"Hi Tom, this is Chris! You said you were feeling feverish yesterday. I wanted to know if you are doing better. On a scale of 1-10, how would you rate your symptoms today?"

Who do you think that was? That sure wasn't a doctor, that was an AI-driven chatbot.

COVID-19 changed a lot of aspects of our daily life. Among many changes, noticeable changes reflected in the healthcare segment. An industry that faces challenges every day, had to take a long leap to adjust to the drastic effects of this pandemic. Globally, two things emerged – telemedicine and chatbots. While doctor consultations via call existed to a certain extent pre-COVID, telemedicine with the inclusion of AI has now become primary care.

How AI Chatbots Are Transforming Healthcare

Artificial Intelligence-enabled chatbots are providing a new approach for patients to receive the right healthcare at the right time. By now, you must have seen chatbots pop when a website opens. Those bots ask basic questions like "how may I help you" or "what are you looking for". But in the medical sector, that is not it. Chatbots take various forms. They perform various tasks like scheduling appointments, billing, patient engagement.

AI chatbots mimic human conversation through text chats (commonly) and voice commands. But unlike humans, they can be available 24/7 in any geographical location. Most often, chatbots come with preloaded FAQs and answers that are programmed to adapt to human responses. Through this loop of conversation, healthcare providers are receiving tons of patient data that creates new opportunities.

Nick Desai, CEO of Heal, a telemedicine platform calls this digital primary care. He says "there is still an irreplaceable value to the human-doctor patient interaction. What we want to do is give doctors data-driven decision support."

How Is Data-Driven Support Helping Patients & Hospitals?

• For patients dealing with chronic conditions, a short response time from health care providers is crucial. Here, chatbots help doctors from getting burnt out. Health care providers can speak to their AI-powered devices to record notes, schedule appointments, order medicines from pharmacies, and generate reports.

One such platform is SafedrugBot that mediates messages between breastfeeding patients and doctors via the Telegram app. This app helps health care providers get updated information about the patients and prescribe them pregnancy-safe medicine. This app also helps patients by giving them alternate names to a specific doctor-prescribing medicine.

• What happens when you read about cold symptoms on websites like WebMD? The answer might be more gruesome than needed. That's probably why doctors stop people from searching about their symptoms on the internet. But these days, there are chatbots that will give a much accurate answer, thanks to databases of medical information and similar patient experiences.

One such app is Ada. Ada is a personal health companion that uses AI to determine a patient's symptoms by asking questions like "Where does it hurt?" to which it gives a diagnosis based on several GBs of medical data. The advantage of using such a platform is that it learns more about the patient with each interaction, thanks to AI. About the diagnosis, Ada generates a report that the patient can show the doctor.

• For patients who juggle a million different tasks daily, chatbots can become their personal nurses. It can help schedule and remind follow-up checkups, send out reminders to take medicine, and answer quick FAQs.

LifeLink powers chatbots that provide patients with accurate wait times, give an understanding of medical procedures, assists in finding doctors and scheduling appointments, sends families live updates about the patient's health, and informs patients about tests. Such apps increase patient engagements and reduce uncertainties and frustrations.

For health care providers and patients, this AI-driven chatbot technology is a win-win. These chatbots hold vast capabilities that can make healthcare a rather easy and less-intimidating aspect of people's lives. It helps patients find doctors, schedule appointments, get details about tests and procedures, and medical bills. Chatbots increase patient engagement and patient satisfaction which is the ultimate goal of healthcare.