Chatbots in healthcare: an overview of main benefits and challenges

This virtual assistant is available at any time to address medical concerns and offer personalized guidance, making it easier for patients to have conversations with hospital staff and pharmacies. The convenience and accessibility of chatbots have transformed the physician-patient relationship. However, some of these were sketches of the interface rather than the final user interface, and most of the screenshots had insufficient description as to what the capabilities were. Although the technical descriptions of chatbots might constitute separate papers in their own right, these descriptions were outside the scope for our focus on evidence in public health.

Health-focused apps with chatbots (“healthbots”) have a critical role in addressing gaps in quality healthcare. There is limited evidence on how such healthbots are developed and applied in practice. Our review of healthbots aims to classify types of healthbots, contexts of use, and their natural language processing capabilities. Eligible apps were those that were health-related, had an embedded text-based conversational agent, available in English, and were available for free download through the Google Play or Apple iOS store. Apps were assessed using an evaluation framework addressing chatbot characteristics and natural language processing features.

Although the law has been lagging and litigation is still a gray area, determining legal liability becomes increasingly pressing as chatbots become more accessible in health care. Chatbots have the potential to address many of the current concerns regarding cancer care mentioned above. This includes the triple aim of health care that encompasses improving the experience of care, improving the health of populations, and reducing per capita costs [21].

Patients suffering from mental health issues can seek a haven in healthcare chatbots like Woebot that converse in a cognitive behavioral therapy-trained manner. When chatbots are developed by private healthcare companies, they usually follow the market logic, such as profit maximisation, or at the very least, this dimension is dominant. Through the rapid deployment of chatbots, the tech industry may gain a new kind of dominance in health care. AI technologies, especially ML, have increasingly been occupying other industries; thus, these technologies are arguably naturally adapted to the healthcare sector. In most cases, it seems that chatbots have had a positive effect in precisely the same tasks performed in other industries (e.g. customer service). Pasquale (2020, p. 57) has reminded us that AI-driven systems, including chatbots, mirror the successes and failures of clinicians.

Benefits of chatbots in healthcare

While conversational AI chatbots can digest a users’ questions or comments and generate a human-like response, generative AI chatbots can take this a step further by generating new content as the output. This new content can include high-quality text, images and sound based on the LLMs they are trained on. Chatbot interfaces with generative AI can recognize, summarize, translate, predict and create content in response to a user’s query without the need for human interaction. With a user-friendly, no-code/low-code platform AI chatbots can be built even faster. In a rule-based, or chatbot decision tree type of system, developers predefine specific responses to guide the chatbot’s interactions. These bots follow a set of if-then rules, which are programmed by developers to determine how they respond to user inputs.

These bots can help patients stay on track with their healthcare goals and manage chronic conditions more effectively by providing personalized support and assistance. Chatbots can be accessed anytime, providing patients support outside regular office hours. This can be particularly useful for patients requiring urgent medical attention or having questions outside regular office hours. Chatbots can handle a large volume of patient inquiries, reducing the workload of healthcare professionals and allowing them to focus on more complex tasks. This increased efficiency can result in better patient outcomes and a higher quality of care. Healthcare providers must ensure that chatbots are regularly updated and maintained for accuracy and reliability.

It’s common for chatbots to have a hard time understanding commands that instruct them to not do something. Some people compare it to the “don’t think of an elephant” phenomenon in humans, but it’s important to keep in mind that LLMs are nothing like human consciousness and are just malfunctioning in such cases. With a lack of proper input data, there is the ongoing risk of “hallucinations,” delivering inaccurate or irrelevant answers that require the customer to escalate the conversation to another channel. Generate leads and satisfy customers
Chatbots can help with sales lead generation and improve conversion rates. For example, a customer browsing a website for a product or service might have questions about different features, attributes or plans.

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Users can report their symptoms or any recent close contacts they may have had through the chatbot interface, enabling health authorities to take swift action. One of the key advantages of chatbots is their ability to offer up-to-date information about testing centers, vaccination sites, and updated pandemic guidelines. With the constantly evolving nature of the virus, having access to accurate and timely information is crucial. Chatbots can provide users with a list of nearby testing centers or vaccination sites based on their location, ensuring they have easy access to these important resources.

