linics and hospitals began to use chatbots in order to maintain a fluid communication with their patients.  In Spain, the Clínica Humana implemented “Rosa”, a bot which handles the follow-up, monitoring and health control of almost 1,000 patients every day throughout a simple chat, similar to the one used to communicate with families and friends.

A bot or chatbot is an artificial intelligence customized software programmed and designed to simulate a conversation in an online platform (web page, online shop, ecommerce, etc.) as if it were a human being. These virtual assistants are booming because they offer instant responses, permanent assistance and the possibility of learning about our likes and preferences by providing us with the requested information.

Gradually, chatbots are being introduced within all areas, especially to improve business profitability. By the way, companies are using them as well to generate an added value to the client experience, thus improving its assistance.

Particularly in the health area,  it can be very helpful.  The Clínica Humana which was the winner of the Santander – Caeb Award  to Business Innovation implemented a caring, recovery and quality improvement system of chronic patient’s life  at home, throughout a management program, called “ROSA”. This program operates through a chatbot controlling and monitoring patients while coordinates and establishes direct communication links.

Another interesting example is Babylon Health, the first digital medical assistance provider located in London that has an ambitions mission: to implement a health service accessible to all people around the world. To this effect, they affirm that the best way to achieve this “is avoiding people having to visit the doctor”, said Ali Parsa, Founder of the Company.

How does it work? From afar and via a chatbot, the Babylon female voice is part of the new Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications designed to avoid personal visits to the doctor. On the other hand, it reduces the time that we would have to wait to receive medical assistance as well as it saves money that we would spend to get there.

Unlike the online self-diagnostic, this virtual assistant guides the patient throughout a classification process of clinic grade:  For example, it could inform you if your symptom needs urgent assistance or if you could take an over-the-counter medicine and bed rest. This technology is based on a number of AI techniques: language processing allowing users to describe their symptoms informally; expert systems to explore huge data bases of medical data; and automatic learning in order to set correlations between symptoms and illnesses.