Top 10 Chatbots in Healthcare: Insights & Use Cases in 2023

Although a wide variety of beneficial aspects were reported (ie, management of health and administration), an equal number of concerns were present. If the limitations of chatbots are better understood and mitigated, the fears of adopting this technology in health care may slowly subside. The Discussion section ends by exploring the challenges and questions for health care professionals, patients, and policy makers. Healthy diets and weight control are key to successful disease management, as obesity is a significant risk factor for chronic conditions. Chatbots have been incorporated into health coaching systems to address health behavior modifications.

• In terms of cancer therapy, remote monitoring can support patients by enabling higher dose chemotherapy drug delivery, reducing secondary hospitalizations, and providing health benefits after surgery [73-75].
• To reduce selection bias, two reviewers independently selected studies, extracted data, and assessed the risk of bias in the included studies and quality of the evidence.
• Traditional therapy, while beneficial, often faces challenges like high costs and limited availability.
• Risk of bias graph for quasiexperiements, showing the review authors’ judgments about each risk of bias item.

In this interview, we speak with Jack O’Meara, co-founder and CEO of Ochre Bio, a pioneering force in liver disease treatment. O’Meara shares insights into Ochre Bio’s innovative RNA therapies, their approach to tackling liver disease, and the company’s vision for the future. Also, if the chatbot has to answer a flood of questions, it may be confused and start to give garbled answers. For companies like QliqSOFT, which has focused its solutions on enhancing patient engagement and satisfaction, this comes as little surprise. FNumbers do not add up as some studies used more than one tool to assess a single outcome and several studies have more than one outcome. Among all 284 questions asked across the two chatbox platforms, the median accuracy score was 5.5, and the median completeness score was 3.0, suggesting the chatbox format is a potentially powerful tool given its prowess.

Effectiveness and Safety of Using Chatbots to Improve Mental Health: Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

There was no comparator in the 4 one-arm quasiexperiments; these quasiexperimental studies assessed outcomes before and after the intervention (Table 1). In 3 additional studies, chatbots were compared with providing information or education. In the remaining study, the comparison was between high users (more engaged app users) and low users (less engaged app users). The most common outcome assessed by the included studies was severity of depression (6/12). The Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ-9) was the most used outcome measure in the included studies (4/12).

Some patients might worry about chatbots sharing sensitive data, but many AI-based chatbot solutions have robust security measures to prevent that from happening. A big challenge for medical professionals and patients is providing and getting “humanized” care from a chatbot. Fortunately, with the development of AI, medical chatbots are quickly becoming more advanced, with an impressive chatbot in healthcare ability to understand the needs of patients, offering them the information and help they seek. The development of more reliable algorithms for healthcare chatbots requires programming experts who require payment. Moreover, backup systems must be designed for failsafe operations, involving practices that make it more costly, and which may introduce unexpected problems.

Medical Chatbots and Sensitive Health Issues

Use cases should be defined in advance, involving business analysts and software engineers. Healthcare chatbots automate the information-gathering process while boosting patient engagement. Patients appreciate that using a healthcare chatbot saves time and money, as they don’t have to commute all the way to the doctor’s clinic or the hospital. Furthermore, if there was a long wait time to connect with an agent, 62% of consumers feel more at ease when a chatbot handles their queries, according to Tidio. As we’ll read further, a healthcare chatbot might seem like a simple addition, but it can substantially impact and benefit many sectors of your institution.

Five studies were judged to raise some concerns in the selection of the reported result (Figure 2). This judgment was due to a discrepancy between studies and their protocols in planned outcome measurements and analyses, unavailability of their protocols, or insufficient details in their protocols regarding outcome measurements and analyses. The overall risk of bias was rated as high for all studies because 5 studies were assessed as high risk in at least one domain, while the remaining study had some concerns in two domains. Multimedia Appendix 7 shows the reviewers’ judgments about each “risk of bias” domain for each included RCT. The global shortage of mental health workers has prompted the utilization of technological advancements, such as chatbots, to meet the needs of people with mental health conditions. Chatbots are systems that are able to converse and interact with human users using spoken, written, and visual language.

Cohen κ [21] was calculated to assess interrater agreement between reviewers, which was 0.85 and 0.89 in the first and second step of the selection process, respectively, indicating a very good level of agreement [22]. While a median accuracy score of 5.5 is impressive, it still falls short of a perfect score across the board. The remaining inaccuracies could be detrimental to the patient’s health, receiving false information about their potential condition. To test and evaluate the accuracy and completeness of GPT-4 as compared to GPT-3.5, researchers asked both systems 44 questions regarding melanoma and immunotherapy guidelines.

