Bots in Medicine: Increasing Conversion to Appointment and Accessibility to the Clinic

Low conversion to appointments and poor patient reach to the clinic? Let’s explore how AI chatbots can improve customer service and reduce the percentage of lost customers.

Saving Patient Time and Increasing Accessibility to the Clinic Long wait times for responses and the need to fill out multiple forms before an appointment can frustrate patients and force them to allocate more time for clinic visits. The spread of telemedicine helps to some extent – fewer physical visits are required, and forms are filled out online, speeding up processes directly at the clinic.

Another aspect indirectly affecting the total time a patient must spend on an appointment is the ease of booking and accessibility of information. Difficulty navigating a website, cumbersome voice menus, long wait times for operator responses, and low conversion rates in call-backs for appointment confirmation all lead to customer loss. Patients choose clinics where they can quickly make appointments.

Chatbots based on conversational artificial intelligence (Conversational AI) help patients book, reschedule, and cancel appointments at any convenient time online. Chatbots also remind patients of upcoming appointments, increasing the likelihood of them reaching the clinic.

Meeting Patient Expectations A 2019 study by EY found that rising consumer service expectations were a major challenge for 58% of healthcare organizations. In addition to quality medical care, patients value time savings, digitalization, and comfort level in receiving services – including the ability to book appointments online 24/7.

Integrating chatbots with medical information systems (MIS) allows for immediate updates of appointment statuses in the MIS after a patient interacts with the bot.

Chatbot Functional Requirements for Medical Clinics From our experience working with clinics, we have developed a list of functional requirements for medical chatbots:

1. Dialog Interface for Appointment Booking. The chatbot provides a user-friendly and intuitive interface for patient interactions with the clinic. Patients can make appointments, find information about available services, prices, and specialists through familiar messaging platforms or a widget on the website.
2. Integration with Medical Information Management Systems. For maximum functionality, medical chatbots integrate with MIS, such as Medialog / Infoclinic / MIS based on 1C. This allows patients to learn about available slots for doctor appointments, make bookings, and reschedule without needing to interact with operators. All information is automatically updated in the MIS.
3. Patient Authorization. To ensure data security, the chatbot must identify patients. Authorization can use patient data from the MIS database.
4. Scenarios. A potential basic set of scenarios that a medical chatbot should support includes:
   • Appointment Booking: Patients can book appointments with doctors by choosing a convenient date and time.
   • Changing Appointments: Patients can reschedule dates and times by interacting with the bot.
   • Cancellation: Patients can cancel appointments, and the bot proactively offers to pick a new date.
   • Doctor Schedules: Patients can find out doctors' schedules by specialization.
   • Cost of Services: Patients can inquire about the costs of specific services or consultations with particular specialists.
5. Natural Language Understanding (NLU). Chatbots feature natural language understanding to accurately comprehend and correctly process patient inquiries.
6. Integration with Mobile Apps. The chatbot can be integrated into the healthcare facility’s mobile app, allowing patients to access the bot in an embedded chat.
7. Reporting and Trainability. The platform on which the medical chatbot is built should provide analytics on the bot’s performance and be user-friendly to facilitate prompt retraining of the bot and scenario updates.
8. Payment Processing. The bot generates and sends patients a link for paying for appointments.
9. Filling Out Forms Before Appointments. Before appointments, the chatbot offers patients the option to fill out medical forms at home in a conversational mode, saving time needed for clinic visits.
10. Service and Marketing Mailings. The bot conducts mailings with promotions and special offers, notifications about loyalty programs, changes in work schedules, and announcements of new branch openings. After the mailing, patients can ask clarifying questions.

Ultimately, a chatbot with NLU for a medical center should ensure convenience for patients and improve the quality of service, reduce the burden on the medical center’s resources, and speed up the appointment booking process.