Top 10 Chatbots in Healthcare: Insights & Use Cases in 2023

For example, chatbots integrated with electronic health records (EHRs) can update patient profiles in real-time, ensuring that healthcare providers have the latest information for diagnosis and treatment. 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.

Besides, it can collect and analyze data from wearable devices or other sources to monitor users’ health parameters, such as heart rate or blood pressure, and provide relevant feedback or alerts. An AI-enabled chatbot is a reliable alternative for patients looking to understand the cause of their symptoms. On the other hand, bots help healthcare providers to reduce their caseloads, which is why healthcare chatbot use cases increase day by day. Use cases for healthcare chatbots vary from diagnosis and mental health support to more routine tasks like scheduling and medication reminders. AI text bots helped detect and guide high-risk individuals toward self-isolation. The technology helped the University Hospitals system used by healthcare providers to screen 29,000 employees for COVID-19 symptoms daily.

Best chatbots for each use case

Daunting numbers and razor-thin margins have forced health systems to do more with less. Many are finding that adding an automation component to the innovation strategy can be a game-changer by cost-effectively improving operations throughout the organization to the benefit of both staff and patients. Embracing new technologies – such as robotic process automation enabled with chatbots – is key to achieving the interdependent goals of reducing costs and serving patients better. Since the 1950s, there have been efforts aimed at building models and systematising physician decision-making. For example, in the field of psychology, the so-called framework of ‘script theory’ was ‘used to explain how a physician’s medical diagnostic knowledge is structured for diagnostic problem solving’ (Fischer and Lam 2016, p. 24).

This transforms the banking experience for the clients and most of them want to have the possibility to use digital channels to interact with the bank. In fact, about 61% of banking consumers interact weekly with their banks on digital channels. No wonder the voice assistance users in the US alone reached over 120 million in 2021. Also, ecommerce transactions made by voice assistants are predicted to surpass $19 billion in 2023. About 80% of customers delete an app purely because they don’t know how to use it.

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During the COVID-19 pandemic, chatbots were already deployed to share information, suggest behavior, and offer emotional support. They have the potential to prevent misinformation, detect symptoms, and lessen the mental health burden during global pandemics [111]. At the global health level, chatbots have emerged as a socially responsible technology to provide equal access to quality health care and break down the barriers between the rich and poor [112].

Some ask general questions about exposure and symptoms (e.g., Case 7), whereas others also check for preexisting conditions to assess high-risk users (e.g., Case 1). Based on the assessed risk, the chatbot makes behavioral recommendations (e.g., self-monitor, quarantine, etc.). In cases of Covid-19 exposure combined with symptoms, recommendations across chatbots vary.

We stress here that our intention is not to provide empirical evidence for or against chatbots in health care; it is to advance discussions of professional ethics in the context of novel technologies. We focus on a single chatbot category used in the area of self-care or that precedes contact with a nurse or doctor. These chatbots are variously called dialog agents, conversational agents, interactive agents, virtual agents, virtual humans or virtual assistants (Abd-Alrazaq et al. 2020; Palanica et al. 2019). For instance, in the case of a digital health tool called Buoy or the chatbot platform Omaolo, users enter their symptoms and receive recommendations for care options. Both chatbots have algorithms that calculate input data and become increasingly smarter when people use the respective platforms.

• A brief historical overview, along with the developmental progress and design characteristics, is first introduced.
• These mental health chatbots increase access to support and show promising results comparable to human-led treatment based on early studies.
• Many patients find making appointments with their preferred mental health practitioners difficult due to waiting times and costs.
• Therefore, our analysis of design characteristics has an overrepresentation of publicly accessible chatbots.

A thorough research of LLMs is recommended to avoid possible technical issues or lawsuits when implementing a new artificial intelligence chatbot. For example, ChatGPT 4 and ChatGPT 3.5 LLMs are deployed on cloud servers that are located in the US. Hence, per the GDPR law, AI chatbots in the healthcare industry that use these LLMs are forbidden from being used in the EU.

Thus, chatbot platforms seek to automate some aspects of professional decision-making by systematising the traditional analytics of decision-making techniques (Snow 2019). In the long run, algorithmic solutions are expected to optimise the work tasks of medical doctors in terms of diagnostics and replace the routine tasks of nurses through online consultations and digital assistance. In addition, the development of algorithmic systems for health services requires a great deal of human resources, for instance, experts of data analytics whose work also needs to be publicly funded. A complete system also requires a ‘back-up system’ or practices that imply increased costs and the emergence of new problems. The crucial question that policy-makers are faced with is what kind of health services can be automated and translated into machine readable form.

Chatbots in healthcare are not bound by patient volumes and can attend to multiple patients simultaneously without compromising efficiency or interaction quality. Healthcare chatbots are transforming modern medicine as we know it, from round-the-clock availability chatbot healthcare use cases to bridging the gap between doctors and patients regardless of patient volumes. The chatbot can collect patients’ phone numbers and even enable patients to get video consultations in cases where they cannot travel to their nearest healthcare provider.

Provide medical information

After the request is understood, the requested actions are performed, and the data of interest are retrieved from the database or external sources [15]. For instance, the startup Sense.ly provides a chatbot specifically focused on managing care plans for chronic disease patients. Studies show they can improve outcomes by 15-20% for chronic disease management programs. Chatbots and conversational AI have enormous potential to transform healthcare delivery. As a healthcare leader, you may be wondering about the top use cases for implementing chatbots and how they can benefit your organization specifically. This global experience will impact the healthcare industry’s dependence on chatbots, and might provide broad and new chatbot implementation opportunities in the future.

The Physician Compensation Report states that, on average, doctors have to dedicate 15.5 hours weekly to paperwork and administrative tasks. With this in mind, customized AI chatbots are becoming a necessity for today’s healthcare businesses. The technology takes on the routine work, allowing physicians to focus more on severe medical cases. A conversational bot can examine the patient’s symptoms and offer potential diagnoses.

In the early days, the problem of these systems was ‘the complexity of mapping out the data in’ the system (Fischer and Lam 2016, p. 23). Today, advanced AI technologies and various kinds of platforms that house big data (e.g. blockchains) are able to map out and compute in real time most complex data structures. In addition, especially in health care, these systems have been based on theoretical and practical models and methods developed in the field.

Healthcare chatbot use cases go a step further by automating crucial tasks and providing accurate information to improve the patient experience virtually. As medical chatbots interact with patients regularly on websites or applications it can pick up a significant amount of user preferences. Such patient preferences can help the chatbot and in turn, the hospital staff personalize patient interactions. Through patient preferences, the hospital staff can engage their patients with empathy and build a rapport that will help in the long run. Implementing a chatbot for appointment scheduling removes the monotony of filling out dozens of forms and eases the entire process of bookings. They can provide information on aspects like doctor availability and booking slots and match patients with the right physicians and specialists.

Chatbots in healthcare contribute to significant cost savings by automating routine tasks and providing initial consultations. This automation reduces the need for staff to handle basic inquiries and administrative duties, allowing them to focus on more complex and critical tasks. In addition, by handling initial patient interactions, chatbots can reduce the number of unnecessary in-person visits, further saving costs. Healthcare chatbots can also be used to collect and maintain patient data, like symptoms, lifestyle habits, and medical history after discharge from a medical facility. Mental health chatbots and their usually calm and non-intimidating UI design can provide an alternative—allowing healthcare consumers to access professional healthcare guidance whenever and wherever they need it, at a fraction of the cost.