Tag: Consumer

Healthcare AI: What’s in your chatbot?

Jul 22, 2025

By OWEN TRIPP

So much of the early energy around generative AI in healthcare has been geared toward speed and efficiency: freeing doctors from admin tasks, automating patient intake, streamlining paperwork-heavy pain points. This is all necessary and helpful, but much of it boils down to established players optimizing the existing system to suit their own needs. As consumers flock to AI for healthcare, their questions and needs highlight the limits of off-the-shelf bots — and the pent-up demand for no judgment, all-in-one, personalized help.

Transforming healthcare so that it actually works for patients and consumers — ahem, people — requires more than incumbent-led efficiency. Generative AI will be game-changing, no doubt, but only when it’s embedded and embraced as a trusted guide that steers people toward high-quality care and empowers them to make better decisions.

Upgrading Dr. Google

From my vantage point, virtual agents and assistants are the most important frontier in healthcare AI right now — and in people-centered healthcare, period. Tens of millions of people (especially younger generations) are already leaning into AI for help with health and wellness, testing the waters of off-the-shelf apps and tools like ChatGPT.

You see, people realize that AI isn’t just for polishing emails and vacation itineraries. One-fifth of adults consult AI chatbots with health questions at least once a month (and given AI’s unprecedented adoption curve, we can assume that number is rising by the day). For most, AI serves as a souped-up, user-friendly alternative to search engines. It offers people a more engaging way to research symptoms, explore potential treatments, and determine if they actually need to see a doctor or head to urgent care.

But people are going a lot deeper with chatbots than they ever did with Dr. Google or WebMD. Beyond the usual self-triage, the numbers tell us that up to 40% of ChatGPT users have consulted AI after a doctor’s appointment. They were looking to verify and validate what they’d heard. Even more surprising, after conferring with ChatGPT, a similar percentage then re-engaged with their doctor — to request referrals or tests, changes to medications, or schedule a follow-up.

These trends highlight AI’s enormous potential as an engagement tool, and they also suggest that people are defaulting to AI because the healthcare system is (still) too difficult and frustrating to navigate. Why are people asking ChatGPT how to manage symptoms? Because accessing primary and preventive care is a challenge. Why are they second-guessing advice and prescriptions? Sadly, they don’t fully trust their doctor, are embarrassed to speak up, or don’t have enough time to talk through their questions and concerns during appointments.

Chatbots have all the time in the world, and they’re responsive, supportive, knowledgeable, and nonjudgmental. This is the essence of the healthcare experience people want, need, and deserve, but that experience can’t be built with chatbots alone. AI has a critical role to play, to be sure, but to fulfill its potential it has to evolve well beyond off-the-shelf chatbot competence.

Chatbots 2.0

When it comes to their healthcare, the people currently flocking to mass-market apps like ChatGPT will inevitably realize diminishing returns. Though the current experience feels personal, the advice and information is ultimately very generic, built on the same foundation of publicly available data, medical journals, websites, and countless other sources. Even the purpose-built healthcare chatbots in the market today are overwhelmingly relying on public data and outsourced AI models.

Generic responses and transactional experiences have inherent shortcomings. As we’ve seen with other health-tech advances, including 1.0 telehealth and navigation platforms, impersonal, one-off services driven primarily by in-the-moment-need, efficiency, or convenience don’t equate to long-term value.

For chatbots to avoid the 1.0 trap, they need to do more than put the world’s medical knowledge at our fingertips.

Accepting your Future Avatar: Leveraging Digital Twins for Transforming Healthcare

Dec 29, 2022

by SMRITI KIRUBANANDAN

A possibility to do better and be better by observing yourself (your twin) reacting to various feeds and gaining the ability to gain better care and improve research, seems like a super power. The concept of a Digital Twin is the ability to replicate a person, an object or a process derived from extracting various data points from internet of things (IOT) that are attached to the original object. One can view how the digital twin responds to various feeds and give us a deeper understanding on the possibilities and impact for the real person or object. Shifting this concept into healthcare, I am going to take this up a notch and propose, what if a person has an opportunity to accept their future avatar presented to them and it is reflected and implemented immediately?

