Today we are going to present few chat bot use cases that emerged lately in the Healthcare industry. Users are already familiar with chatbots that are implemented in use cases for domains such as online retail, telco, banking, social media. Healthcare providers are starting to leverage the use of AI to simplify interactions with patients, but also to cut costs. At the same time, patients are more willing to discuss with real doctors, rather than a chatbot with predefined discussion scenarios.

So, AI powered chatbots, that are discussing more like a human are more likely to be preferred by patients. What are most popular Chat Bot use cases?

Triage Chat Bot

Triage Chat Bots become more and more useful during the pandemics. Imagine you have an appointment at a doctor, and you will perform the classical triage on your way to the hospital. When you arrive at the hospital, the assistant that performs the triage already has all the information about your condition and the triage time duration decreases to almost 0.

Another type of triage would be the one where the patient presents the symptoms, and the Chat Bot makes a suggestion about possible diseases and the type of doctor to be consulted. A very good example for this use case is the Microsoft Healthcare Bot (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/health-bot/). Also, a working example using this product can be found by clicking the "Try a demo of an example end-user experience" button from the link above. You can see below a scenario when someone presents flu symptoms. The summary and the conclusions presented by the chat bot are depicted in this image:

Scheduling Appointments

Scheduling appointments chat bots reduce the need of interacting with someone from the customer care for creating the appointments. The chatbot has access to the doctor’s schedule (e.g. let’s say via an API) and is able to agree with the patient on an exact date. Moreover, if the chat would take place in a mobile app with more elevated rights, it could automatically make suggestions based on the patient’s agenda. When the meeting is agreed, the appointment appears automatically both in the doctor’s and patient’s agendas.

Finding Healthcare Services

By sharing the patient’s location, chat bots could recommend most appropriate and closest location based on the input of the patient (either symptoms or requested type of services).

Also, in case of emergencies, it would be useful to propose locations also considering the waiting time at the moment of the request.

Medication Guidance

Another interesting use case would be when the chat bots share information about the drugs pointed by the patient. Information provided:

·        Typical dosage (of course this would not be a replacement for the doctor or a pharmacist)

·        Adverse reactions

·        Incompatibility with other drugs, alcohol, etc.

·        If you are allowed or not to drive while under the drug influence

Of course, this list is not exhaustive and there are many possibilities of using AI powered chat bots in Healthcare use cases. Nowadays, with technologies like Microsoft Healthcare Bot this becomes more accessible than ever.

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