@Andrey I saw a great demo of Gyant from Stefan Behrens, one of the team behind it last week at the SF Bot Demo Night.
He had some very interesting approaches to work within the legal framework and avoid needing to be HIPAA compliant. For example, they are careful not to offer medical advice and don’t link to health care providers (yet).
You could reach out to him or another member of their team. They seem to be doing a great job with Gyant.
Wow! Very nice. I know that the CDC is working on something similar for MS. There is a huge information gap out there between patients and “experts”, so the more of these types of bots, the better!
Has anyone here tried working with any health authorities? I’m thinking Ministries of Health, WHO, CDC…
I presented a proposal for my chatbot and had a meeting at the Ministry of Health yesterday and I’d love to hear if anyone has any experience about working together with the public sector in chatbot development. I have experience on mobile apps development in cooperation with them, but I find the discourse around chatbots very different!
@hola, I am personally not aware of any of such attempts, but I would definitely like to hear more about your progress. If you have any news you can share with the forum, please go ahead. It would be very interesting.
Hey alex. YOODOC seems pretty nice. Do you know any legal issues concerning healthcare chatbots in Germany?
No, only general issues such as data security, issues with personal healthcare records and the usual dumb stuff from the patient side.
Anyone else interested in exploring what Bots can do in healthcare that doesn’t involve PII.
What needs might this bot fill?
A few thoughts to kick this off -
Information sharing about a disease for a patient;
or perhaps stress management techniques
or CBT style tutorial for Health but not medical issue
Other ideas? What is this group’s take on the role for Bots in this facet of healthcare?
I think it might be helpful to structure healthbots into categories and their subcategories:
I am sure the healthcare speakers on BotCast 1.0(Podcast : #chatbots in healthcare) would give good points on the same along with their contact details.Hope it helps.
@hola , thats a crucial point, giving a personality to a bot…so that it emotionally connects with the concerned as digital avatar and helps to resolve a sensitive health issue requires some mastery over the art of conversation in the language of the target audience…
Andrey,
In developing countries (usually) the economics of healthcare is too many patients and too few doctors. Doctors see about 50 patients a day. In such a context, the information gathering phase of a diagnosis tends to collect fewer data points as time is a primary constraint. Doctors could lean on mental heuristics such as the availability bias, overconfidence etc to perform in such short turnaround times. We can use BOTs to collect additional data points that would have normally been missed, increasing the number of data points per consultation.
This was the idea behind our Chatbot. We faced challenges such as what personality she should have. If we gave her a very human name, patients obviously did not want to share information. If we gave her a very robotic name, patients were fine sharing information with her.
To answer your main question yes of course! Bots can be used for better healthcare. 
More power to them!
Akshay
@rakshay, I would like to hear more about your project, please share if you can.
I think personality behind a chatbot is a serious topic by itself, especially in regards to healthcare.
@Andrey This is our link on the playstore: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.docsapp.patients . Our app connects patients and doctors and uses ML to fill in any gaps. Obviously this is a work in progress.
We finally used the name ‘Doctor Assistant’ for the Chatbot. Ha ha no creativity here but it was driven by data and on field observations. Patients are fine with sharing information with anything prefixed with Doctor, nurse etc.
@rakshay, Thanks, will have a look. BTW, naming of a chatbot is not a simple issue! We are facing the same problem, as it should be user friendly, not too personal, etc. Keep me posted !
Ready Links for BotCast 1.0 health episodes by VachSoch
Hi Andrey, my company has a healthcare chatbot that works primarily via SMS text messages (www.ta-na-hora.com). We have nearly 150,000 users in Brazil. We have “guided” health programs that engage and monitor patients. We mainly focus on chronic diseases and pregnancy/maternity. Happy to discuss…
Hi there from spain, very interesting the issue. Actually healthcare and humanitarian go hand 
by .
If someone is interested on developing chatbots for vector born disease let me know it.
After a natural disaster this is important, sending photos and 
about for instance water resources and ecoli.