AI assistants will revitalize World Health

Health Check: The global healthcare industry is set to register a stable growth rate of 4.82% during 2018, and Product as a Service models are becoming the norm.

Healthcare agencies spend a lot of money on customer service agents and taking patient inquiries via phone, e-mail, live chat, and can save time and money through bots infused with artificial intelligence. Well, actually, the applications can go far beyond that but let's keep it for another post.

In the event that the vast majority of us are at ease to get some information about the climate from Siri or offer guidelines to Alexa, would we have a similar receptiveness to converse with a medical chatbot? Where might you draw the breaking point for taking recommendation and medicinal guidelines from an algorithm, considering the underlying set-up was affirmed by general specialists?

While you are brooding over it, picture this: For patients living in remote regions with restricted access to medical services, these solutions could have a profound effect on the nature of their lives. A recent survey from Arm, asked if respondents would rather go to a human doctor or an AI doctor – 47 percent chose the robot doc.

What can Bots do in healthcare:-

Chatbots, personal assistants and AI-supported Instant Messaging apps or voice bots will supplant simple IM apps soon. In healthcare, they will reduce the burden on medical professionals regarding easily diagnosable concerns or quickly solvable health issues.

It's capabilities can help both patients and providers. For example, a scheduling assistant bot enables consumers to create and remember appointments. A diabetes manager tool reminds patients to take insulin and maintain a healthy diet. A trivial use-case for it may be to serve as a navigation tool for a hospital’s website.

One of the roles of chatbots in healthcare is freeing up significant doctors-time by decreasing needless appointments. With costs expanding day by day and a worldwide shortage of healthcare experts, organisations are realising the progressive need for us to innovate, keeping in mind that the end goal is to enable specialists to focus on more basic patient needs.

A significant number of the total populace have constrained access to medical services, however, most have mobile devices. In the event that texting a free portable healthcare service implies the contrast between suffering needlessly, and getting an exact diagnosis and a prescribed treatment, well what could be more precious? But in order for chatbot/AI adoption to really take off in healthcare, we as consumers need to become more comfortable trusting the technology is successful (or even appropriate) for diagnosing health issues. Similarly, healthcare organisations will also need to become more comfortable trusting the technology, and determine best practices for incorporating chatbots in the delivery of services to patients.

The Doctor-Patient ratio is gut-wrenching, to say the least. It’s estimated by Livemint that India alone would need 2.07 million doctors by 2030. The push to meet patient requests for more prominent control over their healthcare decisions will, in the long run, be the driver that urges the healthcare industry to embrace new innovations. Such requests intensify the test of moving a phenomenal volume, velocity, and assortment of information, while conveying better results, bringing down expenses and working under expanding administrative weights.

Present Day dynamics:

Recently, Microsoft launched a private preview of a new AI-powered health chatbot system. The company said intelligent healthcare assistants could "empower" users to access medical info from their smartphone, cutting the time and cost of obtaining care. The project is being developed as part of Microsoft's Healthcare NeXT initiative. Microsoft has partnered with Aurora Health Care for its latest chatbot service, creating the "Aurora Digital Concierge". Through QnA, the app can recommend possible causes for the symptoms being experienced. It then presents a judgment on the best professional healthcare option.

Here are some good examples of health chatbots available today:

• Florence: Florence reminds users to take their medication or birth control pills, motivates them to be adherent with their regimens, and is also able to provide you with medicine specific information. Florence monitors your wellbeing and encourages you to achieve your objectives. It can find your information about a disease or find a special location for you, like a doctor or a pharmacy. This chatbot nurse tells you to take your medicine, gives you instructions if you forgot to take a pill, monitors your health and can help you find specialists, and book appointments in your area.
• Your.MD: Your.MD uses Artificial Intelligence to guide you to the best and most relevant health information, for you to get well and stay healthy. Your.MD offers a Health Library which has the most precise and least difficult to comprehend medicinal data. It replaces a General Practitioner Associate, gets information about indications, and puts enough inquiries endorsed by health experts, to recognise a condition probabilistically. It then sets up appointments or refers you to doctors.

Connecting the dots:

With a great Healthcare Assistant, users can schedule appointments with a doctor, get direction on the kind of specialist required, and how rapidly they ought to be looking for treatment. Patients can recognise their condition, and access proficient medical guidance through natural language. A virtual health assistant stays with the patient perpetually on his own device, and helps medics reduce patient wait-time. The chatbot/voice-bot is embedded with all medical reference data to understand common symptoms and lead to the ‘most likely condition’, or at least urge them to schedule a consultation, as most simply suffer from ignorance and procrastination. Picking up threads from pre-registered history and constantly building an individual health profile helps the bot, as well as doctors, help the patient out.

Another problem lies with the lack of data for immediate knowledge of the patient's background habits. Recording every step and heartbeat, and monitoring habits like eating, sleeping, etc. in the backdrop of conversations, can offer lifelong care based on smarter analysis. Healthcare and empathy go hand in hand. A smart assistant should be able to figure out tone and severity, to decide how it should communicate to keep the patient calm, whilst solving his problem.

We at Saarthi.ai focus on voice assistants, and they can, with data, emulate a specialist and connect with the patient at more profound levels.

AI Assistants and Chatbots will be a revolution in different verticals, including insurance, banking, and retail. No doubt, the medical sector can benefit from huge cost savings and constant availability. However, a simple mistake in this area can be life-threatening. Therefore, it is best to keep giving them simple tasks initially, to save the precious time of doctors and to ensure accuracy and accessibility, and ensure that technology firms and healthcare organisations join hands for a better world. However, a question that still needs to be answered by the reader. Would you trust AI for your personal health? Click the link to enter our poll!