Development and Evaluation of a Natural Language Conversational Bot for Identifying Appropriate Clinician Referral from Patient Narratives

Abstract

Recent years have seen a significant increase in automated conversational agent chatbots. Conversational agents like chatbots for health may provide timely and cost-effective support in clinical care. Some studies show that chatbots could have an impact on patient engagement. Additionally, health systems are attempting to connect with patients over social networks, mainly where specialists are limited. By 2025, the Association of American Medical Colleges estimates that the United States will have a shortfall of 61,700-94,700 physicians and critical shortage in many specialties, delaying available appointments by months in many cases. Thus, we need innovative solutions that can manage the time of limited specialists appropriately. Recent research has demonstrated that deep learning methods are superior for natural language classification tasks compared to other machine learning methods. The primary objective of this study was to develop a telegram chatbot which reads patient narratives and acts as a conversational agent by redirecting the case to the appropriate specialist. Besides simply working on improving conversational capabilities of chatbots, we developed a novel method for referring the cases to specialists based on their responses to previous cases on a social network group. As far as we know, no other chatbot has the level of accuracy or referral system like our developed chatbot.