A pharmacist partner in a general practice has developed an AI chatbot to help with patient queries on the practice website.
Pharmacist and partner Shilpa Patel developed the chatbot because demand on the practice was ‘crazy’ in winter. This prompted her to think about ‘different ways to work more cleverly and try and be able to deal with it’.
The chatbot selects information from specific pages on the practice website, including advice on self-care or help with general practice processes like ordering repeat prescriptions.
Ms Patel said the practice worked hard to keep its website up to date, clear and accessible, with advice on common conditions and answering queries about the practice. But despite these efforts, patients seemed unable to find what they needed.
‘It’s so much easier to just pick up the phone and call us. And we’re really trying to get people to use the website rather than call us,’ said Ms Patel.
And, although the practice had put a lot of self-care tips on the website, patients still thought they needed to see a doctor, she said.
‘Three or four of our doctors are very well respected, and they just want to hear it from them. So we’ve made some little videos to go on our website, which are the GP recording themselves saying, “If you’ve got a cough that’s lasted three days, you don’t need to come here”.
‘And then talking about Pharmacy First and saying “only contact us if you’ve got these red flags”,’ explained Ms Patel.
She added that the practice had also done a lot of work on the website itself to make sure it’s got personalised solutions for people.
‘Every week, one of our senior clinicians will write an article about something that we’re getting a lot of queries about, and then we’ll post the article on the website, and we make sure it’s really prominent.
‘Right now, it’s coughs and colds. But we’re still getting a good 40-50 queries on coughs and colds every day,’ she said.
The chatbot selects information from specific pages on the practice website, including advice on self-care or help with general practice processes like ordering repeat prescriptions.
The chatbot does not replace a reception team – for instance, it does not ask for patient details like date of birth or have access to patient records.
But using a chatbot on the website does make it ‘quicker and easier’ for patients to find the information that the practice already shares online, Ms Patel said.
And she said it was much more specific in responding to questions than the site’s internal search.
Ms Patel said the practice did not want to use a chatbot that would ‘just take random information from Google and everywhere’.
Instead, she looked for a bot that would only take information from specific pages on the practice website to ensure that any information it shared was up-to-date and from the practice team.
The chatbot, trained on specific pages on the practice website, was then tested by clinical staff, who could rate the answer it gave and train the chatbot to answer differently in the future.
‘If it gives an answer, you can say, “I don’t like that answer. Next time someone asks, do this”,’ explained Ms Patel.
The chatbot has also been trained to include links to other pages on the website, including the videos recorded by practice GPs.
The team has added a warning sign to the interface to explain that it is not a replacement for urgent medical advice.
For the first few months of operating, all answers the chatbot gives will be reviewed by a senior clinician, to ensure that the answers it gives are adequate.
‘We’re hoping that our time invested in this will save us time going forward,’ said Ms Patel.
A version of this story first appeared on our sister title The Pharmacist.
