Chatbots have emerged as valuable tools in the realm of digital health. While off-the-shelf AI models like Open’s AI’s ChatGPT, offer impressive capabilities, their usage should be approached with caution. This blog post delves into the potential dangers of using ChatGPT in digital health and highlight the advantages of adopting a custom, tailored chatbot solution built by MEMOTEXT.

1. Delivering incorrect and misleading information

ChatGPT’s ability to generate realistic yet entirely false responses raise significant legal and ethical concerns in digital health. However, these issues can be effectively mitigated with a custom approach. Chatbots built by MEMOTEXT are trained on a curated dataset with domain-specific intents and entitles relevant to the organization. This approach ensures full control and customization over the chatbot’s knowledgebase, actions, and responses. As a result, the chatbot becomes more adept at not only providing accurate and precise information but is tailored to each user’s needs and experiences.

2. Contextual understanding and personalization for users  

Digital health conversations like medication reminders, scheduling, and FAQ are often complex and involve multi-turn interactions. Custom chatbots can incorporate different dialogue management techniques to handle these types of interactions while ensuring the conversation is still natural and contextually relevant to the user. Furthermore, the overall design can be built to align with the operation’s brand such as customizing the chatbot’s tone, personality, visual appearance, and user interface.

3. Continuous learning and improvement

Digital health is a dynamic field with evolving medical knowledge and best practices. Custom chatbots can be improved iteratively based on user interactions and feedback. This continuous learning allows chatbots to improve their performance over time, ensuring they stay up to date with the latest information and deliver accurate responses to user inquires.

4. Implications with regulations and data privacy

In digital health, maintaining data privacy and compliance with regulations is crucial. ChatGPT is not built for handling personal health information or ensuring regulatory compliance. Therefore, there is limited control over how the chatbot processes, stores, or shares sensitive patient information during interactions. A custom chatbot allows organizations to maintain complete control over the data as well as effectively implementing the necessary safeguards to ensure all regulatory requirements are met.

ChatGPT is remarkable but it’s important to acknowledge it has plenty of limitations and we have only addressed a few in this blog. In our humble opinion, investing in a custom built chatbot offers a host of advantages in the digital health space as it can be tailored to specific needs of the operation while ensuring the user experience is still personalized and secure.

Sherry Luo  M.Sc.