The healthcare sector has improved significantly with the advancement of many robust technologies such as IoT, RPA, and blockchain. Artificial intelligence is one such powerful tech trend that has helped the digital healthcare concept gain a competitive advantage over any other sector. Healthcare chatbots are a great example of this phenomenon!

To enhance patient care and facilitate self-care, healthcare organizations are actively investing in the development of custom chatbots. Healthcare chatbots are also providing some amazing benefits, such as automating time-consuming healthcare operations, providing 24*7 attention to patients, and improving administration areas such as payments and client services. 

86% of patients believe to get an answer from a chatbot instead of filling in a website form
– Salesforce survey

Don’t you believe us? Here are some mind-blogging facts about the adoption of chatbots in healthcare!

• To improve medical chatbots, around $800 million has been spent by the leading healthcare development companies to build medical chatbots.
• In 2021, the global chatbot market was valued at US $526 million. The research estimates that it will reach US $3,619 million by 2030, and a CAGR of 23.9%  is projected.
• The AI healthcare market is projected to reach $40 billion by the year 2026.

Based on the facts mentioned above, we can say that chatbots in healthcare have brought a wide range of benefits and automation. That’s why top healthcare organizations are investing in custom medical chatbots.

In this blog, we uncover what medical chatbot technology is and it’s potential for the healthcare industry’s development.

What is a Medical Chatbot?

A medical chatbot is a robust application of AI that is widely used today to improve patient care services. It is empowered by smart ML algorithms and advanced NLP services, the healthcare chatbots efficiently simplify healthcare services and make digital healthcare accessible for the common people.

Many healthcare experts believe that medical chatbots are the best resource to guide patients in searching for and accessing the best medical services around them. That is the main reason many leading telemedicine app owners implemented healthcare chatbots in their apps. chatbots collect the basic information of the patients and based on their health condition, the medical chatbots offer them the best suggestions to improve their conditions.

As per the “Markets and Markets Report,” the growth rate of healthcare chatbots has already reached $122 million by the year 2018. The number is expected to reach $314 million by end of 2022!

What Benefits Does Medical Chatbot Offer?

Here are some unique benefits you can get from implementing chatbots in healthcare. Read to know more!

1. Hospital Administration

Automated healthcare administration is the primary benefit of chatbots in healthcare. Scheduling appointments, answering phone calls, and managing the bills are often considered the most time-consuming and tedious tasks for healthcare administrators. As a result of the involvement of large resources, they consume a lot of time and even increase management costs. However, the scenario is slightly different with chatbots in healthcare.

Advanced medical chatbots automate all those tedious tasks and enhance them with the use of smart features. Chatbots can also remind patients about their medicines and offer them an online booking platform to book doctor’s appointments. Meanwhile, the user can check the patient’s relevant records and even get an update on the required medications.

2. Real-Time Feedback

Any healthcare institute’s main goal is always to provide the best medical services to patients. However, getting real-time feedback is still a challenge for healthcare companies, but that’s no longer a problem with custom healthcare chatbots.

The recent implementation of healthcare chatbots made it possible to collect patients’ real-time feedback. With online surveys and effective communication channels, hospitals are getting real-time feedback from their patients without any effort. Those comments help to improve the overall quality of medical services, make customers satisfied, and build trust in your brand.

3. Self-Care Services

Another great advantage of chatbots is that they encourage patients and the elderly to self-care. There are times when people who live in remote areas or are elderly cannot frequently visit a doctor or healthcare provider for consultation. Furthermore, the doctors could not continuously monitor the routines of their thousands of patients. That’s where healthcare chatbots come into play.

Advanced healthcare chatbots can not only book a doctor’s appointment while sitting remotely, but they can also monitor health conditions. With a customized healthcare chatbot, you can track your diet plan, calorie consumption, water intake, and so on. Custom chatbots can even remind you to take the medications at the correct time.

4. Cost Reduction

In every industry, Cost reduction is crucial to implementing any digital solutions. It doesn’t matter what industry we are talking about; custom AI solutions have always helped businesses to reduce their operational cost and bring intelligence into their existing systems.

