Don't wear yourself out talking to a chatbot

Photo: Christian Wiediger

Communication is crucial when it comes to delivering better healthcare services and journeys for patients. Nowadays, digitalization is slowly becoming more and more popular withing healthcare services providers around the world. Communication with patients is one thing that has been greatly impacted by this. Namely, the way patients contact their health care service providers and obtain information is changing. One example of digitilized contact with patients is through a chatbot. However, although it has its benefits, chatbots can really wear you out sometimes. Therefore, in this article, we are going to take a look at the new ways you can communicate with your patients without them talking to a chatbot.

Chatbots - What are they exactly?

Let us first define what chatbots are before we go on. So, essentially, chatbots are computer programs that can communicate with people. This is a very vague definition. There are all kinds of chatbots out there. However, the basic ways in which they function are similar or almost the same. They are basically software programs that operate through a chat interface on a website or in an app. One of the most common ways of chatbot interaction is through texts. Messaging apps or a chat interface are the two most common examples.

Why are chatbots frustrating?

Well, we have described, in short, what chatbots are. However, let us now take a look at how and why exactly they wear out your patients during communication. For starters, patients do not trust chatbots. This is true for many industries that use chatbots. Simply put, clients do not trust chatbots. Finding out if you are talking to a chatbot or not is fairly easy and once it happens, the trust is basically no longer there. There is no personalized conversation and the conversation as a whole feels pretty blank.

Another problem that often comes up is the chatbot's inability to answer ambiguous questions or questions outside of the regular, straightforward ones. This can be a real problem when it comes to healthcare. Patients like to get the necessary information in a timely but also accurate manner. This is especially important in healthcare. So, when talking to a chatbot, patients can wear themselves out by trying to explain as best as they can the question so that chatbot can understand it.

In addition to this, patients prefer to have a conversation that is similar to what they would experience if they were talking to a real person. Obviously, chatbots alone cannot provide efficient, clear, and evolving conversation. So, looking at all of these different factors and problems that can appear with chatbot conversations, how can healthcare service providers around the world communicate with their patients more efficiently? Well, let's take a closer look.

The use of breakthrough AI systems

As technology is progressing, so is AI. Various types of different AI software are constantly being developed and improved. A lot of them are beginning to see extensive usage in the world of healthcare. Conversational AI in particular has seen a lot of improvement over the years. Furthermore, it has a ton of new advantages over old chatbot systems. Conversational artificial intelligence or conversational AI is an AI technology tool behind conversational experiences with computers. These technologies include NLP which is an excellent tool for communication with patients. What exactly is NLP? Well, NLP is short for natural language processing. Natural essentially stands for the way we naturally speak. Basically, It allows a machine to understand what we say in our natural language with all of the rhetorical questions, slang, and so on.

NLP allows these machines and tools to also understand voice input as well as the text of course. With the ability to constantly progress and learn, we can see why conversational AI already has a great number of advantages over regular chatbots. Of course, it is also important to say that conversation AI does power chatbots, however, not all chatbots use NLP.

Communicating with patients through a proprietary natural language processing engine

A proprietary natural language processing engine, built exclusively for healthcare, can truly enhance patients' experience. When NLP is put to use for healthcare interactions, it constantly improves on them and learns on a regular basis. This also includes its ability to learn multiple different languages which greatly increases the effectiveness of healthcare providers in different regions as well.

This AI has an incredible capacity to constantly advance. Therefore, each patient can have a different kind of conversation with it. Namely, a personalized conversation is possible and patients begin to earn more trust. Another important aspect that this AI improves is the percentage of mistakes. For example, once made, the same mistake cannot be repeated. Additionally, the information patients can get from conversational AI are accurate, timely, and concise. This increases not only the patients' trust but also improves their healthcare journey.

Finally, when it comes to communicating with patients, AI can deliver a well-organized system of appointment making and scheduling. Healthcare centers around the world are seeing an increase in patient numbers and digitalization and the use of AI is beginning to play a critical role in making no-shows lower, schedules more organized, and appointments easier to make.

To sum up - Chatbots should not wear out your patients

When looking at chatbots, they can have valuable usage in gathering certain information. However, when it comes to healthcare, patients prefer to have a real, meaningful conversation that can be personalized. NLP engines can allow this. With the use of new, innovative AI technologies, healthcare service providers around the world can enable their patients to have a clear, timely, and meaningful conversation with the AI instead of frustrating themselves from talking with chatbots.