Chatbots in Healthcare: How They’re Changing an Industry

Most would assume that survivors of cancer would be more inclined to practice health protection behaviors with extra guidance from health professionals; however, the results have been surprising. Smoking accounts for at least 30% of all cancer deaths; however, up to 50% of survivors continue to smoke [88]. The benefit of using chatbots for smoking cessation across various age groups has been highlighted in numerous studies showing improved motivation, accessibility, and adherence to treatment, which have led to increased smoking abstinence [89-91].

Due to partly automated systems, patient frustration can reach boiling point when patients feel that they must first communicate with chatbots before they can schedule an appointment. The dominos fall when chatbots push patients from traditional clinical face-to-face practice to more complicated automated systems. As computerised chatbots are characterised by a lack of human presence, which is the reverse of traditional face-to-face interactions with HCPs, they may increase distrust in healthcare services. HCPs and patients lack trust in the ability of chatbots, which may lead to concerns about their clinical care risks, accountability and an increase in the clinical workload rather than a reduction. When chatbots are developed by private healthcare companies, they usually follow the market logic, such as profit maximisation, or at the very least, this dimension is dominant.

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He graduated from Bogazici University as a computer engineer and holds an MBA from Columbia Business School. You’ll need to define the user journey, planning ahead for the patient and the clinician side, as doctors will probably need to make decisions based on the extracted data. Doctors can receive regular automatic updates on the symptoms of their patients’ chronic conditions.

Organizations should include chatbot services in their insurance plans for employees to prevent reimbursements for unwanted doctor visits. Automated medication reminders sent by chatbots help patients adhere to their prescribed treatment plans, promoting medication compliance and better health outcomes. Conversational AI-powered chatbots can assess the severity of patients’ conditions and guide them to appropriate care levels.

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Vivobot (HopeLab, Inc) provides cognitive and behavioral interventions to deliver positive psychology skills and promote well-being. This psychiatric counseling chatbot was effective in engaging users and reducing anxiety in young adults after cancer treatment [40]. The limitation to the abovementioned studies was that most participants were young adults, most likely because of the platform on which the chatbots were available. In addition, longer follow-up periods with larger and more diverse sample sizes are needed for future studies.

And finally, patients may feel alienated from their primary care physician or self-diagnose once too often. The widespread use of chatbots can transform the relationship between healthcare professionals and customers, and may fail to take the process of diagnostic reasoning into account. This process is inherently uncertain, and the diagnosis may evolve over time as new findings present themselves. In today’s highly dynamic world, almost every industry is going through major transformations. Similar to other industries, the healthcare sector has also observed many changes during the last two decades.

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Implementation of chatbots may address some of these concerns, such as reducing the burden on the health care system and supporting independent living. With the rapidly increasing applications of chatbots in health care, this section will explore several areas of development and chatbots in healthcare industry innovation in cancer care. Various examples of current chatbots provided below will illustrate their ability to tackle the triple aim of health care. The specific use case of chatbots in oncology with examples of actual products and proposed designs are outlined in Table 1.