Understandings of the Trend
As a healthcare trend, chatbots/bots can be understood as the emergence of intelligent conversational applications designed to reduce the burden on healthcare providers by facilitating information dissemination. Depending on their type, chatbots can be used to answer common disease-specific questions without healthcare appointments or provide organizational information concerning hospitals or healthcare insurance (Almalki & Azeez, 2020; May & Denecke, 2022). Diagnostic chatbots that redirect users to specialty doctors or enable self-diagnosis for informational purposes are also present (May & Denecke, 2022). Despite the associated safety concerns, such bots could be helpful in spreading awareness of stigmatized disorders’ symptoms, including STDs or mental health conditions.
Potential Impacts on Nursing Practice
As a nurse caring for populations with varying health literacy levels, I could be required to provide chatbot-using patients with additional education to ensure safety and prevent misinformation. It is because current informational chatbots, including those focused on COVID-19, are still imperfect when it comes to avoiding medical jargon and demonstrating the consistent use of condition-specific terminology (Almalki & Azeez, 2020). Thus, chatbots’ further popularization might increase the demand for nurse-initiated patient teaching even though the technology focuses on reducing the workload on healthcare providers.
Legal, Privacy, and Ethical Considerations
The key considerations/implications should be acknowledged to maximize the trend’s safety and patient-centeredness. Regarding legal issues, as chatbots become widespread, software developers should clarify the distribution of accountability for failures and mistakes that lead to misinformation, delayed diagnosis, or explicit harm to the user (Almalki & Azeez, 2020). For privacy, chatbot users are increasingly concerned with the risks of personal data leakages (Almalki & Azeez, 2020). However, as per literature review research, chatbots’ privacy protections and security standardization do not necessarily meet users’ expectations, which could cause distrust (May & Denecke, 2022). Finally, regarding ethics, AI-based healthcare chatbots have to be carefully monitored to make sure that their responses to high-risk concerns, including acute mental health conditions and self-harm complaints, emphasize getting qualified assistance. To improve non-maleficence and beneficence, chatbot applications should be sensitive to particular keywords and redirect particular cases to human operators, thus eliminating the risks of misinterpreted instructions or script errors hindering suicide prevention.
References
Almalki, M., & Azeez, F. (2020). Health chatbots for fighting COVID-19: A scoping review.Acta Informatica Medica, 28(4), 241-247.
May, R., & Denecke, K. (2022). Security, privacy, and healthcare-related conversational agents: A scoping review. Informatics for Health and Social Care, 47(2), 194-210.