While there are some challenges left to be addressed, we’re more than excited to see how the future of chatbots in healthcare unfolds. While it’s challenging to predict exactly how medical chatbots will shape our future health management, considering their rapid advancement and the growing demand for digital innovation in healthcare, it’s hard to imagine a future without them. Our research at the Psychology and Communication Technology (PaCT) Lab at Northumbria University use of chatbots in healthcare explored people’s perceptions of medical chatbots using a nationally representative online sample of 402 UK adults. The study experimentally tested the impact of different scenarios involving experiences of embarrassing and stigmatizing health conditions on participant preferences for medical consultations. Though previously used mainly as virtual assistants and in customer service, ChatGPT has ignited our fascination with the potential of chatbots to change the world.

Different types of chatbots in healthcare require different advantages, and the strengths of these algorithms are dependent on the training data they are provided. Chatbot technology in healthcare is undergoing advancements on a daily basis, and we’re excited to see the importance of chatbots in healthcare changes as we develop new technologies. We’ve already discussed the role of top health chatbots, but what are their use cases? Well, you can find anything from a chatbot for medical diagnosis to chatbots for mental health support. Now that you know about the main benefits of chatbots in healthcare, let us tell you about a couple of the best chatbots that exist today. With all the disadvantages of chatbots in healthcare, it’s crucial to look at the good side as well.

4 BUOY HEALTH

Expertise generally requires the intersubjective circulation of knowledge, that is, a pool of dynamic knowledge and intersubjective criticism of data, knowledge and processes (e.g. Prior 2003; Collins and Evans 2007). Therefore, AI technologies (e.g. chatbots) should not be evaluated on the same level as human beings. AI technologies can perform some narrow tasks or functions better than humans, and their calculation power is faster and memory more reliable. When physicians observe a patient presenting with specific signs and symptoms, they assess the subjective probability of the diagnosis. Such probabilities have been called diagnostic probabilities (Wulff et al. 1986), a form of epistemic probability.

Added life expectancy poses new challenges for both patients and the health care team. For example, many patients now require extended at-home support and monitoring, whereas health care workers deal with an increased workload. Although clinicians’ knowledge base in the use of scientific evidence to guide decision-making has expanded, there are still many other facets to the quality of care that has yet to catch up. Key areas of focus are safety, effectiveness, timeliness, efficiency, equitability, and patient-centered care [20]. With the vast number of algorithms, tools, and platforms available, understanding the different types and end purposes of these chatbots will assist developers in choosing the optimal tools when designing them to fit the specific needs of users.

This relieving of pressure on contact centres is especially important in the present COVID-19 situation (Dennis et al. 2020, p. 1727), thus making chatbots cost-effective. However, one of the key elements for bots to be trustworthy—that is, the ability to function effectively with a patient—‘is that people believe that they have expertise’ (Nordheim et al. 2019). A survey on Omaolo (Pynnönen et al. 2020, p. 25) concluded that users were more likely to be in compliance with and more trustworthy about HCP decisions.

From catching up on sports news to navigating bank applications to playing conversation-based games on Facebook Messenger, chatbots are revolutionizing the way we live. Chatbot algorithms are trained on massive healthcare data, including disease symptoms, diagnostics, markers, and available treatments. Public datasets are used to continuously train chatbots, such as COVIDx for COVID-19 diagnosis, and Wisconsin Breast Cancer Diagnosis (WBCD). It can provide a new first line of support, supplement support during peak periods, or offload tedious repetitive questions so human agents can focus on more complex issues. Chatbots can help reduce the number of users requiring human assistance, helping businesses more efficient scale up staff to meet increased demand or off-hours requests. The ability of AI chatbots to accurately process natural human language and automate personalized service in return creates clear benefits for businesses and customers alike.

Now that we’ve gone over all the details that go into designing and developing a successful chatbot, you’re fully equipped to handle this challenging task. We’re app developers in Miami and California, feel free to reach out if you need more in-depth research into what’s already available on the off-the-shelf software market or if you are unsure how to add AI capabilities to your healthcare chatbot. Recently, Google Cloud launched an AI chatbot called Rapid Response Virtual Agent Program to provide information to users and answer their questions about coronavirus symptoms. Google has also expanded this opportunity for tech companies to allow them to use its open-source framework to develop AI chatbots. The challenge here for software developers is to keep training chatbots on COVID-19-related verified updates and research data. As researchers uncover new symptom patterns, these details need to be integrated into the ML training data to enable a bot to make an accurate assessment of a user’s symptoms at any given time.

