How a WhatsApp Chatbot helped UKHealth address COVID-19 related concerns
Expertise Delivered
Industry
Our client,
Our client, UKHealth, is one of the largest healthcare service providers in the UK. UKHealth provides comprehensive healthcare services, including primary care, hospital, mental health, ambulance, and social care services to all UK citizens.
UKHealth works both at the national and local level to ensure high-quality healthcare for all UK citizens based on their medical needs, irrespective of their ability to pay for it. They make health and care services more efficient and accessible to the citizens of the UK.
Disclaimer - The name UKHealth is a placeholder as there is an NDA signed between both parties.
Abstract
As the novel coronavirus got declared a global pandemic, governments and organizations worldwide started working to curb the spread of the disease. As healthcare professionals and other frontline workers grappled with the virus, another crucial problem needed attention - the crisis of misinformation, rumors, and myths regarding the coronavirus.
The fight against misinformation became just as crucial as chaos ensued. To address this issue for our client, Maruti Techlabs designed a WhatsApp chatbot to provide authentic information at the users’ fingertips. The WhatsApp chatbot addressed the fight against misinformation and raised awareness by making reliable and verified information accessible to the country's general public.
Challenge
As coronavirus spread across the country, the UK citizens had a lot of questions about the spread of the virus and how they could fight against it. People usually turned to the internet, their family, friends, and neighbors to access this kind of information or reach doctors and hospitals for guidance. As not all information on the internet was verified, this led to the spread of rumors, scaremongering, and misinformation.
The healthcare workers were already stretched to their limits by the soaring numbers of COVID-19 patients. People reaching out to them for reliable answers about the virus further overburdened them, as they had to bear the brunt of the volume of queries. Most of the general high-volume queries were questions like ‘What are the symptoms of coronavirus?’ ‘What to do if I have developed mild symptoms?’ ‘Where can I get tested?’ etc., which have standard replies.
With limited human resources, dispersing the correct latest information to millions of people at the right time became challenging for the authorities. There was a lack of a unified source of information that people could depend on for relevant, verified, and real-time updates about the pandemic. Also, given the nature of the pandemic, delivering proper healthcare services to remote areas also became challenging.
Solution
Easy access to correct information was instrumental in saving lives. So, Maruti Techlabs designed a chatbot solution that would provide the latest and reliable information to people from the comfort of their homes.
Channel: One of the deciding factors in choosing the right channel for the chatbot was accessibility. Our chatbot experts decided to go ahead with WhatsApp as 66% of the internet users aged 16-64 years in the UK use WhatsApp.
Chatbot Platform: Once the channel was finalized, the challenge was to choose a bot platform that would support a massive volume of messages and deploy the chatbot on WhatsApp. We decided to go ahead with the no-code chatbot builder - WotNot. Using WotNot, the bot could be quickly built within a week, without writing a single line of code, and deployed on WhatsApp quickly.
We designed a conversational tree that branched into different use-cases addressed by the bot. Along with text, graphics and videos were also incorporated into the bot to explain things more effectively.
The conversation tree was designed to enable the citizens to find their respective queries in a minimum number of conversation steps. The chatbot could take inputs from the user wherever required. The WhatsApp bot was integrated with the knowledge base of verified information that our client, UKHealth, had provided.
We designed the WhatsApp chatbot, keeping in mind all the use-cases that could decrease the burden on the frontline healthcare workers, and at the same time, alleviate people’s fears and keep them updated with the correct information. The bot addressed the following use-cases:
- Precautionary Measures
This included information about how the coronavirus is transmitted, what the symptoms are; preventive steps that can be taken as a safeguard against the virus; travel advisories along official government helplines for further assistance. - Helpline Numbers
A list of official helpline numbers for covid-related inquiries and assistance was provided through the chatbot. This also included the numbers of various ambulance trusts and government-approved hospitals where people could call and get to know the status of availability of beds, ICUs, etc. - List of Nearby Testing Centers and Hospitals
A list of nearby testing centers and hospitals were provided through the chatbot. For this, the user needed to enter their postal code, and the chatbot would pull up a list of nearby testing centers and hospitals that the user can go to. - Official Guidelines by WHO
If a user wants to quickly access the official guidelines issued by the World Health Organization on coronavirus, they can do so through the chatbot itself. - Countering Myths about COVID-19
The WhatsApp chatbot provided verified and reliable information approved by scientists and healthcare officials. Moreover, chatbots produced consistent answers to counter misinformation and fear-mongering. The section ‘Busting Myths’ was created explicitly after collating untrue information about the coronavirus, which had spread like wildfire on social media platforms. The bot would provide verified scientific explanations and give citations to the source/research study to counter these myths. - Help in Remote Screening of Patients
As the government-mandated mass quarantine to control the spread of the virus, it had become challenging to deliver healthcare services to remote areas. In such a scenario, the WhatsApp chatbot helped in the remote screening of patients by asking relevant questions. An interactive quiz was designed to gauge the patient’s condition. The quiz contained various questions from the severity of the symptoms, age, body temperature, and travel history. The bot could issue further precautionary steps to be taken and connect the patient to relevant telemedicine experts based on the answers. - Providing Mental Health Assistance
Continuous news consumption about the rising cases of COVID-19 and maintaining social distancing had a detrimental effect on people’s mental health. The chatbot would ask some basic-level questions to gauge the user's mental state and provide contact numbers of professional psychologists and therapists to whom the user could talk to and alleviate stress.
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Technology Stack
Result
queries answered
users
avg time spent engaging with the bot
increase in no. of apt calls to helpline numbers
Our Development Process
We follow Agile, Lean, & DevOps best practices to create a superior prototype that brings your users’ ideas to fruition through collaboration & rapid execution. Our top priority is quick reaction time & accessibility.
We really want to be your extended team, so apart from the regular meetings, you can be sure that each of our team members is one phone call, email, or message away.
