Salud Digital | Chatbots: una apuesta para el beneficio del sector salud

Chatbots: a investment for health sector’s benefit

Chatbot technology has contributed to healthcare by providing patients with a quick diagnosis by simply entering their symptoms and without the need to go to a doctor's appointment in cases where there is no emergency. They are offered as guides and accessible companions, for money and time saving.

Among the great advances that arise every day, there is a type of Artificial Intelligence that pretends to be a person behind a device, answering questions via chat: this is known as CHATBOTS.

Artificial Intelligence is a mode of programming towards machines so that they can have autonomous behaviors within a delimited number of actions; that is, to be able to make machines perform everyday activities like any of us.

Chatbots simulate a conversation with a human, generating automated responses mediated by algorithms and interacting in real time with people.

In this sense, they are an innovative tool for the health sector, as it shortens times and distances.

Damo Consulting is a project founded in the city of Illinois, working with strategies that support and benefit healthcare companies.

In addition, Providence St Joseph Health, from Washington State in the USA also launched one of the chatbots called Grace, which works on patient symptoms and, based on series of questions that the same system asks, measures the severity level of the health status and depending on it, can either prescribe medications on its own or, failing that, transfer with a specialist to better detail a diagnosis.

Another system is IBM’s WATSON, developed in IBM's DeepQA project by a research team led by David Ferrucci., Although it is still developed and refined, it is an AI platform for business. What Watson offers is the ability to learn skills such as language, speech and reasoning without the need to include too many parameters. It's like carrying a complete smart device anywhere, without taking up as much space. It reproduces the ways of thinking, acting and deciding of the owners who manage this system, which seeks to emulate human behavior by simply calibrating data on the computer.

The central theme of these systems and resuming chatbots, dedicated to the health sector, is the waiting time, as multiple surveys have warned that responses and diagnoses take no more than two minutes and that makes people prefer to download the App on their cell phone and from the comfort of their home have a doctor's appointment. The only factor against it is that competition grows between platforms and companies, which allows for a variety of options, and complicates the difference between platforms and companies.

An important feature of these advanced tools is that they transcend borders, do not measure barriers in terms of distances.

A namesake of Grace is operating in Mexico. Her name is Holly, a virtual assistant who sends a reminder to patients when they have to go to their doctor's appointment via text message, phone call or WhatsApp. This platform is developed by Nimblr's co-founder, Juan Vera, who with entrepreneurship seeks to improve medical services.

It is not yet resolved whether Artificial Intelligence, through chatbots, is the answer to reduce obstacles in the person-carerelationship, but it has been measured that they produce cases of success in consultations and diagnosis. The process of evaluating the type of response and creation of algorithms has to be followed very closely by true Health Professionals so that, at this initial stage, there will be no cases of misdiagnosis and the health of a patient at risk.