Healthcare is a busy industry and with the COVID-19 pandemic, the working of the health sector got affected badly; turning into an unorganized process, crashing down the general procedure of conducting healthcare treatment and business.
COVID-19 demanded social distancing, work-from-home, and even country-wise lockdown for months. Hospitals and clinics got busier, dealing with COVID patients and the overall healthcare system failed at many places and stages.
However, with technologies and several digital means, we have found alternative solutions to keep our healthcare structure working without falling down.
Chatbots are one such technology that has been there for a few years, and during the COVID impact, these chatbots were found to be of great help for doctors, general physicians, and patients. Chatbots started a trend in the healthcare industry and using the core of Artificial Intelligence, these chatbots have revolutionized the healthcare industry to some extent.
A lot of free chatbot builder companies are offering a quick, easy, no-code way to build chatbots for websites, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and other platforms.
In this article, we will look at some of the aspects or ways where chatbots are playing an indispensable role in general medical care. Further, we will see some of the features that give chatbots the potential to be useful in the healthcare industry.
Top Roles of Chatbots in the Healthcare Industry
Health is a priority to everyone, and people look for an immediate solution for their health, whether it’s just a regular cold or serious infection, or a big disease.
The doctor-patient conversation is something that makes the core of the healthcare solution.
Patients need to share the problems they are facing and doctors or health experts listen and based on that, they prepare prescriptions and recommend precautions and measures. All of these conversations take a considerable amount of time, and with chatbots, the majority of these conversations can be automated and designed in a way that the best of care is done without wasting the time and effort in unwanted conversations.
Talking of what chatbots are?
They are tools that simulate human conversation. To the most fundamental level, chatbots are programmed such that they reply with answers in a certain way when asked a particular question. And therefore, you need to train your chatbots accordingly.
Healthcare chatbots are those programmed chatbots that are trained to assist doctors, physicians, or healthcare experts in their healthcare processes.
The graph below shows the industries that are most benefited by chatbots, and healthcare is amongst the top ones.
With chatbots, a variety of work is being carried out in the healthcare industry; ranging from booking to self-health-assistance.
Let’s look into the details of how healthcare chatbots are really helping:
Chatbots as Quick and First Responders
Health can deteriorate anytime; it could be midnight or when you are far out of the doctor’s reach. In all such cases, chatbots are quick responders. They are active round the clock, ready to reply with the first aid and early precautions that a patient can take based on the symptoms.
Patients are not required to wait anymore for general healthcare guidelines and support. Chatbots are turning into the first stage of primary care.
As a Symptom Checker
A lot of health treatment is based upon the symptoms that the patients have developed. And, based on those symptoms, the doctors suggest the kind of treatment or checkup one needs to get done.
For example, a patient that has breathing needs to get his lungs checked, and based on those results, the treatment will proceed. And, this is where chatbots play their role; they take in symptoms from the patients and recommend the type of consultation they need and provide them options for the right kind of booking with the right doctor.
Dispensers of Drug Information
Chatbots are designed in a way that they can store a large amount of answer data and reply to it when asked for it. As a result, chatbots can store details of medicines, treatment, and other reports. For more detail vistit: https://technewsenglish.com/
A lot of patients cross-check and verify drugs and other details using the chatbots. They also get notified of the time to get their medicines and next treatment. All of these medicine-related details are directly accessible from the pocket using neatly built healthcare chatbots.
Doctor’s Virtual Assistant
Chatbots are good virtual assistants for the healthcare staff and doctors.
These chatbots provide good virtual assistance, are present all the time, and listening to all the health problems of the patients. Whenever needed, they schedule live conversations or calls with the doctors, and also book appointments with doctors and healthcare professionals.
They gather data of patients and bring those data in an organized manner to the doctors, making it very easy for the healthcare staff and doctors to quickly review the patients.
Book Appointments
Making appointments is a regular and general task in the healthcare industry. It is equally important because appointment marks the beginning of the conversions in the healthcare industry and thus matters a lot for financial benefits.
Chatbots are a very effective way to automate the booking appointments process. They provide the available slots of meetings, fixed dates, and times and are also capable of reminding the doctors as well as patients as the meeting time approaches.
The roles of chatbots are not just limited to this.
More Roles:
Apart from these major tasks, chatbots contribute to various other specific healthcare tasks. Chatbots help during blood donation campaigns to spread awareness among people and encourage them to come ahead and save other’s lives with blood donations.
Some chatbots are designed with a special focus on women’s health; help pregnant women round the clock as friendly assistance with all answers to their questions and pregnancy tips.
These chatbots are also very effective when collecting healthcare charity funds for any better cause. They engage people and show them the positive impact their donation can bring.
Apart from these, chatbots are also specifically designed based on diseases such as cancer, thyroid, asthma, etc. For example, we recently had COVID-19 all around the world, and with these chatbots, healthcare institutes can attend to so many clients without much effort or manpower.
