chatbots for the healthcare industry with the highest standards of security. Our specialist team utilizes deep analytics and user behavior insights to create the right solution. Rishabh’s team utilizes low code platforms like Microsoft’s Power Virtual Agent to build a bit that serves the needs of the healthcare practice. By utilizing the synergies of varied MS Power Platform Suite, we’re the ideal partner for healthcare chatbot development who help integrate services and re-route customer queries to create specific customer cases that help in personalizing conversations to a whole new level. The robust features of this platform help triage customer service requests, advanced capabilities & image analysis to help you supercharge your ability to engage customers.

Here’s how we look at the entire process:

Define the Project Scope

We assign a project manager, a business analyst and an IT architect who help you define comprehensive project scope. And together, they would assist you in consolidating a list of features & services that begin right from patient interaction through to appointment scheduling.

Build a Successful Software Development Team

Our experience with an array of clients leads us to believe that an Agile approach would serve your needs well. This is because you may need to add new features and services as the project progresses. This helps you consider patient needs before your app is fully ready! Scrum works best for Agile projects and a scrum master can help in communicating the progress at regular intervals. Also, with our team of qualified developers, we can help elevate end-user experiences & resolve all potential queries to keep your customers engaged!

Define Your Required IT Infrastructure

If you do not have an on-premise IT infrastructure to support your app development needs, you can consider low-code development that ensures faster time-to-market & reduced costs.

As a chatbot software development company, we ensure speed, accuracy & conversation flow with error management to bring efficiency to business operations. Our development team while building healthcare bots ensures data access and information sharing are secure and in full compliance with standard healthcare regulations. If you are looking for a chatbot that can help you carry out cumbersome & time-consuming processes, then engaging with Rishabh’s team can help you leverage the best of this platform.  So, if you want to keep up with your competitors, now is the time to start building a bot! Our team will be more than happy to help you map the above-listed healthcare chatbot use cases or custom ones that enable you to automate your operations with conversational AI.

Digital assistants are evolving quickly – and so are the technologies that support this app.

Platform

• Chatfuel
• Botsify
• Flow XO
• QnA Maker
• Motion.ai
• Dialogflow

Frameworks & languages

• Python
• Wit.ai
• Microsoft Bot Framework

Having worked with early-stage as well as established healthcare organizations, our healthcare chatbot development team has the experience to build digital agents, keeping the unique needs of your practice & patients in mind.

While the adoption of chatbots in the healthcare sector is rather slow, its adaptability is much faster! Interactive chatbots have a new role in improving the efficiency of healthcare experts. Hence, the benefits of using them in clinical settings are undeniable. They can reduce costs dramatically, lessen the burden on medical professionals and improve patient experiences.

In today’s digital healthcare landscape, an AI-based bot has become a must-have. It keeps your facility accessible round-the-clock, without you having to spend heavily on recruiting customer service reps.