As I posted in November, I’m extremely interested in chatbots as the next evolution of patient communication. In fact, I’m expecting to see a lot of chatbot talk at HIMSS 2017 in a couple weeks. I should have scheduled a healthcare chatbot meetup at HIMSS17, but didn’t. However, I expect the concept will come up in my other HIMSS 2017 meetups. The idea is finally catching on.
As part of my chatbot learning, I came across David Hawig from Germany who has created a healthcare chatbot named Florence. Florence is still in the early stages, but you can already talk with Florence over Facebook Messenger, and David has an early Skype version and web version as well. I personally used the web version for my tests, but David said that the only real publicly released version is the Facebook Messenger version of Florence because Facebook “messenger has the best chatbot integration so far.”
What I find really interesting and inspiring are these chatbot screenshots that David sent me. I liked them because they inspire me and hopefully you to start thinking about all the ways a healthcare chatbot could help us. Here’s a quick run down of the examples he shared with me:
Daily Health Tips
Doctor Finding Service (with Connection to past record)
Medication Reminder and Tracking
Health Tracker
Health Literacy and Education
Symptom Checker
What do you think about all of these possible uses for chatbots? Are there any others that are missing? Which chatbot uses make the most sense to implement right away?
