Intelligent Conversational Agents in Healthcare: Hype or Hope?

New developments in healthcare require an increased disease self-management of patients. Intelligent digital assistants equipped with a conversational user interface are intended to support patients in this challenging task by providing reminders, answering questions, or supporting in self-monitoring tasks. In this paper, we study the potentials of intelligent conversational agents in healthcare. We realized three systems for three different use cases (patient education, disease management, self anamnesis). Based on these implementations and experiences with usability tests, we performed an analysis of strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats (SWOT) using a questionnaire. The results show that conversational agents used in healthcare applications can be helpful. However, they have to be integrated into the healthcare process, supporting also the interaction between the healthcare team and a patient. In order to be attractive for a long-term usage, the scope of operation should autonomously adapt to the current health situation of a patient to provide relevant functionality as needed.

eMedication Meets eHealth with the Electronic Medication Management Assistant (eMMA).

BACKGROUND: A patient's healthcare team is often missing a complete overview on the prescribed and dispensed medication. This is due to an inconsistent information flow between the different actors of the healthcare system. Often, only the patient himself knows exactly which drugs he is actually taking. OBJECTIVES: Our objective is to exploit different eHealth technologies available or planned in Switzerland to improve the information flow of the medication data among the stakeholder and to support the patient in managing his medication. METHODS: This work is embedded in the "Hospital of the Future Live" project, involving 16 companies and 6 hospitals in order to develop IT solutions for future optimized health care processes. A comprehensive set of requirements was collected from the different actors and project partners. Further, specifications of the available or planned eHealth infrastructure were reviewed to integrate relevant technologies into a coherent concept. RESULTS: We developed a concept that combines the medication list and an eHealth platform. The resulting electronic medication management assistant (eMMA) designed for the patient provides the current medication plan at any time and supports by providing relevant information through a conversational user interface. CONCLUSION: In Switzerland, we still need a bridging technology to combine the medication information from the electronic patient record with the medication plan's associated QR-Code. The developed app is intended to provide such bridge and demonstrates the usefulness of the eMediplan. It enables the patient to have all data regarding his medication on his personal mobile phone and he can - if necessary - provide the current medication to the health professional.