Some Benefits of Chatbots in the Healthcare Industry
We saw the specific ways in which chatbots play their role in the healthcare industry. The benefits are evident to the world, as a result so many healthcare professionals are using it. Here are some top benefits listed below.
Make General Healthcare Affordable
Chatbots are free for anyone to connect and ask their questions and get their queries resolved. So, with chatbots, the early attention of healthcare professionals or doctors and general consultation turns free and affordable to all.
Further, it all can be done sitting at your home, adding convenience to the patients. The time and money spent on traveling directly to the hospitals for taking appointments are saved.
Saves Human Resources
The chatbot does all the talking on the behalf of healthcare professionals, gives general assistance to the patients, answers queries, books consultation and checkup time, and many other tasks that will require manpower to do.
Hence, chatbots in healthcare save manpower that can be used elsewhere.
Generate Leads
Chatbots are very useful in generating leads for all types of business from healthcare to eCommerce. According to findings, about 74% of the users prefer chatbots for getting answers to simple questions.
Hence, a hospital or a clinic that has implemented chatbots gets easy leads round the clock. A lot of people are looking for any treatment or medication, research for the right hospital, and doctors using chatbots. On being satisfied by their general queries by the chatbots, they approach them.
Patient Engagement and Data Storage
Engaging patients from day one to the point when treatment has been completed is beneficial in retaining them. It helps your health sector and industry grow. Also, with so many additional broadcasting and omnichannel strategies, you can stay in touch with your prospects from time to time.
Chatbots can be integrated into several other platforms to store patients data, which can be used for later reference, therefore adding convenience to the health treatment process.
Features That Makes Chatbots a Powerful Potential
With the benefits listed above, it’s obvious that chatbots are becoming crucial members of the healthcare system. With new features being added every day, a new age of the healthcare industry is taking shape.
Here are some features that make these chatbots a powerful potential in healthcare.
Broadcasting
With broadcasting features, chatbots allow healthcare professionals to engage multiple patients or health-conscious (subscribed one) to communicate en masse. They can send regular health tips, treatment, and announcements that benefit their mass patients.
With such forms of communication, the healthcare sector is taking a new shape where spreading health awareness will be made possible in mass.
Rich Media Conversation
Chatbots are conversational tools and they are built to effectively chat and reply to text messages to solve queries.
However, chatbots are not limited to just text. Chatbots are designed to send rich media messages such as links, videos, images, etc. These rich-media messages allow patients to understand complex healthcare problems and treatment with ease.
Addresses can also be shared, which helps patients to find hospitals and clinics.
Live Chat and Handover System
Chatbots smartly assist doctors and healthcare staff, but can’t handle intelligent or new queries, and so they cannot replace the doctors and health physicians completely.
But, these chatbots have a smart inbuilt feature of handover or live chats, that shifts the ongoing conversation from chatbots to the real person or human representatives. They notify doctors and healthcare experts of emergency cases or at times when patients need expert advice. Therefore, there is a perfect sync between patients and doctors with a chatbot in between them.
Accept Payment
Chatbots also make it possible to accept fees through several online payment gateways. It sends bills along with reports and other details and redirects patients to pay the charges online.
How to Add a Chatbot to Your Website?
So many useful benefits of chatbots in the healthcare industry makes it an enticing choice for all healthcare website owners to add a chatbot to their website.
To make it easy for you, here is a quick step-by-step method to add a chatbot to your WordPress website using a plugin.
- Go to the plugin section of the WordPress admin panel, install and activate the “WP Chatbot Builder” plugin.
- After activation, signup using your Facebook account.
- Train your bot by writing down the replies that your chatbot will respond to whenever a query is made. The better you train it, the better it will perform.
- Save all the settings, and the chatbot is ready to use.
- Track the data directly in the WordPress panel.
The added chatbot when trained for various healthcare processes will help to resolve queries of the visitors, provide immediate access to healthcare information, and all other benefits that we discussed in the above sections.
Conclusion
Technology has always been influencing the way the healthcare industry works, and lots of complex and delicate processes were simplified using new advanced technologies over the years.
With the increasing digital presence, a lot of businesses including the healthcare sector are incorporating digital means to communicate and engage with their consumers or customers. Chatbots are one of the major automation tools that are transforming the present-day healthcare industry in a completely new way.
Whether it’s generating leads, engaging patients, helping patients with free primary healthcare, booking appointments, or reminding time to take medicine, chatbots wisely do all of these things.
Finally calling out all the healthcare sector:
If you are in the healthcare industry and still not taking these amazing advantages of chatbots, then it’s high time you do so and get started.
Author bio- Himanshu Rauthan is an entrepreneur, Co-Founder at MakeWebBetter, BotMyWork, and the Director of CEDCOSS Technologies. He has worn many hats in his career – programmer, researcher, writer, and strategist. As a result, he has a unique ability to manage multi-disciplinary projects and navigate complex challenges.
