Patient engagement is essential for an effective healthcare system, as
it plays a vital role in providing good quality care and achieving
better health outcomes. Engaging patients are more likely to follow
their treatment plan, keep upcoming appointments, and make more
informed and appropriate decisions on their health. Patients will feel
better and more satisfied, and overall healthcare costs will decrease.
Maintaining consistent and quality patient engagement can be
challenging for healthcare providers.
Enter chatbots: a new technology to transform patient engagement.
Artificially intelligent chatbots are a tech solution that can engage
with a patient in various ways. Sometimes, patients want an instant
answer; sometimes, they need personalized information about their
health, and sometimes, they need a proper channel to send a message,
be it scheduling an appointment or asking a medical question. A
chatbot offers all of these in one fell swoop and can be accessed at
all hours. It’s a handy little assistant to stay with you throughout
your healthcare journey.
We need to explore further what makes chatbots engage patients better
and what are the crucial elements for patients and their carers to
leverage the benefits of this technology. In this article, we look at
how integrating bots in electronic health systems can benefit all
stakeholders, their specific advantages, and real-world use
experiences and challenges. Finally, we will also consider the
challenges this nascent technology is poised to face.
Patient engagement is a term that describes patients being engaged in their own healthcare experience. The components of patient engagement involve well-informed patients making decisions with the guidance of their healthcare providers. Patient engagement includes participating in their treatment plans, adhering to treatment recommendations, and attending follow-up appointments. Research has demonstrated that engaged patients are more adherent to treatment, attend more follow-up visits, and change their health behaviors to decrease their risk for chronic disease. Patient engagement is one of the key strategies utilized to improve health outcomes, patient satisfaction, and lower healthcare costs. This outcome is created by developing a more collaborative working relationship between the patient and the provider. Medical care often encourages patients to be passive components of their own treatment programs, which explains why patients are dissatisfied with their care and feel alienated by their experiences.
While patient engagement is vital, it faces key challenges. Among them, there is a limited amount of time and resources for physicians and healthcare professionals to provide patient interaction and support continually. There is generally too much information, too many unconnected resources, and sometimes too many different formats – which, at times, can lead to information overload and disengagement from patients. Health literacy and access to technology can also be a problem: not all patients have the same willingness to embrace and engage with technologies and understand their healthcare. Increasingly complex, multi-level, inter-disciplinary healthcare systems, with their rewards primarily for volume rather than the quality of care, emphasize greater specialization and organization of tasks but result in many patients feeling they have to juggle with several providers to get an integrated, coordinated perspective on their care.
A chatbot is a computer program designed to simulate conversation with humans through text or voice. It can be embedded in websites, mobile messaging applications, and other consumer app ecosystems to assist users with tasks, provide information, and troubleshoot problems. There are two broad categories of chatbots:
In healthcare, chatbots are used for several tasks, all intended to improve patient engagement and streamline operations. Here’s how they work:
Having access to chatbots ensures patients have information and support available to them at any time of day or night. This improves patient satisfaction by helping patients get their answers right away instead of having to wait for regular office hours.
Using chatbot technology to personalize the patient experience with unique information and reminders suited to the individual’s unique needs may lead to greater engagement and, ultimately, better adherence to treatment.
Patients can use them to communicate with their clinicians by acquiring answers to commonly asked questions, such as their laboratory results and more specific medical inquiries. Chatbots also help to maintain a continuous and efficient communication channel between patients and their healthcare teams by delivering personalized information on their medical condition, which helps to sustain their attention and interest in their healthcare throughout their daily activities.
This would respond to all the most commonly asked questions by patients, which are always the same in case of a narrow application. Chatbots narrow the mutual search for specific information to instant responses while accompanying a patient’s quest for reliable health tips that improve their prognosis and facilitate more informed decisions about the care they should receive.
Apart from engagement, appointment management is a key task. Chatbots facilitate scheduling, allowing patients to book, reschedule, and cancel appointments easily. They also send timely reminders to reduce no-show rates and ensure patients attend their scheduled visits.