With the implementation of chatbot solutions, these delays can be significantly reduced. Chatbots offer round-the-clock support and instant responses to queries, enabling patients to receive necessary guidance without enduring lengthy waiting periods. By providing remote assistance through chat interfaces, healthcare organizations can optimize their resources and prioritize urgent cases effectively. Moreover, chatbots empower patients to provide valuable feedback on their healthcare experiences. Through conversational interfaces, they create an environment where individuals feel comfortable sharing their thoughts, concerns, and suggestions.

Users choose quick replies to ask for a location, address, email, or simply to end the conversation. These platforms have different elements that developers can use for creating the best chatbot UIs. Almost all of these platforms have vibrant visuals that provide information in the form of texts, buttons, and imagery to make navigation and interaction effortless. This concept is described by Paul Grice in his maxim of quantity, which depicts that a speaker gives the listener only the required information, in small amounts. Doing the opposite may leave many users bored and uninterested in the conversation.

The literature review and chatbot search were all conducted by a single reviewer, which could have potentially introduced bias and limited findings. In addition, our review explored a broad range of health care topics, and some areas could have been elaborated upon and explored more deeply. Furthermore, only a limited number of studies were included for each subtopic of chatbots for oncology apps because of the scarcity of studies addressing this topic. Future studies should consider refining the search strategy to identify other potentially relevant sources that may have been overlooked and assign multiple reviews to limit individual bias. The ability to accurately measure performance is critical for continuous feedback and improvement of chatbots, especially the high standards and vulnerable individuals served in health care.

This review article aims to report on the recent advances and current trends in chatbot technology in medicine. A brief historical overview, along with the developmental progress and design characteristics, is first introduced. The focus will be on cancer therapy, with in-depth discussions and examples of diagnosis, treatment, monitoring, patient support, workflow efficiency, and health promotion. In addition, this paper will explore the limitations and areas of concern, highlighting ethical, moral, security, technical, and regulatory standards and evaluation issues to explain the hesitancy in implementation.

Neither does she miss a dose of the prescribed antibiotic – a healthcare chatbot app brings her up to speed on those details. Finally, the issue of fairness arises with algorithm bias when data used to train and test chatbots do not accurately reflect the people they represent [101]. As the AI field lacks diversity, bias at the level of the algorithm and modeling choices may be overlooked by developers [102]. In a study using 2 cases, differences in prediction accuracy were shown concerning gender and insurance type for intensive care unit mortality and psychiatric readmissions [103].

Eighty-two percent of apps had a specific task for the user to focus on (i.e., entering symptoms). Personalization was defined based on whether the healthbot app as a whole has tailored its content, interface, and functionality to users, including individual user-based or user category-based accommodations. Furthermore, methods of data collection for content personalization were evaluated41. Personalization features were only identified in 47 apps (60%), of which all required information drawn from users’ active participation. Forty-three of these (90%) apps personalized the content, and five (10%) personalized the user interface of the app.

Moreover, chatbots streamline administrative processes by automating appointment scheduling tasks, freeing up staff time for more critical responsibilities. They expect that algorithms can make more objective, robust and evidence-based clinical decisions (in terms of diagnosis, prognosis or treatment recommendations) compared to human healthcare providers (HCP) (Morley et al. 2019). Thus, chatbot platforms seek to automate some aspects of professional decision-making by systematising the traditional analytics of decision-making techniques (Snow 2019). In the long run, algorithmic solutions are expected to optimise the work tasks of medical doctors in terms of diagnostics and replace the routine tasks of nurses through online consultations and digital assistance. In addition, the development of algorithmic systems for health services requires a great deal of human resources, for instance, experts of data analytics whose work also needs to be publicly funded.

• These chatbots engage users in therapeutic conversations, helping them cope with anxiety, depression, and stress.
• At the end of the text it suggests a series of links to expand the information, although in some cases they are YouTube videos from content creators.
• Nonetheless, chatbots for self-diagnosis are an effective way of advising patients as the first point of contact if accuracy and sensitivity requirements can be satisfied.
• Customer service chatbot for healthcare can help to enhance business productivity without any extra costs and resources.
• Moreover, AI chatbots can improve the provider’s ability to diagnose consistently and accurately.

