Chatbot in Healthcare
With the advancements in healthcare facilities and devices, many hospitals and health-care centres have applied technology to operating procedures, in order to reduce strain on staff. Chatbot has become a "special assistant" providing advice and diagnoses, supporting hospitals in patient care.
What is Chatbot?
Chatbot is a software application used to conduct an on-line chat conversation via text or text-to-speech. The platform where chatbot interacts with users is much smarter than the traditional automated dialog system. By building conversational scripts using Machine Learning, AI-powered Chatbot can learn by itself, understand every question and need from users and give corresponding answers.
What can healthcare chatbots do?
Even though Chatbots cannot offer treatments to patients like a real doctor, it is a viable and effective tool to save time in patient care, helping doctors focus on prescribing treatments for patients. In addition, Chatbots also help patients update news, look up information and provide useful advice 24/7, enhancing patient experience.
Chatbots assist in different medical departments
Chatbots are suitable for many healthcare institutions, from clinic and hospital to pharmacy and spa. Every health care institution can fully set up a chatbot to answer questions of customers and patients, give advice on some common diseases and automate other common tasks. Here are some tasks that Chatbots are good at handling:
- In clinics, chatbot become an effective testing tool. They can ask patients about their symptoms and give diagnosis or advice for them, such as doing self-care at home, or go testing at hospitals and clinics. 
For example, the FightCovid Chatbot of German government offers a series of short, simple questions to assess the probability of infection with COVID-19 and suggests the next step they should take.
- In healthcare organizations, chatbots can be used to provide and disseminate information, such as immunization schedule or infectious diseases. For example, during the Covid-19 pandemic, The Information Technology Department (under the Ministry of Health) worked with FPT Corporation to build a chatbot to update accurate information and current figures to all citizens.
- In pharmacies, based on the needs of customers, chatbots can offer various options on vitamins, functional foods and medical devices and give advice before customers make a decision.
- In dental clinics, chatbots can help customers book and arrange appointments with dentists with just a few simple steps.
- In psychological clinics, chatbots can become a best friend for patients in daily basis. In many developed countries, counselling directly with psychologist is a paid service. But, with chatbots, patients can share their stories in daily life and record emotions, instead of spending time chatting with a doctor. Doctors can rely on the chat history to track patients' moods and emotions easily. For patients with psychological problems, sharing things that are deep down in their hearts with a "virtual" friend will make them feel more comfortable than talking to a doctor. Chatbots can give advice, comfort patients and book therapy appointments quickly.
- In insurance companies, chatbots can be built to help customers learn more about such information as insurance packages, incentives, policies or clinical partners. Chatbots also help insurance companies screen for potential customers who want to buy insurance.
- In beauty spas, chatbots can be designed to conduct marketing campaigns, attract potential customers, offer customer service and book appointments, increasing conversion rates.
In a nutshell, there are two profound benefits of chatbots. Firstly, chatbots reduce strain on doctors and save time in patient care process by handling frequent and simple questions from patients. Secondly, chatbots provide healthcare information and support customers 24/7 for different common tasks, such as screening for symptoms, consulting complementary products or booking appointments.
In Vietnam, FPT.AI Conversation is the best platform to build AI-powered chatbots with Vietnamese natural language processing. FPT.AI Chatbot has been deployed in many businesses, especially financial institutions and banks. Amid the pandemic, FPT.AI worked with the Ministry of Health to build a Covid-19 chatbot to update accurate information and current figures to citizens. Since then, the Covid-19 chatbot has been increasingly well-known among healthcare institutions; and it is expected to be deployed to those institutions to help improve their customer services.
Based on those profound benefits, businesses, without no doubt, should have their own chatbots. In the near future, chatbots can be integrated with a great deal of advanced technologies to improve their problem-solving ability, as well as customer services.