In addition to the benefits mentioned above, chatbots in healthcare simplify patient management and enhance customer services. It also automates consultation and patient monitoring services. By automating healthcare management, hospitals can achieve more profit and improve their brand value.

5. Medication Reminders

It is often seen that due to carelessness or the inability to understand the procedure for taking medicine, patients forget to take the prescribed treatment on time.

A study predicted that almost 50% of patients do not take their medications properly or forget about it altogether.

Healthcare chatbots help to simplify the time-consuming administration task and even assist patients in taking their medications on time. That, in turn, increases the patient’s expectancy and even improves their health. This is a great benefit for people who are either alone or elderly and forget to take their medicine on time.

Top Use Cases of Chatbots

There is no doubt that chatbots can transform the healthcare industry in many ways. They can significantly enhance symptom detection, preventive care, post-recovery care, and feedback procedures. Here are some key use cases of healthcare chatbots. 

1. Schedule an Appointment

Managing appointments is one of the most common tasks associated with healthcare. Despite these systems, some patients find it difficult to navigate scheduling systems.

Approximately 30% of patients left an appointment due to long wait times, and 20% permanently changed providers due to slow service. So, to overcome the challenges, healthcare industries incorporate chatbots. A well-designed healthcare Chabot asks patients about their health concerns, finds a physician who can help address their concerns, offers available time slots, schedules, reschedules, and deletes appointments. A patient can also receive reminders about upcoming appointments through chatbots.

2. Collect Patients Data

One of the key uses of chatbots in the healthcare industry is to extract patient data. Firstly, it uses simple questions like the patient’s name, contact number, address, symptoms, current doctor, and information regarding insurance. Then it stores the extracted data in the medical facility system to make things easier like patient admission, doctor-patient communication, tracking of symptoms, and maintaining medical records.

3. Quick Response to Common Queries

One of the common features of any website is the “frequently asked questions” section.
Chatbots can handle simple queries proficiently, like:

• What are the business’s working hours?
• What is the required paperwork to get the treatment done?
• The amount of insurance coverage
• What are the payment tariff rates?

Chatbots are extremely useful because they serve as an all-in-one solution for answering all general questions from patients in a matter of seconds. Many healthcare service providers are incorporating an interactive healthcare chatbot to respond to users’ general questions. This helps people find immediate responses to their queries.

Here is what makes a chatbot perfect for healthcare:

• Real-time response: A healthcare chatbot provides quick responses to users’ commonly asked questions and reduces the number of tickets.
• 24×7 availability: bots are available round the clock to assist customers and engage them in conversation.
• Personalized answers—A medical chatbot can identify and understand the patient’s query and provide personalized responses.

 

 

 

4. Collect Patients Feedback

 

To enhance healthcare services, it is very important to take patient feedback. It is also helpful to understand what your patients think regarding your hospital, treatment, doctors, and overall experience of them via simple automated conversation.

 

5. Effective patient engagement

 

AI-enabled patient engagement chatbots provide prospective and current patients with immediate, specific, and detailed information to improve patient care and services.

 

Below are the ways healthcare chatbots can enhance your patient outreach:

 

• Automate a Personalized Experience

 

Instead of providing direct contact with a human, chatbots allow healthcare providers and patients to communicate via text or text-to-speech. The patient receives the information they are looking for with one-on-one human interaction.

 

• Connect Meaningfully with Patients

 

A patient can access chatbots via SMS text messaging, email, QR codes, websites, and more. The ability to reach patients in their preferred communication channel increased the like hood of engagement.

 

• Deliver Engaging Content 

 

Healthcare providers and patients benefit when the right information lands at the right time and that is easy to understand. Using chatbots, patients can find answers in multiple formats.

 

Summing it up

 

With years of experience in delivering well-enhanced custom digital solutions, Techspian is known for providing cost-effective solutions to the healthcare and travel industries. Whether we talk about custom telemedicine apps, AI-driven consultation systems, or even chatbots for healthcare, our company’s certified developers strive to deliver the best thing at cost-effective prices. That’s why businesses always choose our company for custom software development. 

 

Connect with us to discuss your project idea and witness the amazing positive changes in your organization.