Artificial intelligence (AI) is infiltrating practically every aspect of our lives. From finding something to watch on Netflix to securing our email inboxes, AI is everywhere. And of course, it’s making its way into the healthcare field, assisting in diagnostics and analysing data to predict treatment outcomes.
But here’s a question: what role is AI playing in healthcare membership organisations? And perhaps a more important question we should be asking is… how is your organisation utilising AI solutions?
What can AI do for you?
There’s an almost unlimited number of opportunities for AI in healthcare membership settings, with the most obvious being automation. With membership organisations typically finding themselves overburdened, using artificial intelligence to take over everyday administrative tasks can provide a bit of much-needed relief. Employees will have more time to focus on the things that really matter.
One great thing about using AI to automate tasks and create seamless, efficient workflows is that these types of solutions are so widely available and accessible. The chances are that your own organisation is already embracing AI – in one way or another – to lighten the load. And that’s fantastic! But right now, we want to dig deeper to explore AI use cases you may not have considered.
Looking beyond automation, AI holds the potential to assist you in helping your members directly. Your members may be looking to develop their skills, advance their research, or simply enhance the ways they’re able to support their end users. And AI can be a hugely valuable tool for the scientists, specialists, healthcare practitioners, policymakers, and other professionals within your network.
So what’s the secret to getting more value out of AI? It’s simple: chatbots!
The rise of AI-powered virtual assistants
You may find ‘chatbots’ a surprising answer. But the fact is that chatbots today are a world apart from the early versions that many of us got frustrated with. In fact, they’re not even ‘chatbots’ anymore, but ‘AI-powered virtual assistants’ designed to closely support our needs.
The idea behind these virtual assistants is that every organisation begins with a blank slate, allowing them to use their own internal data and selected external data sources to train the assistant. The result? A bot that holds the right knowledge to take on the persona required to deliver value.
Let’s look at some of the interesting ways that AI assistants can help healthcare membership associations as they strive to provide the most useful and powerful support for their network.
1. Member training
Your healthcare membership association may welcome industry trainees and students who are not only trying to develop their hard skills, but also the soft skills required to work in sensitive, patient-facing environments. In this instance, AI chatbots can be trained on data derived from real patient experiences in the healthcare industry, essentially creating a realistic patient simulation.
Talking to this bot enables your members to interact with ‘patients’ in a safe, controlled setting, allowing them to visualise the impact of their communications, and tailor their approach to improve patient satisfaction. It’s a way of testing various approaches without causing harm to end users.
2. Research development
For your members to further develop their industry research, it’s important that they’re able to gain a deeper understanding of the demographics they work with, and enhance what they know about their patients. However, there’s often a block to doing so: the fact that it can be difficult to ask the right questions.
This is where AI-powered assistants can help. By training these chatbots on real patient experiences and healthcare data, the bots can act as a patient simulation. This allows researchers to ask questions that may appear ‘silly’ to real people, or be difficult for them to answer. Drawing upon huge amounts of patient data, bots can respond clearly without judgement or bias.
3. Patient support
While AI-powered assistants can be trained using extensive patient data, they can also be trained using the knowledge and industry experiences of healthcare professionals. This can empower your members to enhance the level of support they’re able to offer their own users.
Patients often have questions, require clarification, or want general advice and guidance, but some may find it challenging to reach out to specialists, or become frustrated with lengthy response times. Virtual assistants are able to provide on-demand, real-time support when it’s needed most, analysing huge quantities of expert data to generate accurate, helpful, answers to some of the biggest questions.
4. Patient advocacy
A really important use case for AI-powered virtual assistants is the potential to improve the way members advocate for their patients, and facilitate greater access to the most suitable evidence-based prevention and treatment resources.
AI tools can be trained using a variety of data sources – including the latest research – to analyse and assess options, weigh up risks and benefits, and determine the most suitable courses of action. Armed with this information, members can present both fact-based recommendations and patient preferences in a logical, rational, and credible manner. This helps to ensure that end users are being considered for effective and appropriate treatments.
5. Policy & guidelines FAQ
As a healthcare membership organisation, you’re naturally keen to do your part to contribute towards the development of strong, evidence-based policies. Policies that facilitate improvements in diagnosis, treatment, and long-term health management. And for your members to best support their end users, they need to ensure they’re clear on existing guidelines, and are staying up-to-date on changes and progress.
By developing an AI chatbot into an on-demand FAQ resource that’s able to quickly and efficiently answer any questions relating to policy, you can successfully reduce the amount of time spent in this area. You’ll have more time to focus on making a tangible, real-world difference.
Do AI chatbots have a role in healthcare?
This is definitely an interesting topic of debate. Healthcare is a highly sensitive area, and concerns have naturally been raised regarding the ability of AI virtual assistants to interact in a way that demonstrates understanding and empathy. Artificial intelligence tools do not experience feeling or emotion. Therefore, are they really suited to operating within the healthcare industry?
You may automatically think ‘no’; that AI chatbots aren’t able to replicate human understanding. Yet research suggests otherwise. In fact, one study from 2023 found that 78% of patients preferred talking to an AI assistant than to a human physician. They felt the chatbot responses showed greater empathy, were more concise, and were of higher quality than responses from real professionals.
Ready to embrace AI?
Here at More Time To, we specialise in helping healthcare membership associations build exciting new functionality into their websites. These include video libraries, private professional networks, and advanced AI-powered solutions. So if you’ve been looking for ways to extend support for your members, and help them to help their patients in the best possible way, get in touch with us. We can work with you to determine the most effective digital solutions for you – and this may be a custom-built virtual assistant designed to transform how you operate, and how you make an impact.
