Chatbots to save healthcare industry $3.6B in 2022

Bot technology is still relatively new and nascent, but it’s already becoming part of the strategy of companies both big and small. This is technology that has the ability to space every space and vertical, from retail to education to city planning. There’s already one space in particular where this technology is going to have a big impact: healthcare.

According to the Digital Health: Vendor Analysis, Emerging Technologies & Market Forecasts 2017-2022 report, released from Juniper Research on Wednesday, adoption of chatbots in healthcare will result in cost savings of $3.6 billion globally by 2022.

The cost savings this year are expected to be just $2.8 million, so that’s a 1,185 percent change in just five years, or 320 percent a year. 

The report also says that China will dominate chatbot deployment over the next five years, and that over half of the savings will be seen in the Far East Asian market. That’s partially because of “substantial challenges in developed healthcare systems, such as those in the US and UK. Systems at a mature stage of development are generally more conservative in introducing new technology than others, often resulting in inefficient care.”

Despite these potential issues, there are a number of healthcare companies in those regions that already deploying chatbots. Here are some of those that have already raised money:

doc.ai

• Description: “doc.ai is a conversational platform for on-demand, quantified biology.”
• Funding: Undisclosed seed round
• Investors: Legend Star, S2 Capital, F50, Comet Labs

“I think there are two paradigm shifts colliding: natural language with DNNs and precision medicine. Personalized medicine is changing: healthtech is more about what you can measure IN the body than ON the body, so personalised medicine and precision medicine are meeting just as Eric Topol predicted in his book ‘The Patient Will See You Now.’ He called it the panoramic view of health, all the omics (genomics, microbiome, phenome, pharmacogenome, metabolome etc.),” said Walter De Brouwer, Ph.D., CEO of doc.ai.

Avaamo

• Description: “Conversational bots that check-up, remind, and encourage patients to take their medications”
• Funding: $9.3 million
• Investors: Wipro Ventures, Streamlined Ventures, Eleven Two Capital, Rembrandt Venture Partners

“Health care providers in the US are actively using conversational AI technologies to reduce wait times on the front end for clients and drive a massive reduction in healthcare servicing and customer contact center costs. However ‘chatbots’ in the generic space do not fit the mold for a healthcare space where regulations, PII and data privacy reign supreme. In order to service the healthcare space, chatbot vendors need to buckle down and spend the time and effort to be HIPAA compliant, be able to answer tough questions on how to handle PII data and, most important, integrate to legacy healthcare systems to make sure chatbots can truly service the customer or clinicians side of the equation. Avaamo spends the time and investment in these area and we have found even the largest healthcare organizations open to innovative use of chatbot technologies if software vendors can negotiate the regulatory and Data privacy hump,” said Ram Menon, Founder and CEO of Avaamo Software.

Buoy Health

• Description: “Buoy is an online symptom and cure checker that uses an intelligent algorithm backed by medical data to diagnose patients”
• Funding: $9 million
• Investors: FundRX, F-Prime Capital Partners, Jack Connors

HealthJoy

• Description: “HealthJoy’s easy-to-use, chat-based app combines our team of board-certified doctors, veteran insurance experts, dedicated healthcare concierges and our proactive chatbot, JOY.”
• Funding: $6 million 
• Investors: Relativity, Social Capital, Chicago Ventures, OurHealth, Sidekick Fund, GoHealth

Sense.ly

• Description: “Sensely is an avatar-based, empathy-driven clinical platform that helps clinicians and patients better monitor and manage their health.”
• Funding: $11.8 million
• Investors: BioMed Ventures, BioVeda Capital, Chengwei Capital, Mayo Clinic, Fenox Venture Capital, StartXm Launchpad Digital Health, TA Ventures, Fenox Venture Capital, MSA, Eastlink Capital, Zillionize Angel, Alchemist Accelerator

Your.MD 

• Description: “Your.MD is an AI-based health information service platform and a marketplace of health service providers and products.”
• Funding: $17.3 million
• Investors: Smedvig Capital, Orkla Ventures, Smedvig Capital

“The combination of chatbots and AI can deliver enormous value in healthcare especially to end-users who are hungry for reliable health advice. Automating the ability to direct everyone in the world towards the most appropriate primary care option creates a new market (we call it Pre-Primary Care) that can transform the economics and social impact of healthcare worldwide,” Your.MD CEO Matteo Berlucchi told VatorNews.

 Babylon Health

• Description: “Babylon delivers high quality healthcare via your mobile phone”
• Funding: $85 million
• Investors: Vostok New Ventures, Kinnevik AB, NNC Holdings, Hoxton Ventures

MedWhat 

• Description: “Our virtual assistant answers medical and health questions for consumers and doctors instantly. The answers are provided by an intelligent super-computer that learns about medicine everyday and over time about your health record and medical questions history.”
• Funding: $590,000
• Investors: Microsoft Accelerator, NewGen Capital, MSA, StartX, StartCaps Ventures

Intellivisit

• Description: “Our smart system assesses your symptoms and then routes that information to a health care provider for review and treatment so you don’t actually have to see or talk to a doctor. Visits take less than 10 minutes and clinicians typically respond within an hour.”
• Funding: $2.5 million
• Investors: Undisclosed

Bright.md

• Description: “SmartExam, your virtual physician assistant, cuts the cost of visits by 80% — while providing high-quality care your patients will love.”
• Funding: $12.5 million
• Investors: Seven Peaks Ventures, B Capital Group, Portland Seed Fund, Oregon Angel Fund, Otter Rock Capital, StartX

HealthTap

• Description: “Dr. A.I.♥ incorporates both context and clinical expertise of doctors who have helped triage hundreds of millions of patients worldwide to right levels of doctor-recommended care. Just like a sympathetic human physician, Dr. A.I.♥ converses with the user to understand their current complaints or concerns and uses the user’s health profile to compute the probable causes of their symptoms.”
• Funding: $38.2 million
• Investors: Asset Management Ventures, Khosla Ventures, Mayfield Fund, Innovation Endeavors, The Perkins Fund, Mohr Davidow Ventures, Great Oaks Venture Capital

“We’re very excited about Chat Bots in general and smart simple interfaces that use a combination of real and artificial intelligence as well as emotional intelligence to give people better access to the health knowledge the need more immediately when they need it. Our chat bots are a real collaboration between humans and machines  – with more than 108,000 doctors we’ve created the the world largest knowledge base of doctors wisdom, which is now the foundation for our intelligent chat bots. We make this valuable doctors knowledge (created, curated and reviewed by doctors) available to people any time anywhere even if they cannot afford access to care,” said Ron Gutman, Founder & CEO of HealthTap.

Medxnote

• Description: “Medxnote’s unique blend of patient-centric messaging and ease of use helps you connect instantly with colleagues and provide faster and safer care to your patients.”
• Funding: Undisclosed amount of seed funding 
• Investors: Keiretsu Forum Northwest, NDRC

“Medxnote uses chatbots to connect doctors, nurses and healthcare staff to existing data silos such as EMR’s, Lab, Radiology and Business Intelligence. We believe that chatbots will speed up workflow and create game changing opportunities to improve efficiencies in healthcare,” said Niall Rafferty, CEO of Medxnote.

“We have built and sold a number of bots to hospitals. Our first bot, PharmaBot, reduces the time to record a prescribing error from 10 minutes to 30 seconds. We also developed a Bot to add medical images (wounds) to an EMR using the HL7 FHIR standard.  This process now takes 40 seconds on average compared to an hour or more to call medical photography.”

(Image source: betanews.com)