The Healthcare sector has seen some tremendous technological modernization in the past few decades especially in the pandemic phase. And thanks to modern technologies, especially in the healthcare sector. It is for them that we have managed to evade an apocalypse situation because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Advancements in healthcare services and technologies have helped save billions of lives in this pandemic and can be considered a true savior for the human race.
As we continue to improvise and upgrade technologies in healthcare there is no denying that doctors may soon be replaced by robots and your next consultation call could be with a chatbot!
As for the latter part, WhatsApp chatbots are already a part of our reality and are being used extensively. Here are some of its use cases.
10 Use Cases of WhatsApp Chatbot for Healthcare
Some of the most common use cases of WhatsApp chatbots in health care are as follows:
1. Symptom Assessment
Patients can use WhatsApp to register their symptoms to their healthcare chatbots. Based on those symptoms, the bot can direct the patient to the relevant specialist or suggest some instant remedies.
2. Booking Doctors Appointment
When it comes to booking appointments, WhatsApp chatbots can be used to instantly check for your doctor’s availability and schedule an appointment for you in seconds. It can also be used for appointment reminders, keep track of follow-ups and visits of particular patients.
3. Lab Test Updates
With WhatsApp chatbots, staying updated with your lab reports becomes easy. It can update you on all your scheduled tests and pending reports that may require follow-ups. Using WhatsApp Chatbot in healthcare, you can find nearby pathological and testing centers, find out the price range of different tests, book a test for yourself any time of the day.
4. Mental Counselling
Mental health is still a taboo in various parts of the world and anyone claiming any mental health issue is seen differently. This is the reason a large number of people hesitate in getting help from therapists or mental health experts as they fear that they will be judged by their families or peers. A WhatsApp chatbot can be the solution and can aid people in mental distress by holding personal one-on-one conversations with the patients. Using NLP and proper training, chatbots can also augment the therapist’s work with context-based responses.
5. Handling health-related FAQs
A lot of medical emergencies may require immediate help or assistance before the patient is taken to the hospital. In such cases, WhatsApp chatbots can be trained to handle emergency queries or FAQs. A medical chatbot trained to answer repetitive but important queries from patients can play an instrumental role in saving critical lives and improve the patient experience.
A WhatsApp chatbot for healthcare has an added advantage over other helplines as it is an instant two-way communication platform through which you can exchange multimedia files, voice messages and get instant responses. In many cases, the medical condition may not be very severe such as common flu or fever. In these scenarios, WhatsApp chatbot FAQs can help with relief options and suggest preventive measures.
6. Medicine Reminders
How often do you forget to take your medications on time?WhatsApp chatbot for healthcare can be used to set up medicine reminders which will be a tool to remind patients to take their medicines on time.
7. Health Tips
One way to ensure engagement from your audience and keep them interested is by sending them regular health tips and reminders. WhatsApp chatbot for healthcare can be used to send daily health tips like season-based health precautions, healthy eating habits, and diet plans, and maintaining hygiene. This will also help enhance your brand value.
8. Health Insurance
WhatsApp chatbots can also be used to reduce the hassle of health insurance. Patients can now easily get their queries addressed using the WhatsApp chatbot. Necessary documents can also be submitted by scanning and uploading them in the chat itself.
9. Payments
WhatsApp recently rolled out a payments feature for its WhatsApp users. When integrated with WhatsApp chatbots, patients can make the payment against online appointment bookings or lab test reports easily.WhatsApp chatbots can further simplify and streamline the multi-step process that once used to be cumbersome and tedious for patients.
10. Internal Team Coordination
WhatsApp chatbot for healthcare can also make life easier for the hospital staff. Information like availability or status of equipment, wheelchairs, oxygen cylinders, etc. can be easily fetched through a simple query in the WhatsApp chatbot.
The exponential growth in the healthcare sector has ensured that patients no longer have to be physically available at the health facilities to get medical assistance. WhatsApp chatbots in healthcare have facilitated conversations between patients and medical specialists.
Ease of use of WhatsApp healthcare chatbot ensures that patients are met with relevant and instant answers 24*7. Simple use cases can be automated using WhatsApp chatbot for healthcare, taking some of the burden off doctors and other members of the hospital staff and enabling them to focus on treating patients with patience.
Benefits of Whatsapp Healthcare Chatbots
Here are some of the primary reasons why healthcare businesses around the world are rapidly adopting WhatsApp’s chatbots:
1. Instant Response
With the WhatsApp chatbot, healthcare practitioners and health care officials can provide instant responses to the patient’s queries and concerns 24×7 even if the patient is located remotely.
2. Record-Keeping and Speed
Integrating WhatsApp with third-party tools like SocialEpoch, WhatsApp chatbots can be used to store a patient’s medical. This will help the doctors with crucial data and help them in making more accurate medical decisions. WhatsApp chatbots help provide speedy and timely access to vital data such as allergies, prescribed medication, and past checkup reports.
3. Easy information sharing
WhatsApp chatbots offer a discreet interactive and visual medium of communication. This makes patients feel more comfortable talking about their health problems freely, thus improving customer satisfaction.
4. Easy Notifications and Updates
WhatsApp chatbots can be used by Healthcare institutions to send important updates or information through broadcasts or notifications to patients at scale. It can be regarding health tips, a reminder about future appointments, or information about a new healthcare product or service.
5. Bot-to-Human Handover
WhatsApp chatbots in the healthcare sector can be programmed for basic services such as booking appointments, sending reminders to performing complex analyses of patient’s medical conditions, and suggest remedies accordingly. Chatbots can help lower the number of repetitive calls that medical executives have to answer while at the same time improving customer service by a vast margin.
Conclusion
WhatsApp chatbots in healthcare have become an indispensable part of medical science. As we are continuously upgrading on medical technologies and trying to integrate bots with AI and MI, the day may not be far when you might be attended by a walking-talking medical assistant like “Baymax“
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