Digital healthcare has not remained a new concept today. With the advancements in many robust technologies like IoT, RPA, and Blockchain, the healthcare sector improved significantly. Artificial Intelligence is also one such powerful tech trend that has helped the digital healthcare concept gain a competitive advantage over any other sector. The use of chatbots in healthcare is solid proof of that!
Today, healthcare organizations are actively investing in custom chatbot development to enhance their services and facilitate self-care amongst the patients. Chatbots in healthcare today are even offering some amazing benefits like automating the tedious healthcare operations, providing 24×7 attention to patients, and enhancing the administration areas like payments, client service, and marketing.
Don’t you believe us? Here are some mind-boggling facts about the adoption of chatbots in healthcare!
- Around $800 million has been spent across the leading healthcare development companies to build medical chatbots for enhanced services.
- The growth rate of healthcare chatbots has already reached $122 million by the year 2018. The number is expected to reach $314 million by 2022!
- The AI healthcare market is projected to become $40 billion by the year 2026.
As evident from the facts mentioned above, one can say that chatbots in healthcare have brought a wide range of benefits and automation. That’s why the leading healthcare organizations today are investing in custom medical chatbots.
But, what exactly are these medical chatbots? Let us discover our answers in the blog below!
What are Chatbots in Healthcare?
A medical chatbot is a robust application of AI that is widely used today to enhance patient care services. Empowered by smart ML algorithms and advanced NLP services, the healthcare chatbots efficiently simplify healthcare services and make digital healthcare accessible for the common people.
Whether we talk about online searches by the patients or digital healthcare consultations, chatbots in healthcare prove very useful. Besides that, many healthcare experts believe that medical chatbots are the best resources to guide patients in searching and accessing the best medical services around them. Maybe, that’s the main reason why many leading telemedicine app owners implemented healthcare chatbots in their apps. Chatbots collect the basic information of the patients, and based on their health conditions, the medical chatbots further offer them the best suggestions to improve their conditions.
Not just that, but the advanced medical chatbots, even mimic the human voice and observations by using the smart NLP (Natural Language Processing) services. That greatly reduces the tedious patient management operations. All in all, with medical chatbots, things become much easier in the healthcare industry! Need more reasons to invest in custom chatbots for healthcare? Don’t worry, we have got you covered!
What Benefits Does Medical Chatbot Offer?
Here are some amazing and unique benefits that you can get by implementing chatbots in healthcare. Read on to know more!
1. Hospital Administration
The first and foremost benefit of chatbots in healthcare is that it facilitates automated healthcare administration. Scheduling appointments, managing the bills, and answering phone calls are often considered the most time-consuming and tedious healthcare administrator tasks. They consume a lot of time and even increase the management cost due to the involvement of larger resources. However, the scenario is a bit different with chatbots in healthcare!
The advanced medical chatbots automate all those tedious tasks and even enhance them with the use of smart functionalities. Chatbots for healthcare remind the patients about their medicines and offer them an online booking platform to book doctor’s appointments. Meanwhile, the users can check the patient’s relevant records and even get updates on the required medications.
2. Real-time Feedback
Any healthcare institute’s main goal is always to provide the best medical services to the patients in need. But, getting the feedback, too, in real-time is still a big challenge for the healthcare industry. But, not anymore with custom healthcare chatbots!
The recent implementation of chatbots in healthcare has today made it possible to collect the patient’s real-time feedback. With online surveys and effective communication channels, the leading hospitals are getting real-time feedback from their patients without any effort. Those real-time feedback help improve the overall medical services and make the customer satisfied, and builds trust for your brand.
3. Self-Care Services
Another excellent benefit of chatbots in healthcare is it promotes self-care services amongst patients and elderly people. There are times when people living in remote areas or elderly people could not frequently visit the doctors or healthcare provider to get a consultation. Moreover, the doctors also could not continuously monitor the routines of their thousands of patients. That’s where healthcare chatbots come to play!
