Chatbot breakthrough in the 2020s? An ethical reflection on the trend of automated consultations in health care PMC

Human-aided chatbots utilize human computation in at least one element from the chatbot. Crowd workers, freelancers, or full-time employees can embody their intelligence in the chatbot logic to fill the gaps caused by limitations of fully automated chatbots. While human computation, compared to rule-based algorithms and machine learning, provides more flexibility and robustness, still, it cannot process a given piece of information as fast as a machine, which makes it hard to scale to more user requests [35]. Classification based on the goals considers the primary goal chatbots aim to achieve.

There are further confounding factors in the intervention design that are not directly chatbot related (eg, daily notifications for inputting mood data) or include aspects such as the chatbot’s programmed personality that affect people differently [33]. As an emerging field of research, the future implications of human interactions with AI and chatbot interfaces is unpredictable, and there is a need for standardized reporting, study design [54,55], and evaluation [56]. Two-thirds (21/32, 66%) of the chatbots in the included studies were developed on custom-developed platforms on the web [6,16,20-26], for mobile devices [21,27-36], or personal computers [37,38]. A smaller fraction (8/32, 25%) of chatbots were deployed on existing social media platforms such as Facebook Messenger, Telegram, or Slack [39-44]; using SMS text messaging [42,45]; or the Google Assistant platform [18] (see Figure 4). Studies were included if they used or evaluated chatbots for the purpose of prevention or intervention and for which the evidence showed a demonstrable health impact. He and other experts expected that ChatGPT and other A.I.-driven large language models could take over mundane tasks that eat up hours of doctors’ time and contribute to burnout, like writing appeals to health insurers or summarizing patient notes.

Chatbot Cuts Care-Related Costs

Even with the rapid advancements of AI in cancer imaging, a major issue is the lack of a gold standard [58]. As you can see, chatbots are on the rise and both patients and doctors recognize their value. Bonus points if chatbots are designed on the base of Artificial Intelligence, as the technology allows bots to hold more complex conversations and provide more personalized services. This bot uses AI to provide personalized consultations by analyzing the patient’s medical history and while it cannot fully replace a medical professional, it can for sure provide valuable advice and guidance. To understand the role and significance of chatbots in healthcare, let’s look at some numbers. According to the report by Zipdo, the global healthcare chatbot market is expected to reach approximately $498.5 million by 2026.

As conversational agents have gained popularity during the COVID-19 pandemic, medical experts have been required to respond more quickly to the legal and ethical aspects of chatbots. The emergence of COVID-19 as a global pandemic has significantly advanced the development of telehealth and the utilisation of health-oriented chatbots in the diagnosis and treatment of coronavirus infection (AlgorithmWatch 2020; McGreevey et al. 2020). COVID-19 screening is considered an ideal application for chatbots because it is a well-structured process that involves asking patients a series of clearly defined questions and determining a risk score (Dennis et al. 2020). For instance, in California, the Occupational Health Services did not have the resources to begin performing thousands of round-the-clock symptom screenings at multiple clinical sites across the state (Judson et al. 2020). To limit face-to-face meetings in health care during the pandemic, chatbots have being used as a conversational interface to answer questions, recommend care options, check symptoms and complete tasks such as booking appointments.

The future perspective of chatbots for healthcare

They offer a powerful combination to improve patient outcomes and streamline healthcare delivery. AI chatbots are used in healthcare to provide patients with a more personalized experience while reducing the workload of healthcare professionals. While building futuristic healthcare chatbots, companies will have to think beyond technology. They will need to carefully consider various factors that can impact the user adoption of chatbots in the healthcare industry. Only then will we be able to unlock the power of AI-enabled conversational healthcare. AI-enabled patient engagement chatbots in healthcare provide prospective and current patients with immediate, specific, and accurate information to improve patient care and services.

Health-focused apps with chatbots (“healthbots”) have a critical role in addressing gaps in quality healthcare. There is limited evidence on how such healthbots are developed and applied in practice. Our review of healthbots aims to classify types of healthbots, contexts of use, and their natural language processing capabilities. Eligible apps were those that were health-related, had an embedded text-based conversational agent, available in English, and were available for free download through the Google Play or Apple iOS store. Apps were assessed using an evaluation framework addressing chatbot characteristics and natural language processing features.