As per Research and Markets report

Up to 89% of all IoT platforms will include digital twins by 2025
Digital twinning will be a standard IoT feature by 2027
Nearly 36% of executives across a variety of industries understand the benefits of digital twinning, with about half of them planning to use it in their operations by 2028

Here are some of the ways a Digital Twin would play a role in making healthcare accurate, smart and reliable while greatly improving member experience:

Delivering the right Frequency of Care

In the United States, 400,000 hospital patients experience some form of preventable harm each year, accounting for a cost of over $20 billion annually.

Giving the proper care at the right time is vital in improving patient experience and the quality of care, and reducing healthcare costs. By using the digital twin concept, we can replicate the process, understand a person’s reactions to different treatments, and help customize the frequency of care needed. That might include understanding and getting more precise with the medication doses based on the Twin’s reactions or refining a type of surgical procedure based on possible recovery and impact. It might inspire a patient to make the right decisions based on the digital twin at the right time. Accepting their future avatar might give a patient hope and psychological comfort before starting a treatment or procedure and, most importantly, could build trust with their provider.

The C Word

Apr 11, 2016• 29

By JEFF GOLDSMITH

flying cadeucii That we are experiencing a “consumer revolution” in healthcare is a durable meme in the media and in policy circles just now. When you hear the word “consumer”, it conjures images of someone with a cart and a credit card happily weaving their way through Best Buy. It is, however, a less than useful way of thinking about the patient’s experience in the health system.

A persistent critique of our country’s high cost health system is that because patients are insulated from the cost of care by health insurance, they freely “consume” it without regard to its value, and are absolved of the need to manage their own health. In effect, this view ascribes our very high health costs to moral failure on the part of patients.

Market-oriented policy advocates believe that if we “empower”patients as consumers by asking them to pay more of the bill, market forces will help us tame the ever rising cost of care. If patients have “skin in the game” when they use the health system and also “transparency” of health providers’ prices and performance, patients can deploy their own dollars more sensibly.

This concept played a major role in the otherwise “progressive” Affordable Care Act. The 13 million people who signed up for coverage this year through the Affordable Care Act’s Health Exchanges opted overwhelmingly for subsidized policies with very high deductibles and out-of-pocket cost limits. The “skin in the game” argument has also heavily influenced corporate health benefits decisions. More than 30 million workers and their families receive high deductible plans through employers.

Should Health Consumers Be Paid for Performance Too?

Jun 2, 2014• 23

By MICHELLE SNYDER

Meaningful Use and Pay for Performance – two of the most talked about programs in healthcare IT over the past several years. They are both based on the premise that if you want to drive behavior change among providers and improve quality of care, you need to offer financial rewards to get results.

But what about the consumer? We have now entered a new era in healthcare where the consumer is rightfully front and center – AHIP is even calling 2014 the “Year of the Consumer.” Payers, and other population health managers, who until recently viewed consumers as claims, now want to “engage,” “motivate” and “delight” them.

The challenge, however, is that we are giving consumers more responsibility, but not making them accountable for the quality of care they provide for themselves.

As a country we have spent tens of billions of dollars on Meaningful Use incentives and Pay for Performance programs for clinicians. Providers need to demonstrate they are making the best choices for patients, being efficient and coordinating care.

They need to educate patients and give them access to information based on the belief that if patients are informed, they will take responsibility and action. Unfortunately, this seems like a “Field of Dreams” spinoff – “If we say it, they will act.”

However, that movie has a different ending. The intentions are good, but the flaw is that consumers don’t simply need more information. They need personalized guidance and support, and they need to feel like they have a financial stake in the game.

So the big question is – why aren’t we spending more time thinking about how the concepts behind “meaningful use” and “pay for performance” could be used as a way to get consumers engaged in their health? Yes, clinicians are important as they direct approximately 80 percent of the healthcare spend in our “sick-care” health system.

However, what most people do not realize is that 75 percent of healthcare costs are driven by preventable conditions like heart disease and type-2 diabetes. And while some consumers may throw up their hands and blame genetics for the majority of their health issues, it’s a fact that 50 percent of what makes us healthy is under our control – as opposed to 20 percent for genetics.

So what if we made wearable technologies such as FitBit more “meaningful” for the consumer? Instead of just tracking steps, what if consumers were financially rewarded for taking steps to improve their health (pun intended) through health premium reductions, copay waivers or even gift cards?

Consider a scenario where an individual who was identified as being pre-diabetic and then took action to prevent the onset of diabetes. What if we required that proactive person to pay less in premiums than someone who was not taking any initiative to improve their health? That would clearly be very motivating.