The idea I have been entertaining is how I could make an innovative healthcare tool
The idea I have been entertaining is how I could make an innovative healthcare tool
to improve health outcomes for the geriatric population and for patients with
chronic conditions. The intended device
is a chatbot that differs from every other health bot in the market because it
will diagnose numerous conditions instead of focusing on one disease, which is
the norm for most health bots. This bot will attain this feat by having a
detailed log of multiple conditions that afflict the geriatric population and it
will have a highly integrated symptom checker to provide an accurate diagnosis
of the different conditions. The desired appliance is designed for use at home
settings to help avert the complexities involved in transporting old and chronically
sick people from home to varied health facilities. The innovation will also
help cut down the costs involved in sustaining these patients in hospital
settings. This is because the bot will mainly be used to provide care to such
patients while they are in the comfort of their homes. The healthcare sector is
witnessing increased demand for the adoption of better technologies that will
facilitate better interaction and communication between patients and healthcare
professionals. This demand can only be met by integrating technological
appliances in healthcare and ensuring that such tools facilitate better
engagement with patients.
The smart chatbot will also have video capability and a portfolio of various
medical conditions to assist healthcare specialists to identify and process
visual prompts on the patient’s condition through the device’s camera. The
specialists will then use these prompts to execute real-time examination
informed by the data the device will relay. The device will have the capacity
to learn the physical behaviors of the patients and trigger alerts to care
managers, or the responsible family caretakers incase of any deviation, which
will provide the needed intervention in case of a medical emergency. The
chatbot will have significant positive implications on the medical sector
especially on improving patient health for the chronically ill and the old, and
on alleviating the many resources used to care for these patients in hospital
settings. I intend that the chatbot converses with patients in an empathetic
and reassuring voice to invoke the feeling of intimacy in the patient.
Additionally, the gadget will be equipped with a set of varied health
peripherals to extract vital information on a patient’s condition by asking and
answering questions, collecting and evaluating vital signs, assessing the
patient’s responses, and making the necessary recommendations for adjustment. Besides,
the gadget will help monitor the patient’s progress and issue alerts in case of
improvements or deterioration. Further, the smart chatbot is desirable because
it will provide care on a 24/7 basis, hence alleviating the need to have a
nurse on a full-time basis.
Moreover,
the chatbot can monitor the patient to ensure that they are following the
prescribed medication regimen and taking medicine as prescribed. If the patient
forgets to take medicine at the specified time, the chatbot alerts the patient
or the caregiver, hence improving the efficiency of care. Ultimately, the
chatbot will help the overall condition of the chronically ill and old
patients. Since it will contain all the requisite accoutrements that will help
in providing the needed care, it will be easier for patients to open up in
their conversations. This is because the bot will eliminate the intrusion of
human beings as it will only require the nursing assistant receiving the patient’s
information from the bot. Designing this bot will involve various specialists
with varied expertise on different medical conditions, so that the bot will be
fed with accurate symptoms of the diseases managed by the different
professionals. The specialists will provide information on the medications,
medication procedures, and symptoms of these different medical conditions.
The
smart healthcare practices will also feature the intelligent chatbot checking
symptoms and executing reliable triage, in addition to exploiting the built-in
models of language intelligently by referring to the pertinent medical
terminologies. Further, the smart practices will be facilitated by the
chatbot’s capability to manage disruptions, intricate medical questions,
alterations in topics, as well as human mistakes. The chatbot will also seek to
connect to patients on varied levels of intimacy, such as by allowing the
patients to communicate with the bots concerning checking their symptoms and
relating them to the bot’s diseases database. After reviewing the symptoms, the
bot will then provide the patients with the required medical assistance for
understanding their ailments and seeking for the appropriate intervention.
The
intelligent bot will also provide patients with information on their
prescription medication, which will help them relate to their conditions better
and know how to manage them in future. Moreover, the bot will also remind
patients of the time to take their medication. It will also remind them when
they are about to forget or abscond their medication. Besides, the smart bot
will provide intimate interactive experiences for patients, as they will
communicate directly and virtually with doctors from their homes whenever the
need arises. The bot will also advise patients on the right foods to eat and
even remind them of any scheduled meetings with the pertinent doctors,
depending on their medical ailments. Ultimately, the bot will help allay the
fears and anxiety faced by old, chronically ill patients.