Chatbots help patients track symptoms and manage chronic conditions, thanks to regular collection and analysis of patient data that yields valuable insight and recommendations to help them stay on track and successfully modify their treatment plan.
Accuracy is another central issue with chatbots. Since AI-driven chatbots are not yet perfect and may reply in response to user inputs they haven’t seen before, inconsistencies between verbal and text-based consultations are possible. This could present serious problems if, for example, a patient in some part of the world receives incorrect guidance on, say, COVID-19 or breast cancer via the chatbot. An obvious solution is regular updates, rigorous testing, and linking the chatbot with evolving, verified, and well-monitored medical databases.
Given that chatbots will be handling sensitive patient information, privacy, and data security issues are top of mind for some. Providing a service and having patient data held to regulations such as HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act in the US) can offer others relief from worries and knowing their information is secure and available to the appropriate parties when needed. Encryption that is above and beyond what most people can provide, secure data storage and control over who can access that data is paramount to avoid a data breach and to protect privacy.
Some might feel they do not want to use this chatbot technology because they feel they don’t know how to use it, or they might not feel they can trust this system. Education about experiences between patients and the chatbot can help alleviate a lack of familiarity with this application. Showing the system's benefits and that this artificial intelligence has been tested and proven reliable can help improve the trustworthiness of this virtual caregiver. Improving the user interface of the system ensuring it is accessible and convenient, can help decrease reluctance. Providing a parallel support option for those less familiar or comfortable with technology can help minimize this barrier.
The future of chatbots in healthcare is bright, especially since the technological foundation of AI and ML keeps changing. Soon, we will get to a place where chatbots are truly impressive, with improved patterns for natural language processing – their ability to understand complex medical queries. AI and ML algorithms are already improving as more data is available to train machines. This will enable chatbots to produce more accurate, context-aware responses that will improve the depth and quality of patient interactions and those offering medical support.
Chatbots can be integrated with other technologies that are crucial to patient care and engagement. For example, they may be included in Telemedicine software platforms to support virtual consultation and provide pre-appointment details and post-appointment care. Several data privacy issues still persist, but these have inspired innovative use cases. However, some integrations can improve both the patient and care provider experience. For instance, integration with Electronic Health Records (EHRs) can facilitate patient data access and update procedures, enabling seamless real-time data sharing and more personalized patient management. These integrations will support and align with the need for a more connected and efficient healthcare setup.
So, where do we go from here? It seems like chatbots are the key to enhancing engagement with patients in the future. As their technology and applications advance, chatbots will more energetically engage in proactive surveillance in real-time. Buddybots will become more ‘buddy-like’ and predictive of the patient’s needs, and data-mining of health data over time is likely to surface early warning signs of potential health problems. Patients who are cared for by chatbots may have a closer and more engaged patient-provider relationship. Buddybots may also encourage their patients to take a more active role in their health, as sharing and receiving care will appear to be easier. This means that patient engagement enabled by chatbots will eventually lead to better patient health outcomes and a more efficient healthcare system.
In conclusion, chatbots are revolutionizing patient engagement in
healthcare by providing round-the-clock access to information and
their well-being and alleviating barriers between the staff and
patients. They can execute many tasks dedicated to assisting the
provider, patient, and government institutions in scheduling follow-up
appointments, checking on the symptoms being shown by the individuals,
and monitoring the patients' health. This frees up valuable time and
resources on the part of the medical staff and provides a better
hospital journey for the patients. The sophistication of chatbots is
bound to improve with the advancement of AI and machine learning
algorithms, which will provide better information and result in their
improvement and acceptance by the community they are meant for.
However, overcoming challenges like data security, accuracy of
diagnoses, and patient acceptance is essential to making its use
widely successful in enhancing patient engagement and improving
clinical outcomes. With the proper implementation of other healthcare
technologies, such as telemedicine and Electronic Health Records (EHR)
systems, healthcare chatbots have the potential to streamline
healthcare, making it much more accessible and effective. Overall, it
is evident that such innovation will play a vital role in building a
healthcare system that serves the best interests of the patients and
provides them with better care and satisfaction in the coming years.