Healthcare Chatbot: Appointment Scheduling Assistant for Doctors

Healthcare services should be seamless and chatbots can make it happen.

In the healthcare sector, there’s a high need for automation tools that can cut short the waiting time by automating the monotonous tasks. However, at present, 80% of the healthcare websites are following the stone age tools and methods to let patients book an appointment with the doctors. Such as, you can see that most of the healthcare websites are either making use of web forms or help desk to fix an appointment. But, in this era, such techniques are proving to be ineffective.

Traditional tools are time-consuming, and sometime people have to wait for hours to get an appointment with the specialists.

The future of healthcare relies on the real-time conversational tools that can beforehand ask website visitors about their query and assist them accordingly. Like, the next-gen AI chatbots can tackle the appointment process swiftly while maintaining the human connection. Furthermore, they can handle monotonous tasks and assist help desk executives to handle complex cases. Thus, resulting in better work management and patient care.

Real-life Case: Why Traditional Tools are a Failure?

Since the last decade, most healthcare organizations have turned towards digital platforms. But getting online isn't the only thing that needs to be addressed. In fact, making healthcare services accessible to all should be the motive of the digital engagement.

An assistive reproduction healthcare centre located in New Delhi has helped thousands of women achieve their dream of motherhood. On a daily basis, around 200 people call them to fix an appointment with their doctors.

Therefore, to answer their queries in real-time, healthcare management has expanded the number of help desk executives. Eventually, this has led to a rise in the operation and maintenance cost.

How we helped them speed up the process while capping the cost?

As booking an appointment is a repeated and monotonous task (in most cases), it can be simply managed by AI chatbots. So, we voluntarily took up this challenge and asked them about the most repeated queries. We were surprised to know that every day out of 200 inquires via calls only 20–30 were unique. That sums up to 80% of the queries that Frontman can answer instantaneously without letting a single user wait in line.

Frontman doesn’t let people think that they are talking with a machine. It can sympathize with the users, understand their problem, and take immediate action based on the nature of the query, that too while mimicking the real-life conversation with the users.

To handle such queries, we designed Frontman’s conversational flow, which can be used to take user details and schedule an appointment in real-time seamlessly. And, we focused on two key areas, tap the monotonous queries that burden the help desk people and kill the waiting time that frustrates the patients.

Keeping these two factors in mind, we designed Frontman’s flow, and we successfully managed to keep it that way by segmenting the user queries into two sections:

Monotonous queries: These are the queries that have been answered before and doesn’t require any special human attention, like scheduling an appointment.

Unique queries: These queries are often unique and require a human assistant. These queries can be on a personal level that a chatbot can not understand and answer.

In case of the monotonous queries, Frontman will ask the details of the users, such as Name, Age, Gender, Location, Contact Number, and then it will let the uses pick a suitable date for appointment as per the availability. After an appointment gets scheduled the details will be sent to the user Google Calendar application as a reminder.

For instance, whenever a user selects ‘schedule an appointment’, the chatbot would ask number of questions one after the other such as ‘type of services’ and ‘Department of Doctor’. After initiating the conversation it further asks ‘Are you visiting for the first time or following up’, ‘when do you prefer to meet the doctor’? And then an option comes to book the time slot by choosing a date and available slots in the calendar.

Whereas, in the case of unique queries, Frontman will get the user details and query, and will send them to the human executives in realtime. This makes it easier for agents to connect with customers that require individual attention. Plus, from the user perspective, now they don’t have to wait for minutes to hours to connect with an executive. As a result, it eventually enhances the customer experience with the healthcare organization.

The End Results: How Frontman Assisted Healthcare Organizations, Patients, and Help Executives

Automation in healthcare is win-win for everyone. Such tools can make complex processes simpler by filtering out the repeated ones.

As per the case study discussed above, Frontman as a healthcare chatbot has proved to be a helping hand for the patients, help desk executives, and doctors.

Patients liked to be addressed in real-time: By answering the tedious queries of the users in a snap of a second, and arranging their appointment for further help. Frontman has made it simple for the users to avail healthcare services without wasting too much time in waiting lines. Including this, Frontman can answer the queries of the users 24*7. This incites a sense of customer value and further bonds the relation between a healthcare organization and patients. 

Doctors appreciated seamless management: Whenever a user books an appointment, the details are shared with the doctors’ Google Calendar in real-time. This enables them to better handle the cases while managing their work accordingly.

Help desk executives are free from repeated tasks: Certainly, no one likes to answer the same question, again and again, a hundred times a day. Frontman made it a reality for the help desk executives connecting them with the users that have a different query. This healthcare chatbot has effectively reduced the workload of the executives by 62%, hence their productivity has doubled by more than 4X. 

What Else Frontman Can Do?

Frontman is a multi-functional and multi-channel chatbot. Apart from fixing the appointments, it can be used to enhance the impact of marketing campaigns, and also to manage a lot of healthcare operations in real-time. Like, when trained extensively, this chatbot can identify the type of disease by asking some simple questions to the users. And, further, it can highlight and advise them to avoid eating specific food that can further elevate the disease.

By integrating Frontman with the backend, you can let patients download their medical reports within the chat screen. This function can diminish the long queues and ultimately will help patients to not wait much before availing treatment.

In addition to this, this chatbot can remember the ailments of the patients and can ask them about how they are feeling after a certain defined period. It can further save the detail into the backend, by doing so, it enables the healthcare organizations to have a managed overview of the patients' health and can act fast in case a patient needs special attention.

How to Create a Healthcare Chatbot for Your Organization?

Frontman is easy to build and deploy AI-powered chatbot. You can create a healthcare chatbot in minutes, visit the Dashboard > Story builder, and start creating a conversational flow that matches the needs of your organization.

Things you should know before training Frontman:

• Repeated queries of the users, and their corresponding answers.
• Departments concerned to handle specific patients.
• Availability of the doctors so users can book a slot right from the chat window.
• What are the medical services you offer?
• How to answer the sensitive queries of the patients?

These are some of the basic points that you should be versed with before deploying AI chatbot on your website.