For example, CoachAI and Smart Wireless Interactive Health System used chatbot technology to track patients’ progress, provide insight to physicians, and suggest suitable activities [45,46]. Another app is Weight Mentor, which provides self-help motivation for weight loss maintenance and allows for open conversation without being affected by emotions [47]. Health Hero (Health Hero, Inc), Tasteful Bot (Facebook, Inc), Forksy (Facebook, Inc), and SLOWbot (iaso heath, Inc) guide users to make informed decisions on food choices to change unhealthy eating habits [48,49]. The effectiveness of these apps cannot be concluded, as a more rigorous analysis of the development, evaluation, and implementation is required. Nevertheless, chatbots are emerging as a solution for healthy lifestyle promotion through access and human-like communication while maintaining anonymity.

Top Use Cases & Benefits of Emotional Chatbots in 2024

Two-thirds of the chatbots in this review used predefined rules and decision trees to generate their responses, while the remaining chatbots used artificial intelligence. In contrast to rule-based chatbots, artificial intelligence chatbots can generate responses to complicated queries and enable users to control the conversation [13]. Artificial intelligence chatbots can exhibit more empathetic behaviors and humanlike filler language than rule-based chatbots [19].

You have probably heard of this platform, for it boasts of catering to almost 13 million users as of 2023. Ada Health is a popular healthcare app that understands symptoms and manages patient care instantaneously with a reliable AI-powered database. The idea of a digital personal assistant is tempting, but a healthcare chatbot goes a mile beyond that. From patient care to intelligent use of finances, its benefits are wide-ranging and make it a top priority in the Healthcare industry. Healthcare chatbots enable you to turn all these ideas into a reality by acting as AI-enabled digital assistants.

Insufficient consideration regarding the implementation of chatbots in health care can lead to poor professional practices, creating long-term side effects and harm for professionals and their patients. While we acknowledge that the benefits of chatbots can be broad, whether they outweigh the potential risks to both patients and physicians has yet to be seen. First, we introduce health chatbots and their historical background and clarify their technical capabilities to support the work of healthcare professionals. Second, we consider how the implementation of chatbots amplifies the project of rationality and automation in professional work as well as changes in decision-making based on epistemic probability. We then discuss ethical and social issues relating to health chatbots from the perspective of professional ethics by considering professional-patient relations and the changing position of these stakeholders on health and medical assessments. We stress here that our intention is not to provide empirical evidence for or against chatbots in health care; it is to advance discussions of professional ethics in the context of novel technologies.

The use of chatbots in healthcare helps improve the performance of medical staff by enabling automation. The rapid adoption of AI chatbots in healthcare leads to the rapid development of medical-oriented large language models. How do we deal with all these issues when developing a clinical chatbot for healthcare? The CodeIT team has solutions to tackle the major text bot drawbacks, perfect for businesses like yours. We adhere to HIPAA and GDPR compliance standards to ensure data security and privacy. Our developers can create any conversational agent you need because that’s what custom healthcare chatbot development is all about.

Improve patient satisfaction

A pandemic can accelerate the digitalisation of health care, but not all consequences are necessarily predictable or positive from the perspectives of patients and professionals. With psychiatric disorders affecting at least 35% of patients with cancer, comprehensive cancer care now includes psychosocial support to reduce distress and foster a better quality of life [80]. The first chatbot was designed for individuals with psychological issues [9]; however, they continue to be used for emotional support and psychiatric counseling with their ability to express sympathy and empathy [81].

The selection of participants was not based on participant characteristics observed after the start of the intervention in 5 studies, and the start of follow-up and start of intervention coincided for most participants in all studies. Accordingly, the “risk of bias due to selection of participant” domain was judged as low in the 5 studies (Figure 3). Although all studies clearly defined the intervention groups at the start of the intervention, it was not clear whether classification of intervention status could be affected by knowledge of the outcome in 3 studies. Therefore, the risk of bias in the classification of the interventions was rated as high in those 3 studies.

For example, the workflow can be streamlined by assisting physicians in administrative tasks, such as scheduling appointments, providing medical information, or locating clinics. Despite limitations in access to smartphones and 3G connectivity, our review highlights the growing use of chatbot apps in low- and middle-income countries. Additionally, such bots also play an important role in providing counselling and social support to individuals who might suffer from conditions that may be stigmatized or have a shortage of skilled healthcare providers. Many of the apps reviewed were focused on mental health, as was seen in other reviews of health chatbots9,27,30,33.