Bot, Chat Bot
New Healthcare, Who Dis?
“Mo’ Money, Mo’ Problems” — Christopher ‘Notorious B.I.G.’ Wallace, 1997
For all of the advances that healthcare has made in fighting disease and improving treatment practices, it is still stuck in a loop when it comes to adopting emerging technologies to help the patient of today navigate a complex system — often using money to solve its symptoms.
Wait a minute, that doesn’t sound right…
First, some clarity:
Signs can be seen. Symptoms can be felt. Problems can kill you.
A sign is a thing that presents itself when something has gone wrong. An objective measure that needs an investigation to determine what’s at the source of the problem. Take for example your local emergency room. You see that, at all points of the day, people wait for hours on end to be treated by doctors and nurses, eventually getting the help they need whether they have a bloody nose or first-degree burns from spilling, say, coffee all over themselves.
That isn’t right!
A symptom, on the other hand, is a subjective measure of how something feels — something that cannot be seen. A symptom that is correlated with having to wait in that waiting room for six hours is pain or discomfort. As important, anger is also a symptom that begins to develop around hour three of six — one assumes due to previous experience.
I don’t like that feeling!
A problem is a different beast — they are the reasons those signs and symptoms occur in the first place. Problems, from a healthcare sense, are those underlying, can’t-quite-get-to-it answers to questions that nag practitioners and administrators, keeping them up at night. The 6AM shower thoughts of “there needs to be a better way to do this” that make them bore a hole on the inside of their brains. Therefore, the reason that Emergency Rooms are as inefficient as they are is that they’re a medical clinic with an identity crisis. The problem in the case of the emergency room is triage. If you were triaged to a doctor within one hour for that pain in your stomach, versus sitting for six hours to be told the exact same thing, which would you choose?
Option A, obviously…but what now?
Enter treatment — or innovation in this case — something that can make you healthy again. To live longer, to live a better life. Now, if your healthcare practitioner, after telling you now suffer from ‘disease x,’ repeatedly used catchy buzzwords like ‘miracle treatment’ and ‘groundbreaking’ to the point of tokenization and led you out of their office with a smile and a pat on the back saying “Next!,” what would you say? How would you feel?
Probably like sending that doctor back to the emergency room as a patient…
Those buzzwords that we keep hearing is a way of parsing the line “We have no clue what we’re doing, but we sure sound like we’re doing something, don’t we?” and fooling likeminded individuals into thinking that the latest healthcare technology needs to be elaborate, well thought out, and carefully planned — oh and that it’s right around the corner. Think “Artificial Intelligence” or, our favourite, “Blockchain.”
Top 4 Most Popular Ai Articles:
1. Machine Learning for Dummies
2. Regularization in deep learning
In reality, however, some of these technologies may never need to be integrated into healthcare — * stares in blockchain’s direction* — and other concepts like true artificial intelligence are decades away but need a leg up now to begin the conversation — the chatbot is that leg up.
Chatbot — a computer program or an artificial intelligence which conducts a conversation via auditory or textual methods.
Chatbots are the new buzzword on the block in technology circles, many sporting ‘artificial intelligence’ tags to make them seem hip. We may recognize mainstream iterations like those of Siri and Alexa, to more complex, multifunctional ‘entities’ that are in our lives on Facebook that claim to help with a host of issues. Often, however, when we interact with these bots, we often long for a human to recognize the problem at hand…that the album I’m trying to play from my phone is already DOWNLOADED ON MY PHONE SIRI…
#FirstWorldProblems
Chatbots, for all of their failing in playing music, will end up helping us in more useful ways — especially in healthcare — as long as we remember to keep it simple and treat the patients on the other end of the chatbot user experience like what they are; people.
With the opportunity to help patients locate and receive healthcare when and where they need it — regardless of geographic location and economic class — chatbots are that low-hanging fruit in healthcare industries such as pharmacy, allied health, and administration that can provide instant value to patients needing to, say, refill a prescription, or schedule an appointment, or ask when the medical clinic opens.
So the next time you or your staff answer your clinic phone and wonder why you get stuck in a one-minute refill call for five minutes, ask yourself:
Am I really putting my patients first?
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