AI-Chatbots: Healthcare Challenges
The chatbot technology in healthcare, which is AI-powered, serves as a virtual assistant for patient care. They aim to improve human expectations, emotions, and behaviors, thus enhancing healthcare efficiency and healthcare transformation.
The world of AI is growing, providing humanized experiences. Imagine a world where AI-powered chatbots revolutionize healthcare delivery, offering instantaneous medical advice, streamlining administrative tasks, and providing personalized patient care. With the projected chatbot investment to create humanized experiences worth over $1 billion by 2030, it’s evident that the transformative potential of these intelligent systems goes beyond mere automation.
The landscape of AI chatbots is landmined with a web of complexities. We will take a look at the hurdles laden in deploying these solutions, but ultimately, we will focus on the end game: the transformative future of healthcare.
With chatbots and the recent developments in AI, we have moved from humanoid experiences to humanized experiences. In humanoid interactions with artificial intelligence, the design features a mechanical structure that resembles or is similar to a human being in terms of appearance or characteristics.
The humanoid (robot, as is often the case) has a physical structure and features that resemble those of a human — a head, torso, arms, and legs — which allow the robot to perform tasks and interact with its surroundings in a manner similar to humans. The robots mimic human movements and behaviors to a certain extent (preprogrammed), enabling them to perform various tasks and engage with humans in more natural and intuitive ways.
In contrast, as described earlier, humanized experiences are custom-fitted for human needs, emotions, and preferences. This makes them more relatable, engaging, and empathetic. The humanized experience focuses on creating interactions or experiences that align with human expectations, emotions, and behaviors. With this, user satisfaction, engagement, and overall well-being can be enhanced.
Chatbot Technology in Healthcare
The concept of chatbot technology in healthcare was developed from the complementary healthcare assistant framework, where solutions can be automated and delivered without a breach in efficiency and replicability. The development evolved around the use of artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language processing (NLP) to create virtual assistants that can communicate and interact with users in a conversational manner without compromising on quality.
Primarily, the goal of chatbot technology in healthcare is to enhance patient experiences, improve accessibility to healthcare information, and reduce administrative bottlenecks. The leverage chatbots provide is enormous in that they help healthcare technology free up time initially spent on auxiliary services. Let’s discuss the benefits in detail.
Streamlining Administrative Tasks and Improving Patient Experience
In hospitals or centers with high patient throughput, these chatbots can assist patients in scheduling appointments by providing real-time availability, guiding them through the appointment scheduling process, and sending appointment reminders. This eliminates the need for manual scheduling and reduces administrative burdens.
BotPenguin, an appointment-booking chatbot solution for hospitals, was created for essential appointment booking and is being used by a variety of companies. Its aim is to “assist hospitals, dentists, doctors, clinics, and therapy centers.” The chatbot can be linked with various chat channels such as Facebook Messenger, Websites, Telegram, and Google Assistant.
Chatbots have also been deployed to tackle paperwork tasks such as patient documentation, insurance, and medical history. They can also facilitate online payment processes by reducing the need for manual intervention and providing answers to patient queries related to invoices, payment options, and insurance claims. Therapy-focused chatbots like Wysa and Limbic offer suggestive chatbot-assisted free and paid teletherapy services.
Improving Patient Engagement and Satisfaction
At the base of a unique patient experience is the need to be listened to and attended to. Some chatbots, like Replika, are programmed to provide emotional support and empathy to patients. They offer comforting words, and motivational messages, or simply act as a listening ear. This aspect of human-like interaction can enhance patient engagement and satisfaction, especially in cases where emotional well-being is crucial.
Facilitating Diagnostic Decision-Making and Telehealth Services
AI chatbots play a vital role in assisting healthcare professionals with diagnostic decision-making by iterating information from the corpus of patient data, medical literature, and clinical guidelines available. They provide real-time suggestions, recommendations, and insights based on the input and information provided by healthcare professionals, aiding in the diagnostic process and improving accuracy.
Additionally, they facilitate remote monitoring services by enabling continuous monitoring of patient’s vital signs, symptoms, and health parameters. Through integration with wearable devices or sensors, these chatbots can collect and analyze data, alert healthcare providers of any concerning changes or anomalies, and facilitate virtual consultations or check-ins with patients. This remote monitoring capability enhances patient convenience, reduces the need for in-person visits, and enables timely intervention and proactive care management.
