Explore Chatbots in Medical Field

The medical field is one of the most prominent sectors in today’s world. About 58 million patients are admitted each year in the US alone, not to mention the rest of the world! Healthcare is the busiest sector among all. Hence, there has to be some tool to help out the hospital staff and free them from all the monotonous tasks that kill their precious time. After all, every second in the medical field is important and can save lives! And what better tool than the chatbot technology for quick and easy automation? That’s the reason why healthcare providers and the medical field is teaming up with chatbots to aid patients.

Hence, in this blog, we’re going to explore all about medical chatbots! What’s their role in the medical industry? How do they provide assistance to people at healthcare centres?

What do chatbots really do in the medical field?

One thing that chatbots are great at- providing assistance, irrespective of the help needed. It comes with various functionalities and has been evolving each day! From healthcare to insurance to customer care, chatbots got it all covered!

There are a few instances where chatbots come to play in hospitals. If you need to step away from the lobby, you usually have to check-in with the person-in-charge of the floor and inform them that you’ll be returning. Instructions for medicines and food has to be given by staff. Ways to the restroom, vending machines, room number and much more which are the tasks of the staff can be handled perfectly well with a chatbot!

Chatbots are ideal for hospitals because, for one, patients need assistance at odd times and the staff isn’t available at times. Though chatbots cannot replace the human element completely, as artificial intelligence continues to progress and consumerism continues to impress hospitals, the importance of connecting to patients via chatbots will soon be standard. Chatbots are already widely used in other industries- especially E-commerce, where they’re hard to avoid in online customer-service conversations and a lot of times the customers don’t even know they’re talking to a chatbot. With chatbots gaining traction in healthcare too, it has been helping connect patients to payers and providers on a cost-effective medium. While providers are making use of chatbots, payers are getting into the game as well, with AI designed to help patients understand their benefits.

Getting engaged

Most of the organizations using chatbots are so early with the chatbot programs that they don’t really have cost-saving numbers yet. But engagement on the other end is much easier to measure. Healthcare providers can measure engagement through chatbot analytics and make sure the patients come back for appointments prepared so that there are no last-minute cancellations which costs the hospital their time and money.

Chatbots also help in engaging your patients right by providing them not only during but also post-treatment assistance, which we’ll be talking of in the latter section.

Don’t need an app for it

Making an app seems to be ideal for any business starter. But the vendors of chatbots are focused on using online interfaces and text messages, not specific apps. Chatbots can be made easily, without any need for prior knowledge of coding. There is a huge amount of app fatigue. So with integrating chatbots on your hospital website, you can provide easier assistance to your patients. Chatbots are here to help at any time to assist your patients and neither do they have to download an app to get that assistance.

Quick assistance for those sudden health-related queries

We’ve been through those midnight health queries and often don’t find the right assistance. With chatbots on your website, your patients can immediately reach out to some level of assistance and in serious cases, your patients can also be assigned to a representative to address their issues. All for all, they provide quick and easy assistance and that’s all that we need sometimes. Be it trying to understand your health condition by letting the digital assistant analyze your symptoms or just to gain some knowledge on anything that has to do with maintaining good health. Chatbots got you covered!

A lot of patients have issues with taking their medicines or eating on time. And as we know hospitals are always gushing with new cases and emergencies at all times. So the nurses being available enough to remind each and every patient amongst all that hurry and emergency is very hard to achieve. Hence, in such cases, chatbots can be a breather for the hospital staff! They can automatically send your patient reminders and continue to do so till recovery once set.

Post-hospitalization assistance

Would you believe it if a chatbot could remind your patients to take their medicines, keep a check on their overall health, diagnose diseases based on symptoms and even schedule an appointment with you for regular check-ups? Chatbots don’t just provide assistance during hospitalization but post-treatment as well. They sort of act as a personal assistant and read your patients well enough to understand them. They store all your patients’ data through conversations and the document fed to it and personalize each patient’s experience. This not only gives your patients end-to-end assistance but also keeps up a certain standard for your hospital/healthcare center.

Chatbots are growing big in the healthcare industry today. And did you know, healthcare and the banking sector the first-ever industries to adopt chatbots? They come with numerous benefits and have started to become a lot more standard among many industries in the past couple of years. And it’s only getting better from here!

To build your healthcare centre a chatbot, visit Engati and check out the Bot Marketplace to make use of multi-purpose bot templates!

We’re also going live on a webinar real soon where our expert guides you through every step of a robust bot-building, so stay tuned!

But before that, don’t forget to read up some of these blogs to a better understanding of the chatbot technology.

Thank you for reading! Hoping it was of some use!

Happy Botting!

Originally published at https://blog.engati.com on October 14, 2019.