Conversational AI in Healthcare Industry: Use Cases

According to Software Advice’s Medical Survey, nearly 77% of doctors believe that AI chatbots will be able to treat patients safely in the next ten years, while 46% are already using chatbots to assess patient symptoms.

While these are users of AI chatbots, the beneficiaries, the patients, also feel that AI can revolutionize healthcare. An Accenture survey mentions that 66% of their survey participants confirm that they will likely use AI-based home diagnostics and virtual services. 90% are willing to share their data with doctors to get these services. 

Why?

Because they believe that it reduces medical costs and enables timely care.

This is not surprising, considering AI also:

• Improves medication adherence by 67%
• Improves practice efficiency by 20% in physicians
• Can offload up to 30% of administrative tasks from nurses 
• And offers 24/7 support services to patients in need of healthcare information

What is Conversational AI in Healthcare?

Conversational AI is a technology that uses natural language to communicate with users. Unlike simple chatbots, conversational AI chatbots use advanced NLP and ML to generate human-like interactions between humans and computers.

NLP enables AI to understand human interactions and intent. It uses algorithms to extract rules of human language and convert them to a language computers understand. ML, on the other hand, enables the AI to continuously learn and improve its responses using past and current interaction data.

In the healthcare industry, some of the benefits that conversational AI offers are:

• Providing access to information 24/7
• Simplifying appointment scheduling
• Automating administrative tasks freeing up staff time 
• Reducing operational costs by eliminating the need for manual phone calls and human interaction 
• Improving patient satisfaction by providing faster, more efficient, and personalized care
• Offers access to patient data across touchpoints and generates insights for evaluating and optimizing healthcare services
• Helps evaluate the impact of changes in staffing levels, capacity, etc.

Conversational AI Use Cases in Healthcare

Appointment Scheduling

Appointment scheduling can become a frustrating experience for healthcare professionals and patients. Limited personnel, long holds, and busy phone lines lead to delays and sometimes even missed appointments.

Conversational AI streamlines the scheduling process by:

• Allowing patients to book appointments any time of the day, 24/7
• Providing an easy-to-navigate chat interface or voice assistance for easy appointment booking
• Reducing wait time by automatically displaying the available slots during booking
• Personalizing the experience and providing the option to choose from preferred dates, time, and doctors
• Sending automated confirmation messages and reminders to patients

For healthcare professionals, conversational AI reduces the administrative burden of cumbersome appointment booking by automating scheduling and confirmations.

With ITSM by its side, conversational AI can guide employees through the troubleshooting process, automate answering common questions frequently asked by patients and escalate issues to the right team without delay.

Mercy Healthcare uses GenAI to take patient calls to schedule appointments, provide recommendations for additional follow-up actions, reduce the need for follow-up calls, and ensure patients' needs are met in a single interaction.

Simultaneously, they use an AI-based chatbot for employees to quickly find Mercy policy information and procedures and locate HR-related questions like leaves and benefits.

Customer Care

Customer care in the healthcare industry means catering to the needs of your patients and internal users, providing them with support and information throughout their healthcare journey.

Healthcare conversational AI chatbots have become the central point for all the information about healthcare plans, pharmacies, and patient history. This information, which is up-to-date and readily available for healthcare professionals, helps them to provide the utmost required services to patients.

Other benefits are:

• Patients do not have to wait in queues for any information 
• Get immediate assistance tailored to their requirements or queries and treatment advice
• Get help evaluating symptoms and ascertain the need to seek professional advice
• Get support in their preferred language

For internal users, AI conversational chatbot assistance equips them with the required patient information and links them to relevant knowledge base articles regarding organization policies, protocols and procedures, and training materials for quick access.

Babylon Health, a digital-first healthcare provider, uses conversational AI to provide personalized healthcare advice, treatment advice, and 1:1 appointments with healthcare professionals.

Escalating Emergency Cases

Conversational AI helps with initial health assessment and escalating potential emergency cases humans usually handle.

Conversational AI can:

• Access the symptoms by asking patients a series of questions which will be based on the patient's medical history, hospital data and documents, medical guides, and studies to suggest the next course of action and guide them to the right healthcare team in the facility. 
• For healthcare professionals, the AI assistant will use the data to inform them about patient history and the emergency. 

This ensures the right medical care at the right time.

Enhanced Patient Engagement

Conversational AI chatbots significantly enhance patient engagement by providing personalized interactions and timely responses. These chatbots can handle a wide range of patient queries, from scheduling appointments to providing health tips, thereby keeping patients actively involved in their healthcare journey.

Invoice Payment and Claims

Conversational AI offers a more patient-centric approach to healthcare payments and claims. It makes the process easier and faster for both patients and staff. The complexity of bills, insurance claims, and an unending number of documents takes a lot of time.

Conversational AI-powered ITSM streamlines this process by generating detailed invoices, creating auto-invoices, and forwarding the account to the insurance department. It leverages AI to automate eligibility, patient estimates, authorizations, financial assistance and payments, creating a better experience for both parties.

• Generate detailed estimates of the treatment cost and bills and answer patient’s follow-up questions, creating transparency.
• Streamline secure payment process, offer different payment options, and even set up installment plans.
• Help patients with their queries about insurance claims, their status, and insurance reimbursement rates; detect errors in the claim request and expedite the issue for resolution.