For example, CoachAI and Smart Wireless Interactive Health System used chatbot technology to track patients’ progress, provide insight to physicians, and suggest suitable activities [45,46]. Another app is Weight Mentor, which provides self-help motivation for weight loss maintenance and allows for open conversation without being affected by emotions [47]. Health Hero (Health Hero, Inc), Tasteful Bot (Facebook, Inc), Forksy (Facebook, Inc), and SLOWbot (iaso heath, Inc) guide users to make informed decisions on food choices to change unhealthy eating habits [48,49]. The effectiveness of these apps cannot be concluded, as a more rigorous analysis of the development, evaluation, and implementation is required.

Both chatbots referred me to publicly available data on hospital outcomes and safety metrics, rather than actually using data on the government’s Hospital Compare site. An example of such a chatbot is Florence, a personal medical system designed for people who undergo long-term medical care. Users of the bot can get extra information about clinic locations and benefit from features such as health tracking, medication reminder, and statistics. You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. For example, Northwell Health recently launched a chatbot to reduce the number of no-shows for the colonoscopy procedure, which is critical for diagnosing colorectal cancer. This issue was particularly concerning because 40% of the less privileged patients didn’t follow through with the procedure.

Some experts also believe doctors will recommend chatbots to patients with ongoing health issues. In the future, we might share our health information with text bots to make better decisions about our health. Companies are actively developing clinical chatbots, with language models being constantly refined. As technology improves, conversational agents can engage in meaningful and deep conversations with us. This AI-driven technology can quickly respond to queries and sometimes even better than humans.

More simple solutions can lead to new costs and workload when the usage of new technology creates unexpected problems in practice. Thus, new technologies require system-level assessment of their effects in the design and implementation phase. There are risks involved when patients are expected to self-diagnose, such as a misdiagnosis provided by the chatbot or patients potentially lacking an understanding of the diagnosis. If experts lean on the false ideals of chatbot capability, this can also lead to patient overconfidence and, furthermore, ethical problems. From those who have a coronavirus symptom scare to those with other complaints, AI-driven chatbots may become part of hospitals’ plans to meet patients’ needs during the lockdown. Many health professionals have taken to telemedicine to consult with their patients, allay fears, and provide prescriptions.

This relays to the user that the responses have been verified by medical professionals. Before chatbots, we had text messages that provided a convenient interface for communicating with friends, loved ones, and business partners. In fact, the survey findings reveal that more than 82 percent of people keep their messaging notifications on. Patients can naturally interact with the bot using text or voice to find medical services and providers, schedule an appointment, check their eligibility, and troubleshoot common issues using FAQ for fast and accurate resolution. Hyro is an adaptive communications platform that replaces common-place intent-based AI chatbots with language-based conversational AI, built from NLU, knowledge graphs, and computational linguistics.

Healthcare chatbots offer a convenient and accessible way for patients to access healthcare information, receive support, and manage their health remotely. The users of such software products might be reluctant to share their personal information with bots. Business owners who build healthcare do their best to implement data safety measures to ensure that their platforms are resistant to cyber-attacks. User privacy is a critical issue when it comes to any type of AI implementation, and sharing information about one’s medical conditions with a chatbot seems less reliable than sharing the same information with a human doctor. According to a report from Accenture, over 40% of healthcare executives consider AI the technology that will have the greatest impact on their organizations within the next three years.

Healthcare providers must ensure that privacy laws and ethical standards handle patient data. Conversational chatbots can be trained on large datasets, including the symptoms, mode of transmission, natural course, prognostic factors, and treatment of the coronavirus infection. Bots can then pull info from this data to generate automated responses to users’ questions. In emergency situations, bots will immediately advise the user to see a healthcare professional for treatment. That’s why hybrid chatbots – combining artificial intelligence and human intellect – can achieve better results than standalone AI powered solutions.

A further scoping study would be useful in updating the distribution of the technical strategies being used for COVID-19–related chatbots. Telemedicine uses technology to provide healthcare services remotely, while chatbots are AI-powered virtual assistants that provide personalized patient support. They offer a powerful combination to improve patient outcomes and streamline healthcare delivery.

The healthcare sector is no stranger to emergencies, and chatbots fill a critical gap by offering 24/7 support. Their ability to provide instant responses and guidance, especially during non-working hours, is invaluable. Such an interactive AI technology can automate various healthcare-related activities. A medical bot is created with the help of machine learning and large language models (LLMs).