The advanced healthcare chatbots not just offer functionalities to book the doctor’s consultation while sitting remotely, but even monitors your health conditions. With a custom healthcare chatbot, you can seamlessly keep track of your diet plans, calorie intake, water amount, and so on. Not only that, but those custom chatbots could even remind you of the medications that your need to take the proper time.
Such functionality helps keep the patients healthy and enhances your brand value and customer satisfaction.
4. Cost Reduction
Cost reduction is a key player in every industry in implementing any digital solutions, and AI has got this one covered. Whether we talk about any industry, custom AI solutions have always helped businesses to reduce their operational cost and bring intelligence into their existing systems. At least, we can say that for the healthcare industry!
As evident from the benefits mentioned above, chatbots in healthcare streamline patient management and enhance the customer experience. With that, it even automates the consultation and patient monitoring services. Hence, with such great automation, the overall healthcare management cost eventually reduces, offering profits and enhanced brand value to the hospitals.
5. Greater Brand Value
Last but not least, with chatbots in healthcare, the institutes/hospitals’ brand value increases significantly. Besides automating all your healthcare operations, the medical chatbots even provide ease and efficiency to your patients by offering them services like medication reminders, online consultation, and much more.
Besides that, the healthcare chatbots even help healthcare organizations reduce their operational cost. That means you can focus on automating other critical tasks that can help you increase your brand value and outstand your competitors seamlessly.
6. Medication Reminders
Now, it is often seen that doctors prescribe the best medicines to patients. Sometimes, due to carelessness or due inability to understand the procedures to take medicines, patients forget to take prescribed treatment on time. That’s where the custom healthcare chatbots come to play!
The healthcare chatbots implemented in your systems help simplify the tedious administration tasks and even help the patients take medicines on time. That, in turn, increases the patient’s life expectancy and even improves their health. That is eventually a great benefit for the people who are either alone or elderly and forget to take medicines on time.
Also Read- AI Healthcare Software Development: Benefits, Features and Process
Challenges Involved in Development of Chatbots in Healthcare
Like every coin has two sides, medical chatbots also have some challenges associated with them. As a leading name in AI solutions provider, we have listed some of the major challenges that need to be addressed while implementing chatbots in healthcare.
1. Lack of Human Responses
The first and foremost challenge associated with implementing chatbots in healthcare is it lacks the human touch. Although chatbots have become more advanced than ever, the ability to fully understand human behavior is still not developed. The users, especially the patients, always want to consult with a real person rather than a chatbot when discussing their medical conditions. Hence, this is one challenge where healthcare chatbots still need to work.
2. Data Privacy Issues
Another critical factor that needs to be analyzed before implementing chatbots in healthcare is data privacy. It is not doubted today that digital solutions have become more advanced than ever. However, security concerns like data privacy and theft are still prevailing in the global market. And the data becomes critical when it comes to the healthcare industry! Hence, always try to add all the security tools and develop compliance-regulated healthcare applications when planning to implement chatbots in healthcare.
3. Choosing Inappropriate Technology Partner
Finally, choosing a reliable technology partner is also one of the major challenges that healthcare institutes have to address when developing chatbots for healthcare. When a startup or not-so-reliable company offers you chatbot development at a very cheap rate, there are times. That’s where most healthcare organizations fail!
Always choose the best and experienced software engineering firm that has a name in developing healthcare solutions. With that, you will not only have the proper assistance but will even get a successful and scalable solution that will help you in the long run.
That’s where Matellio comes to play!
With years-long experience in delivering well-enhanced custom digital solutions, we, at Matellio, are known to provide cost-effective solutions to many industries. Whether we talk about custom telemedicine apps, AI-powered consultation systems, or even chatbots for healthcare, our company’s certified developers strive to deliver the best thing at cost-effective prices. That’s why we are always the first choice of businesses when it comes to custom software development. Reach us to discuss your project idea, and witness the amazing positive changes in your operations. Plus, get a free 30-min expert consultation by filling our form today!
Till then, Happy Reading!