For professionals, conversational AI takes charge and answers all the preliminary questions reducing their occupancy for handling the initial process and streamlining claim processing.

Atrium Health has been leveraging AI to simplify and unify healthcare payments. They have implemented an AI-based solution to streamline payments and claims, which has significantly impacted their staff’s work and interactions with patients.

Mental Health Support

Conversational AI can offer discreet and non-judgmental mental health support. These AI systems provide a safe space for patients to discuss their mental health concerns, access resources, and receive emotional support, which is crucial for individuals who might be hesitant to seek help due to societal stigma.

Chronic Disease Management

AI-driven conversational interfaces can assist in managing chronic diseases by tracking symptoms, reminding patients to take medications, and providing tailored advice based on individual health data. This ongoing support can lead to better disease management and improved patient outcomes.

Proactive Patient Reminders

If you receive reminder emails regarding your appointments, your healthcare provider is likely using automated reminders to ensure you don’t miss your appointment, vaccination, or checkup.

Using conversational AI for proactive patient reminders can significantly improve patient engagement and health outcomes. While this is just one use case for conversational AI sending reminders, it also sends reminders for:

• Medication adherence ensures patients don’t miss taking their medicines 
• Appointment scheduling for preventive screening like mammograms to help patients be aware of and stay ahead of potential health issues
• Disease management for patients with diabetes and heart issues to monitor signs and symptoms, take medications, and track metrics 

Providence St. Joseph Health uses AI for direct patient reminders, significantly reducing no-shows at their facility.

Public Health Information Dissemination

Public health information helps manage community health and safeguards the spread of diseases, and conversational AI has immense potential to help healthcare systems achieve that.

Unlike traditional methods, conversational AI uses platforms where the public is active, like social media, messages, and apps, which gives it a wider reach for information.

• Personalizes information for the recipients based on their age, language, health concerns, and location ensuring relevant and actionable information outreach
• Brings efficiency to the process by eliminating the scope of errors in information dissemination
• Creates an interactive learning experience where users can ask questions about any health concerns
• Ensures 24/7 availability for providing health information 
• Runs campaigns to educate people about the importance of vaccinations, address common health issues, suggest preventive and precautionary healthcare tips 
• Offers mental health resources, guidance, self-assessment tools, and directs users to support services in case of critical cases, ensures timely monitoring and help
• Disseminate stigma-free information on sexual health and diseases like AIDS and answer questions about STDs, contraception, etc.

Multi-language Support

Conversational AI systems can support multiple languages, breaking down language barriers and ensuring that non-native speakers receive the same level of care and information as native speakers. This feature is particularly beneficial in diverse communities with patients from various linguistic backgrounds.

Elevate Healthcare Operations with Rezolve.ai

The healthcare industry is constantly evolving and requires intelligent solutions that can improve patient care and support their staff to perform better. Rezolve.ai revolutionizes healthcare operations with high accuracy using the power of GenAI.

It goes beyond traditional chatbots, offering a friendly, intelligent GenAI sidekick that personalizes solutions and offers real-time support for patients and healthcare professionals. It successfully automates up to 65% of support issues and reduces the number of support tickets significantly.

Here’s how Rezolve.ai solves healthcare sector problems:

• Boosts staff and healthcare practitioners’ efficiency by automating repetitive tasks like answering common questions, delivering and accessing reports, etc. 
• Enables efficient service desk management with smart ticketing, automation studio and integrated conversational chatbot 
• Streamlines workflows and processes
• Improves your ROI by enabling self-service for employees to resolve common issues and queries independently 
• Integrates with 1000+out box integrations allowing access to relevant, up-to-date data and enabling accurate support services
• Seamlessly integrates with MS Teams, which enables support teams and employees to leverage conversational AI within the MS Teams interface
• Facilitates better communication and collaboration with real-time updates and quick issue resolution 
• Agile knowledge management and centralization of data collected and stored from various data sources
• Advanced analytics and reporting to read inside the data and derive insights for predictions, trends, and patterns.

If you are ready to streamline your healthcare processes and deliver services backed by cutting-edge GenAI-based solutions, try Rezolve.ai.

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FAQs

1. What are some examples of the use of AI in healthcare?

AI is used in various ways across healthcare, including predictive analytics for patients, diagnostic imaging interpretation, personalized treatment plans, virtual health assistants, information dissemination, research, and development.

2. Which is an example of using AI chatbots in healthcare?

AI chatbots are used in healthcare for patient engagement and support and provide support services to the internal team and staff.

For example, conversational AI chatbots can triage patient inquiries, provide medication reminders, schedule appointments, conduct mental health assessments and offer health tips.

When combined with ITSM capabilities and tools like Rezolve.ai, they help improve internal systems, assist staff in retrieving patient information, and streamline appointment scheduling.

3. How does AI reduce human error in healthcare?

AI leverages advanced algorithms to reduce human errors, analyze vast amounts of data, and assist healthcare professionals with crucial insights. For example, AI can help identify patterns in medical imaging scans and help radiologists detect abnormalities.