Potential Outcomes
However,
with this chatbot, better outcomes will be attained regarding improving
treatment outcomes of the chronic conditions affecting patients of the
geriatric populations. For example, the bot will save time for professionals
and for the patients who would otherwise have to wait on nurses tending to many
other patients in healthcare facilities. It will realize this outcome because
it will help offload the operation and maintenance costs of healthcare
infrastructure. Besides, the innovative chatbot are improving the experience of
chronically ill patients, engaging the patients positively in their plans of
care, and enhancing communication and interactions between caregivers,
families, and healthcare providers. Further, the chatbot seeks to enhance healthcare
results, extending patient lifespan, and reducing the invariably expensive
costs of care for the various complications.
As previously indicated, this innovative chatbot will not concentrate on
checking one disease. Instead, it will have a catalog of the symptoms of many
illnesses, which will eliminate the need to have many bots for different
conditions.
The
chatbot invention will also come with an added advantage of creating more
opportunities for growth, both for the specialists, for the sector, and for the
new professionals required to manufacture and market them. The traditional
nursing system requires only a handful of professional checking on patients.
However, with the advent of this system, more jobs will arise with regard to
the makers of the device, the installers, the specialists responsible for
maintaining them , the marketers, and many other entities who will be directly
and indirectly involved with the device.
The greatest drive for installing this novel healthcare device,
nonetheless, is not the convenience or daily presence or even its efficiency. Instead,
it is the added comfort the device provides patients and they will be more
comfortable reporting on whatever changes in their conditions to the device
than to a human attendant. Chronically ill patients are always wary of exposing
their health conditions to other people, and especially to third parties.
However, using this device allows patients the advantage of helping them to
open up without fearing that the information about their health conditions they
would desire to keep private will be exposed. Further, they device helps
safeguard the privacy of patient information, a critical requirement in the
health care sector articulated in the
Healthcare Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) (HIPAA Journal,
2020).
This
observation is echoed by Robinson (2018), who avers that a study at the
University of Southern California established that it is easier for a person to
self-disclose their health conditions more straightforwardly to a virtual
assistant such as the novel chatbot than to a human specialist. The easy
disclosure to the assistants is because the patients are not overly concerned
about the chatbot judging them on the discomforting aspects of their health
conditions. Notably, a patient’s willingness to share their personal medical
information is dependent on two critical aspects, namely, the feeling of
support and the lack of biased and unfair opinions and judgments on their
condition. The innovative chatbot regards these aspects, and this renders it an
especially important tool for getting the medical information that chronically
ill patients may feel sensitive about revealing.
Potential Problem of the Bot and How
to Resolve It
The bot also deals with the downside that
affects the majority of other health bots in the market, which is that their
services are only accessible when there is a reliable internet connection. The
implication is that if a patient using a virtual assistant device losses their
internet connection, the patient will not access the vital health information
or even communicate with their caregiver, especially when the need to arises.
Such loss of connectivity is very critical because vital patient information
could go undocumented. Besides, if a patient undergoes a medical crisis, there
is a high likelihood that it could go unnoticed. Failure to detect medical
issues could affect a patient’s wellbeing and result in legal consequences. The
difference with this innovative chatbot is that it incorporates local
functionality into its various applications, which implies that if the bot
losses connectivity; its applications can still record information into the
device. This form of offline connectivity provides a previously unexplored by
highly important healthcare feature for the elderly patients.
Sustainability of the New Idea
The
innovative chatbot will have highly innovative and unique features and
applications that will make it highly desirable in the market and hence attain
the needed sustainability in better resource use and improved patient
outcomes.
Financial Implications
Making
the chatbot will consume considerable resources because of the sophisticated
approach it will use to diagnose various medical conditions in the geriatric
population and for other chronically ill patients. The various applications
that the chatbot will contain include a backend that will facilitate the
management of messages from multiple avenues and process them in language that
the patient understands, mainly through Natural language processing assistance
such as Wit.ai as noted by Saxena (2020). The bot will also contain channels or
endpoints that allow the integration of each particular channel to get the
messages. Upon receiving the message, the bot will use natural language
processing (NLP) to extract the intents as well as entities of the message
provided by the user.
The
bot will also use the natural language processing intents as well as entities
to create smart conversations by creating an algorithm for each smart
conversation. The bot will then be integrated with multiple applications to
provide the required interaction between the bot, the patient and the health
provider. Integration takes about two to three days, although it depends on the
complexity of the apps, with developing the whole bot taking about three weeks.
The cost of designing, developing and integrating the requisite operational
features of the bot would amount to about 50,000 dollars. Although it may seem
that this is a hefty amount, the health sector will take up this product
significantly because it will have the added advantage of diagnosing many
conditions, unlike the conventional healthbots that mostly diagnose one medical
condition.
