“Are the healthcare systems ready to adopt conversational agents and virtual assistants to be used in response to a pandemic?” and “Are technology providers ready to collaborate and support healthcare communications?” In this commentary, the rest of our discussions focus on VA, which holds a significant share in the intelligent conversational agents and virtual assistants market in terms of accessibility and consumer adoption 19. Frameworks for COVID-19 screening with chatbots have been proposed and implemented at healthcare institutions 17, 18.ĭespite these promising efforts in response to the pandemic, questions still remain. Amazon released Alexa VA features to help users setup routines during staying at home and providing tips, information, and guidance about COVID-19 16. Apple released an app to share COVID-19 information and updates using CDC resources, which can also be accessible through Siri (Apple’s VA) 15. The World Health Organization (WHO) released a text-based chatbot via a highly popular messaging app, WhatsApp, to respond to public questions about COVID-19 14. The Centers for Disease Control and Preventions (CDC) and Microsoft joined forces to create a COVID-19 text-based chatbot using reliable and evidence-based information in self-assessment to eliminate basic information seeking 13. Recent efforts have expanded their utilities in health assessment. Intelligent conversational agents and virtual assistants have been used and tested for responding to health information seeking activities 8, 9, 10, 11, 12. Generally, chatbots are perceived to be service-specific conversational agents that typically engage in multi-turn dialogues (e.g., Woebot- a therapy chatbot), while VAs are perceived to be virtual assistants which need voice commands to interact and complete tasks (e.g., Amazon Alexa and Alexa skills) 7. Both may include multimodal interaction support (e.g., screen, text, speech, and sound), with VAs primarily engaging users through voice interface and chatbots through text. Both enable communications with end-users via natural language, achieved through rule-based dialog or machine learning 6. In the literature, the definition and implementation of VA and chatbots are intertwined. Chatbots and voice assistants (VA) are popular examples of intelligent conversational agents and virtual assistants. Intelligent conversational agents and virtual assistants have proven their potential to serve as an intermediary to reduce the burden in the healthcare system for monitoring and consulting the public 4, through their versatility, accessibility, and scalability for naturalistic communications with the end-users 5. Moreover, other digital health tools had a significant role in the fight against COVID-19. The use of interactive two-way video teleconferencing in medical consultation mitigated the volume of non-essential in-person visits at hospitals, preserved critical resources and supplies needed for treating COVID-19 patients, and reduced exposure for healthcare professionals and patients 3. 6074: “Coronavirus Preparedness and Response Supplemental Appropriations Act, 2020”, which allowed Health and Human Services (HHS) to waive several Medicare restrictions and requirements temporarily regarding telehealth services during the COVID-19 emergency 2. One of the early congressional decisions was H.R. The timely actions taken on by federal agencies in response to the COVID-19 emergency to relax regulation and privacy enforcement, as well as to expand allowable reimbursement, were critical factors for telehealth’s implementation 1, 2. The motivation to reduce the spread, continue providing care, and contain operational costs forced the rapid deployment of telehealth. This unexpected public health crisis with sustained spread has magnified the problems that health systems encounter when relying on the face-to-face care delivery model almost exclusively. The health systems have also been under tremendous stress to meet the unprecedented healthcare demand while maintaining inpatient and outpatient services for other healthcare needs. With the rapid spread of the deadly Corona Virus Disease of 2019 (COVID-19) outbreak, many countries faced a demand surge for inpatient and intensive care unit beds and the associated healthcare services and resources.
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