The healthcare industry is rapidly transforming in every aspect as the world is rapidly changing. The industry is relying on the potential benefits of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Healthcare organizations are leveraging AI to improve operational efficiencies, grow business revenue and deliver top-notch customer experiences through their EMR systems. Hospitals and clinics are greatly realizing the need for AI-enabled solutions to assist the challenges in the healthcare industry.
Many healthcare institutions and are facing challenges to handle the health crisis during this post-pandemic due to the shortage of medical equipment and staff. Hospitals are flooded with queries and cases, unlike usual days. The scenarios have brought on unexpected changes to the entire healthcare sector. And the patients’ expectations have changed as they need easy & quick access to information. They expect instant responses to their problems according to EClinicalWorks EHR. With advanced technologies like artificial intelligence (AI), natural language processing (NLP), and machine learning (ML) for providing chatbots.
According to recent research, “AI is set to grow from $667.1 million to over $7.9 billion, at a CAGR of 53% over the forecast period.”
Impact of Artificial Intelligence on Healthcare Sector
Artificial Intelligence (AI) in healthcare is actually far more than an emerging technology trend. It brings along fear and uncertainty as well. However, the opportunities involve a number of challenges, where they can have a strong impact on the health of patients. Additionally, it is vital to develop standards with clarity and frameworks alongside advancements in technology.
- AI assures speed, accuracy, and consistency that helps better health care services. Though it can not replace human empathy and objective analysis, when combined together they combine each other’s capabilities. The healthcare sector very well realizes that AI capabilities would give real time actionable insights to boost meaningful changes. AI solutions also help to level up revenue, while delivering an excellent patient experience at the same time.
- The modern AI-enabled healthcare products and services are designed so well to help in precise early diagnosis and deriving the right treatment for curing the diseases. The features like robot-assisted surgery, instant image recognition, checking of symptoms and identifying the risk level. It will further personalize health screening in different areas like diagnostics, administrative workflow support, virtual assistants in nursing, clinical use cases, fraud detection, etc.
How AI Chatbots are Helping Healthcare Institutions
Chatbots are being widely accepted by different hospitals and clinics for delivering cutting-edge solutions. Bots are best at helping people from opening a bank account, booking a table at your restaurant – which is why bots are intelligent and a must have tool for any fast-growing business.
Irrespective of the size or industry of your business, chatbots are being widely deployed across different use cases in order to automate common and repetitive tasks. Chatbots in the healthcare sector made providers reluctant in the beginning but are now comfortable in adopting digital tools.
7 Practical Ways Chatbots Help to Accelerate Healthcare Services
By building and deploying AI patient engagement chatbots, organizations can not only streamline their work process but also play a main role in saving and changing lives.
Let us discuss the key chatbot use cases that make it one of the most effective tools for seamless communication between healthcare providers and patients.
#1. Diagnose symptoms of illness
The advanced AI patient engagement tool empowers the patients with advanced opportunities for self-diagnosis by preparing a comprehensive medical questionnaire. By determining the answers by the patients to the questionnaire related to their health condition they get recommendations and good suggestions for the right course of action. Chatbots are a perfect fit as healthcare revolves around the use case pretty well.
#2. Schedule meetings & appointments
One of the biggest challenges for the patients is visiting the doctor’s clinic personally for booking an appointment. For anyone who is undergoing some health issues, it could be an annoying process. Equally, it can be hectic for the medical staff to manually interact with patients for repetitive tasks.
Leveraging a chatbot solution can seamlessly handle appointments and bookings smoothly. Not only this but the productivity of your medical staff is improved as they can handle tasks of high priority. Building appointment booking chatbots simplify the life for patients as well as for healthcare staff.
#3. Instant update on medical news
Undoubtedly, voice and text-enabled experience is in great demand and is emerging as a new channel for reaching out to people. It helps in providing useful and accurate information they expect in less time.
Deploying the chatbot technology has been a great support to healthcare during the difficult COVID times. It has proved worthy to the healthcare industry with the potential factors. Most organizations have started investing in conversational AI to redesign the entire patient experience.
#4. Easy medications
Nowadays, we do not have to go to the medical store with prescriptions to buy medicines. AI-enabled chatbots have made ordering the prescribed medicine simple and easy. The customers just have to upload the medical prescription and place an order for the required medicines by using the suitable payment options.
#5. Send notifications and promotions
Implementing patient engagement chatbots greatly helps in promoting medical products and diagnostic machines by providing interactive product demos. Bots help companies to collect and store conversational data that can provide valuable and actionable insights, to outline and create successful marketing campaigns by identifying the behavior of the target customers.
#6. Real time responses to FAQs, 24×7
Building an automated FAQ chatbot can engage with customers in real time and provide instant answers for basic queries that reduce the number of support requests. Bots can significantly reduce wait times and improve response times.
When service providers meet the key metrics the customer satisfaction levels increase tremendously and the conversion rates are higher. Many healthcare service providers have leveraged this effective tool to provide sufficient time for the agents to focus on more complex issues and increase their efficiency.
#7. Medication reminders and tracking
Last but not least the reminder bots are well trained to deliver a personalized experience by facilitating medicine reminders to patients as per their prescription. Bots are capable of tracking many things like body weight, blood pressure, or blood sugar level that are vital to staying fit and being streamlined with their health objectives. You can also use pre printed rfid labels to label medications.
Wrap Up
In the healthcare sector, leveraging chatbots can be the best solution for patients and healthcare professionals. Usually, visiting the doctor for primary care is quite difficult having a busy life schedule. And with chatbots, patient engagement is opening a spectrum of opportunities for scaling and automating interactions.
About Net Health
Net Health’s mission is to harness data for human health. We offer EHR software and predictive, actionable analytics for medical specialties, including rehab therapy, wound care, home health and hospice, and employee health and occupational medicine. Net Health solutions are trusted in over 23,000 facilities across the continuum of care. Our EHR software enables caregivers and their organizations to engage effectively with patients, streamline documentation, staff efficiently, secure maximum appropriate reimbursement and maintain regulatory compliance. Our unique approach to analytics seamlessly presents insights in clinical and operational workflows to improve care and business performance. Net Health is a portfolio company of The Carlyle Group, Level Equity and Silversmith Capital Partners. www.nethealth.com.