Use of chatbots in healthcare benefits and risks

This efficient sorting helps in managing patient flow, especially in busy clinics and hospitals, ensuring that critical cases get timely attention and resources are optimally utilized. For instance, chatbots can engage patients in their treatment plans, provide educational content, and encourage lifestyle changes, leading to better health outcomes. This interactive model fosters a deeper connection between patients and healthcare services, making patients feel more involved and valued. The systematic literature review and chatbot database search includes a few limitations.

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 healthcare chatbot use cases the limitations and areas of concern, highlighting ethical, moral, security, technical, and regulatory standards and evaluation issues to explain the hesitancy in implementation. Everyone wants a safe outlet to express their innermost fears and troubles and Woebot provides just that—a mental health ally. It uses natural language processing to engage its users in positive and understanding conversations from anywhere at any time.

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From personalized treatment plans to remote patient monitoring, ChatGPT is transforming the way healthcare providers deliver care to their patients. The healthcare industry incorporates chatbots in its ecosystem to streamline communication between patients and healthcare professionals, prevent unnecessary expenses and offer a smooth, around-the-clock helping station. The development of multiple such use cases, including surveillance and logistics, would be especially beneficial as a frugal solution to bridge the digital divide in areas of poor infrastructure.

Chatbots and conversational AI have been widely implemented in the mental health field as a cheaper and more accessible option for healthcare consumers. Healthcare chatbots can help medical professionals to better communicate with their patients. Since a chatbot is available at all hours, users are able to access medical services or information when it’s most convenient for them, reducing the burden on staff. Chatbots can be used to automate healthcare processes and smooth out workflow, reducing manual labor and freeing up time for medical staff to focus on more complex tasks and procedures.

Chatbots in Healthcare: Six Use Cases

To develop social bots, designers leverage the abundance of human–human social media conversations that model, analyse and generate utterances through NLP modules. However, the use of therapy chatbots among vulnerable patients with mental health problems bring many sensitive ethical issues to the fore. Dennis et al. (2020) examined ability, integrity and benevolence as potential factors driving trust in COVID-19 screening chatbots, subsequently influencing patients’ intentions to use chatbots and comply with their recommendations.

• These categories can be divided into general health advice and chatbots working in specific areas (mental, cancer).
• This review article aims to report on the recent advances and current trends in chatbot technology in medicine.
• They can encourage your buyers to complete surveys after chatting with your support or purchasing a product.
• AI and chatbots dominate these innovations in healthcare and are proving to be a major breakthrough in doctor-patient communication.
• It conducts basic activities like asking about the symptoms, recommending wellness programs, and tracking behavior or weight changes.
• All authors contributed to the assessment of the apps, and to writing of the manuscript.

HCP expertise relies on the intersubjective circulation of knowledge, that is, a pool of dynamic knowledge and the intersubjective criticism of data, knowledge and processes. Twenty of these apps (25.6%) had faulty elements such as providing irrelevant responses, frozen chats, and messages, or broken/unintelligible English. Three of the apps were not fully assessed because their healthbots were non-functional. Questions like these are very important, but they may be answered without a specialist. A chatbot is able to walk the patient through post-op procedures, inform him about what to expect, and apprise him when to make contact for medical help. The chatbot also remembers conversations and can report the nature of the patient’s questions to the provider.

They can also be used to determine whether a certain situation is an emergency or not. This allows the patient to be taken care of fast and can be helpful during future doctor’s or nurse’s appointments. Chatbots are designed to assist patients and avoid issues that may arise during normal business hours, such as waiting on hold for a long time or scheduling appointments that don’t fit into their busy schedules.

The rise of chatbots has led to an increased demand for these automated programs that can help customers, i.e., patients with their medical needs and health-related questions. With time, chatbots are now being used across multiple industries, not only healthcare. Still, they’re especially helpful in medicine because they make it easier for doctors to access their patient records, cases, health and appointments data and update them in real time whenever necessary.

The Black Box problem also poses a concern to patient autonomy by potentially undermining the shared decision-making between physicians and patients [99]. The chatbot’s personalized suggestions are based on algorithms and refined based on the user’s past responses. The removal of options may slowly reduce the patient’s awareness of alternatives and interfere with free choice [100]. The goal of healthcare chatbots is to provide patients with a real-time, reliable platform for self-diagnosis and medical advice.

First, the user makes a request, in text or speech format, which is received and interpreted by the chatbot. From there, the processed information could be remembered, or more details could be requested for clarification. After the request is understood, the requested actions are performed, and the data of interest are retrieved from the database or external sources [15].

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In these ethical discussions, technology use is frequently ignored, technically automated mechanical functions are prioritised over human initiatives, or tools are treated as neutral partners in facilitating human cognitive efforts. So far, there has been scant discussion on how digitalisation, including chatbots, transform medical practices, especially in the context of human capabilities in exercising practical wisdom (Bontemps-Hommen et al. 2019). AI chatbots in healthcare are used for various purposes, including symptom assessment, patient triage, health education, medication management, and supporting telehealth services. Acting as 24/7 virtual assistants, healthcare chatbots efficiently respond to patient inquiries. This immediate interaction is crucial, especially for answering general health queries or providing information about hospital services. A notable example is an AI chatbot, which offers reliable answers to common health questions, helping patients to make informed decisions about their health and treatment options.

You then have to check your calendar and find a suitable time that aligns with the doctor’s availability. Lastly, you have to ensure they enter the right details about your name, your reason for visit, etc. But the unprecedented challenges in the past few years have shown how vulnerable the sector really is. With every significant disease outbreak and a growing population, providing equal care to every individual is becoming increasingly challenging. As a foundational pillar of modern society, healthcare is probably one of the most important industries there is today. The doctors can then use all this information to analyze the patient and make accurate reports.