By Devashish Mamgain
India’s adoption of smartphones, spurred on by a “Digital India” campaign and the COVID-19 pandemic, has led to smartphone technologies being embraced by necessity and force, resulting in almost 600 million user figures in 2021. Integrating life services like Unified Payments Interface (UPI), Aadhaar, CoWin, and WhatsApp HealthDesk into mobile phones has drastically simplified formerly complicated procedures. With daily usage of 12GB per user per month, India’s quickly growing digital footprint has put it on the market for tech space players who can implement higher efficiency, better connectivity, and a more user-friendly experience.
India’s confidence with smartphones, as well as the circumstances of the pandemic, led to people becoming far savvier with the devices. This led to initiatives in all spheres centralised around the device we carry in our pockets every day. During the pandemic, a joint initiative between WhatsApp, the Indian Government’s digital department (MyGov), and the Union Health Ministry was to create a HealthDesk chatbot accessible through a WhatsApp chat. This platform revolutionised the user experience of tracking vaccines, resolving medical concerns, and booking appointments with doctors, all through a simple text message sent to this bot. Conversational AI chatbots were proven as a concept with this initiative which over two crore people have used.
A chatbot brings reliability, accountability, and flexibility to a system that leans on these three factors daily:
- Reliability, through all information being stored on a shareable, secure database for patients to keep track of appointments, medication, diagnosis, and feedback, while a doctor can keep track of each patient’s progress.
- Accountability, where patients and doctors are kept up to date on what needs to be done on either side, whether it is keeping a medication schedule for a patient or running tests for a doctor, both are tracked and stored, ready for use at any time.
- And lastly, flexibility comes through a chatbot being available around the clock, from any location – ensuring that patients and doctors are connected, updated, and reassured. A chatbot does all this through simple, conversational messages, often sent to the patient’s and doctor’s email inboxes or chat screens, saving heaps of time on both sides.
A chatbot can even help evaluate and clerk a patient’s pre-consultation, where they will save the data given by a patient and provide it to the doctor before an appointment to better prepare the patient for a detailed diagnosis. Or, if a patient already has a pre-existing diagnosis, a chatbot is constantly with them, providing information, medicine, and appointment schedules at the tips of their finger.The unfortunate catalyst of the pandemic played a part in the development of chatbots, where individuals who could not leave their homes or meet in person were given the opportunity to quickly track their symptoms, set up appointments, and correctly identify the exact service they needed. The self-learning nature of AI chatbots allowed them to gather more data and learn from it, moving their objectives from transactional jobs to real-time conversationalists capable of far more sophisticated interaction.
In India, the multitude of cultures and corporations led to the development of chatbots in their language, use-case, and flexibility. With healthcare being the most active market for chatbots in the country, the low cost to set up made it far more attractive for more and more corporations to adopt this technology and use it to its fullest.
Chatbots are an evolution in customer care, and with new and exciting developments – they can become an essential standard. An emerging market, a fast-developing technology, and a welcoming user base can catapult AI chatbots to the standard of customer service in a few years. Healthcare has already seen an overhaul in India, where appointments, vaccines, advice, and paperwork have all been streamlined and provided for without the hassle we know all too well.
Devashish Mamgain, Founder of Kommunicate.io, an AI-based chatbot service provider
(DISCLAIMER: The views expressed are sole of the author and ETHealthworld does not necessarily subscribe to it. ETHealthworld.com shall not be responsible for any damage caused to any person/organisation directly or indirectly.)