The ability to accurately measure performance is critical for continuous feedback and improvement of chatbots, especially the high standards and vulnerable individuals served in health care. Given that the introduction of chatbots to cancer care is relatively recent, rigorous evidence-based research is lacking. Standardized indicators of success between users and chatbots need to be implemented by regulatory agencies before adoption. Once the primary purpose is defined, common quality indicators to consider are the success rate of a given action, nonresponse rate, comprehension quality, response accuracy, retention or adoption rates, engagement, and satisfaction level.

To further train the model, researchers tasked the LLM with playing the role of a person with a specific ailment or an empathetic doctor. In addition, their algorithm assumed the role of a critical colleague, evaluating the doctor’s interaction with the patient and providing feedback for improvement. In the United States alone, more than half of healthcare leaders, 56% to be precise, noted that the value brought by AI exceeded their expectations.

Chatbot for Health Care and Oncology Applications Using Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning: Systematic Review

Chatbots also support doctors in managing charges and the pre-authorization process. Chatbots must be designed with the user in mind, providing patients a seamless and intuitive experience. Healthcare providers can overcome this challenge by working with experienced UX designers and testing chatbots with diverse patients to ensure that they meet their needs and expectations. While chatbots offer many benefits for healthcare providers and patients, several challenges must be addressed to implement them successfully. In this article, we will explore how chatbots in healthcare can improve patient engagement and experience and streamline internal and external support. It’s also not realistic to expect every patient to be on board with digital-care solutions beyond their current use in this pandemic.

This interactive shell mode, used as the NLU interpreter, will return an output in the same format you ran the input, indicating the bot’s capacity to classify intents and extract entities accurately. Ensure to remove all unnecessary or default files in this folder before proceeding to the next stage of training your bot. The first step is to set up the virtual environment for your chatbot; and for this, you need to install a python module.

One example of a task-oriented chatbot is a medical chatbot called Omaolo developed by the Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare (THL), which is an online symptom assessment tool (e-questionnaire) (Atique et al. 2020, p. 2464; THL 2020). The chatbot is available in Finnish, Swedish and English, and it currently administers 17 separate symptom assessments. First, it can perform an assessment of a health problem or symptoms and, second, more general assessments of health and well-being. Third, it can perform an ‘assessment of a sickness or its risks’ and guide ‘the resident to receive treatment in services promoting health and well-being within Omaolo and in social and health services external to’ it (THL 2020, p. 14). Fourth, it offers quality-of-life surveys, oral health surveys and health coaching.

Similarly, a graph-based chatbot has been proposed to identify the mood of users through sentimental analysis and provide human-like responses to comfort patients [84]. 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.

AI chatbots in the healthcare industry are great at automating everyday responsibilities in the healthcare setting. They simulate human activities, helping people search for information and perform actions, which many healthcare organizations find useful. Ultimately, chatbot technology in healthcare however, the further advances of artificial intelligence are fascinating, and it will be interesting to see how large language models such as ChatGPT are implemented into all aspects of life, including the healthcare industry, in the near future.

This means, chatbots and the data that they process might be exposed to threat agents and might be a target for cyberattacks. There are several reasons why chatbots help healthcare organizations elevate their patient care – let’s look at each in a bit of detail. Healthcare organizations all over the world currently face workforce shortages (with COVID-19 being one of the primary factors for that) and in such conditions, the availability of doctors might be in decline. Thus, a 24/7 available digital solution can be a perfect alternative and this is one of the main benefits of chatbots.

As for the doctors, the constant availability of bots means that doctors can better manage their time since the bots will undertake some of their responsibilities and tasks. In addition to data and conversation flow, organizations developing conversational AI chatbots should also focus on including desirable qualities, such as engagement and empathy, to create a more positive user experience. While conversational AI systems cannot replace human care, with the right qualities, they can augment the healthcare staff’s efforts by automating repetitive tasks and offering initial emotional support. In the next three to four years, as AI systems improve, the focus will inevitably shift toward making these virtual assistants more human at work.