With the leverage of technology available to healthcare professionals, they can further strengthen their practice by focusing less on trivial and time-demanding non-clinical tasks, reducing the man-hours spent on them, and focusing on core clinical tasks.
Challenges Faced by AI-Chatbots in Healthcare
A limited contextual understanding of mild to complex medical queries is often seen as the major challenge faced by AI-Chatbots. While mild medical queries, like generic health information or basic disease symptoms, may be relatively easier for AI chatbots to handle — as they can rely on pre-programmed patterns — as the complexity of the medical query increases, AI chatbots may struggle to provide accurate responses. This is because they may not have access to the most up-to-date medical research, lack the ability to reason or make connections between different pieces of information, or possess the same level of clinical experience and intuition as human medical professionals.
Other challenges, such as ensuring the accuracy and reliability of responses, addressing data privacy and patient-security concerns, overcoming biases and promoting inclusivity, and resolving ethical dilemmas, and liability issues, all feature prominently in AI-Chatbot limitations.
Some other challenges are technical. For instance, a limitation can be derived from the Natural Language Processing (NLP) algorithm. Natural language is inherently ambiguous, and different sentences can have multiple interpretations. The NLP algorithms may struggle to accurately clarify a query, which may be misunderstood, leading to incorrect responses or outright misleading information. An example is the research published in Science, where a healthcare risk-prediction algorithm used by hospitals and insurance companies throughout the US identified Black patients to increase care cost while also failing to identify Black patients due for high-risk care management.
Another problem can arise from the challenges of different standards and formats for storing and exchanging data, particularly when integrating electronic health records with existing healthcare systems. This is mainly due to variations in data structures, coding systems, and data protocols.
The accountability of AI chatbot systems is also a pressing concern, especially regarding regulatory compliance and legal considerations, which are rife within the product development community. The necessity to trace and explain the decision-making process of the chatbot, especially in critical healthcare scenarios, is essential. In advanced societies where lawsuits regarding medical malpractice or patient rights infringement are common, maintaining an audit trail of interactions and ensuring transparency in the system’s decision-making process must be tackled with immediate focus. This will help foster accountability and provide recourse in case of errors or disputes.
Overcoming AI-Chatbot Technology Challenges in Healthcare
The linkage between healthcare professionals and AI experts through research and development, monitoring and evaluation, as well as deployment stages, can lead to the creation of AI-Chatbot solutions that are better suited to the complex and dynamic healthcare environment. This synergy will ensure that the technology addresses the pain points in healthcare settings while still adhering to ethical guidelines and providing valuable support to healthcare professionals and patients.
Troubling issues such as data management, clinical decision-making, or patient engagement, if properly outlined by healthcare professionals, could guide the chatbot designers in delivering a solution-oriented program that aligns with the needs and workflows of healthcare providers, making them more effective and user-friendly.
Furthermore, enhanced domain knowledge will increase the robustness of the collaboration between healthcare professionals and AI experts. While healthcare professionals contribute their knowledge of medical terminology, clinical guidelines, and best practices, AI experts bring their domain expertise, product design, and development skills to the fore. This collaboration ensures that the AI-Chatbot system is built on a solid foundation of accurate medical information, improving the quality and reliability of the responses provided.
The future potential of AI chatbots in healthcare is limitless. Advancements in AI and natural language processing enable them to revolutionize the traditional patient-healthcare provider service relationship. They automate tasks, provide personalized support, and may even develop emotional intelligence. However, challenges such as privacy and ethics must be addressed. With ongoing research, AI chatbots will reshape industries, enhance experiences, and transform human-technology interactions in exciting ways.
The healthcare transformation with AI, especially chatbots, is revolutionizing healthcare delivery. With their ability to streamline processes, enhance decision-making, and improve patient engagement, AI-driven healthcare innovation will optimize healthcare delivery and access, increase efficiency, and ultimately improve patient outcomes. The future opens up a vista into the continued development and integration of AI-chatbot technologies, which will undoubtedly reshape the healthcare landscape, creating a more patient-centered, accessible, and personalized healthcare system that leverages the power of artificial intelligence for the benefit of all.
Author’s Note: This blog post was AI-guided. However, it was the product of a delightful collaboration with my trusty AI assistant. The human touch added creativity and context, while the AI contributed its algorithmic prowess.
For all inquiries, collaborations, and engaging discussions, connect by sending an email to joshuakayceogbonna@gmail.com. Don’t miss out on this chance to be part of the AI healthcare revolution! Act now and open the door to endless possibilities.
