Chatbots in Healthcare: Improving Patient Engagement and Experience

While we acknowledge that the benefits of chatbots can be broad, whether they outweigh the potential risks to both patients and physicians has yet to be seen. Early cancer detection can lead to higher survival rates and improved quality of life. Inherited factors are present in 5% to 10% of cancers, including breast, colorectal, prostate, and rare tumor syndromes [62]. Family history collection is a proven way of easily accessing the genetic disposition of developing cancer to inform risk-stratified decision-making, clinical decisions, and cancer prevention [63]. The web-based chatbot ItRuns (ItRunsInMyFamily) gathers family history information at the population level to determine the risk of hereditary cancer [29]. We have yet to find a chatbot that incorporates deep learning to process large and complex data sets at a cellular level.

For example, Medical Sieve (IBM Corp) is a chatbot that examines radiological images to aid and communicate with cardiologists and radiologists to identify issues quickly and reliably [24]. Similarly, InnerEye (Microsoft Corp) is a computer-assisted image diagnostic chatbot that recognizes cancers and diseases within the eye but does not directly interact with the user like a chatbot [42]. Even with the rapid advancements of AI in cancer imaging, a major issue is the lack of a gold standard [58]. Even after addressing these issues and establishing the safety or efficacy of chatbots, human elements in health care will not be replaceable. Therefore, chatbots have the potential to be integrated into clinical practice by working alongside health practitioners to reduce costs, refine workflow efficiencies, and improve patient outcomes. Other applications in pandemic support, global health, and education are yet to be fully explored.

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Pasquale (2020, p. 57) has reminded us that AI-driven systems, including chatbots, mirror the successes and failures of clinicians. However, machines do not have the human capabilities of prudence and practical wisdom or the flexible, interpretive capacity to correct mistakes and wrong decisions. As a result of self-diagnosis, physicians may have difficulty convincing patients of their potential preliminary, chatbot-derived misdiagnosis. This level of persuasion and negotiation increases the workload of professionals and creates new tensions between patients and physicians. In the last decade, medical ethicists have attempted to outline principles and frameworks for the ethical deployment of emerging technologies, especially AI, in health care (Beil et al. 2019; Mittelstadt 2019; Rigby 2019). As conversational agents have gained popularity during the COVID-19 pandemic, medical experts have been required to respond more quickly to the legal and ethical aspects of chatbots.

• There is no denying that chatbots in healthcare are becoming more critical than ever.
• This practice lowers the cost of building the app, but it also speeds up the time to market significantly.
• Advancements in ML have provided benefits in terms of accuracy, decision-making, quick processing, cost-effectiveness, and handling of complex data [2].
• However, for both tech-savvy millennials and elderly individuals with low technological acumen, a decent interface must be simple to use.
• But having a smart chatbot with AI integration can efficiently handle thousands of requests at one time without any glitches.

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. However, humans rate a process not only by the outcome but also by how easy and straightforward the process is. Similarly, conversations between men and machines are not nearly judged by the outcome but by the ease of chatbot technology in healthcare the interaction. 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. A friendly and funny chatbot may work best for a chatbot for new mothers seeking information about their newborns.

How Healthcare Chatbots are Expanding Automated Medical Care

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]. 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 chatbot technology in healthcare 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.

This means that the systems’ behavior is hard to explain by merely looking inside, and understanding exactly how they are programmed is nearly impossible. For both users and developers, transparency becomes an issue, as they are not able to fully understand the solution or intervene to predictably change the chatbot’s behavior [97]. With the novelty and complexity of chatbots, obtaining valid informed consent where patients can make their own health-related risk and benefit assessments becomes problematic [98]. Without sufficient transparency, deciding how certain decisions are made or how errors may occur reduces the reliability of the diagnostic process. 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 chatbots then, through EDI, store this information in the medical facility database to facilitate patient admission, symptom tracking, doctor-patient communication, and medical record keeping. Chatbots ask patients about their current health issue, find matching physicians and dentists, provide available time slots, and can schedule, reschedule, and delete appointments https://www.metadialog.com/ for patients. Chatbots can also be integrated into user’s device calendars to send reminders and updates about medical appointments. Also, there are different maturity levels for bots, for instance, Level 1 maturity bot and Level 2 maturity bot. Such a conversational AI in healthcare perceives conversation from a holistic perspective rather than deducing sentence meaning.