The
high cost of making the bot means that I will have to seek external funding.
Grants will make up the bulk of the external funding because of the many kinds
of grants I can use to obtain the money. One example of a grant source I will
seek is from the state grant, considering that my state provides business loans
to nurse entrepreneurs and other health care providers. Such support from the
state is important because in the event the loan they provide initially fails
to yielded substantive gains for commencing my project, I can go back to ask for
additional funding as I will have already sensitized them on the viability of
the idea. Another grant source is the federal government, which provides varied
grants to healthcare startups and especially for initiatives that aim to tackle
varied diseases and improve the general wellbeing of the population.
Since
making this chatbot will require significant resources, I will also augment my
finances by seeking grants from private sources. Private grants could come from
private businesses and nonprofit organizations. Venture capitalists as well as
angel investors also form part of the private grants and I will approach them
because they provide considerable funds to initiative they believe have a
chance of doing well and providing them with good return on their
investment. I will also consider seek
grants from credit unions because they are more receptive to funding mid-size
and even small businesses.
How Entrepreneurship Drives
Successful Healthcare Innovation
Answering
this question first requires stating that I am a licensed
nurse entrepreneur with a
focus on developing an innovative tool that will focus on improving the health
conditions of chronically ill individuals, and especially in the geriatric
population. My desire is in line with the varied businesses that a nurse
entrepreneur can undertake, with one of the most notable being the development
of medical devices as noted by RegisteredNursing.org. (2020). Entrepreneurship is driving successful healthcare innovation
especially in the contemporary era of varied technological advances. The major
impetus among health entrepreneurs is to develop innovative interventions that
can improve patient outcomes, save resources, and lessen the workload of
healthcare professionals. Health entrepreneurs are now focusing on how they can
incorporate new technological infrastructure to the healthcare sector, such as the
use of virtual assistants to improve predictions in medical care, which
translates to better and more informed care. Health entrepreneurs are continually
insisting on the need to use innovation in developing better tools that will
appeal to the health sector so that they can profit from the sales of their
investments. As a result, these entrepreneurs are even seeking to collaborate
with different healthcare professionals to receive advice on how to make the
new tools that can enhance health outcomes.
In light of this, the need for developing this
chatbot is also informed by the ever-increasing problem of chronic illnesses
especially among older people, with healthcare systems around the world
grappling to contain these conditions with heavily burdened healthcare systems
afflicted by a scarcity of resources.
Home-care populations are expanding rapidly, and these patients are
requiring attention on a 24/7 basis. Following the conventional ways of
providing care and especially in assigning a care nurse to monitor the patients
daily is highly expensive, both for the families with ailing patients and for
the sector. Consequently, entrepreneurship
drives highly successful healthcare innovations in a variety of ways. For
example, entrepreneurship in healthcare deals with the use of poor technology
in the healthcare sector that has vastly contributed to poor health outcomes.
For
instance, today’s health entrepreneurs know that the healthcare sector is
already burdened as it strives to manage these varied conditions. They know
that the health sector thus desires the adoption of resource-efficient but
effective approaches in providing such care. Health entrepreneurs are thus motivated
by the high demand for providing cost-effective quality care enabled by
engaging patients intimately, continually, and competently. However, such intimate
patient engagement can only be attained by using technology because the health
care sector is already so burdened to afford such resources. Further, the
rapidly increasing frequency of chronic conditions all over the world is
demanding the use of better approaches to manage the conditions. It is this need
that informs the necessity for entrepreneurs to develop better innovative
approaches to meet patient needs. Thus, the efforts of entrepreneurs are now
informing the incorporation of artificial intelligence (AI) in healthcare.
Conclusion
The healthcare sector is benefitting
from adopting many innovative technologies that are improving their capacities
for diagnosing and treating varied medical conditions. In light of this, artificial
intelligence, and especially its application in making virtual assistant
devices, is improving healthcare outcomes significantly. In fact, entrepreneurs
(and especially those concentrating on improving the methods used in providing
care to different populations) are driving this innovation wave in the health
sector. This entrepreneurship drive is easing
healthcare practices, reducing expenses associated with care provision, saving
resources, and improving patient outcomes. In light of this, the chatbot I am seeking to design
and develop will increase diagnostic accuracy and help follow up on critical
medical conditions. The quality of care that this device will engender will
possibly surpass the economic significance of artificial intelligence-based
management of health care. Ultimately, the chatbot provides a highly
resourceful approach to managing these conditions while concurrently helping in
directing the minimal resources in the healthcare sector towards other
initiatives, hence saving more lives and money.