How conversational AI is shaping up the Digital healthcare space, Health News, ET HealthWorld

By Ayush Verma

Dialogues are layered deep as an auto activity for humans to communicate with each other and have been the core of any kind of human development – most importantly information sharing. With conversational AI claiming to revolutionise the interaction experience across consumer centric industries – The question arises, can today’s regular devices layer information in an interactive dialog session as we humans are wired to have from centuries.

Artificial intelligence, hosts a stack of tools and personalised data manipulators such as NLP (i.e. natural language processing ) and whole jog of activities from machine learning derivatives so that computing devices can interact in autonomous variables (i.e. language and context) with the end user. Soon enough, rule based answering engines will be a thing of past with conversational engines increasingly replacing them with ability to understand context, intent behind the query and all plethora of minute entities while having a base knowledge about user’s preferences. Add to it, Machine Learning that elevates the system’s capability to learn from data streams and enable continuous auto improvement in performance.

With each passing day, AI agents are adding conversations for a growing list of use cases in various business domains, be it banking, e-commerce, healthcare, and were found highly beneficial. For a business they work wonders by not only boosting efficiency, speed, accuracy of key business functions, but also elevating & enhancing end-user experience. In accordance to a report by marketsandmarkets*, the conversational AI is estimated to grow into a $15.7 billion market by 2024.

Its cumulative power comes from its capability to run through personalised interactions with a large number of individuals. The outbreak of COVID-19, also gave us a compelling use case highlighting the unimaginable impact of conversational AI. In India, MyGov Corona Helpdesk, a chatbot integrated with WhatsApp helped answer a wide range of queries. A well-crafted architecture offering such conversational assistance, can reduce the need for human intervention in mild diagnosis and information sharing tasks by 80%, this enables experts to cater to severe conditions, backlashes and problems with an absolute focus. Deploying these intelligent bots in Healthcare sector, that has such large scale of user demographics, has opened us to many benefits & futuristic possibilities:

  • Self-help diagnosis
  • Automated Appointment Booking
  • Personalisation
  • Reduced Cost & Increased Efficiency
  • Automated Billing & Registration
  • Automated Prescription Management
  • Patient engagement & follow ups
  • Claim processing & predictive accumulators adjudication

Nonetheless, conversational AI has emerged as a new avenue for change, during the time of the crisis. From conveying timely care to enabling the workload for medical professionals, the technology has been teasing out a number of opportunities to alter the essence of the industry. But, every rose has its thorn. The road to conversational AI has its own obstacles as most of healthcare providers refuse to let go of legacy systems and resist adapting. But, having said that, we fail to visualize a future where conversational AI is not disrupting healthcare in the coming years. The technology is on its way to raise an army of intelligent bots and assistants that will greatly enhance the delivery of advanced care.

Ayush Verma, Practice Lead, AI & ML and Shveta Raina AVP, Communication & People Strategy, Avizva

(DISCLAIMER: The views expressed are solely of the authors and ETHealthworld.com does not necessarily subscribe to it. ETHealthworld.com shall not be responsible for any damage caused to any person/organisation directly or indirectly.)

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