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Therapist Chatbots: Top Use Cases, Challenges & Best Practices

Therapist Chatbots: Top Use Cases, Challenges & Best PracticesTherapist Chatbots: Top Use Cases, Challenges & Best Practices

According to WHO, one in four people globally experience mental health issues like anxiety, depression, and other disorders. Report also pointed out that the treatment gap is widening, particularly in developing countries.1 For instance, there are only three psychiatrists per million people in India

Despite the fact that there are far more psychiatrists per capita in developed nations, the demand for mental health care cannot be met. For example, in the USA in 2022, over 60% of adults2 and 70% of children3 with mental health issues did not receive any treatment.

Therapist chatbots can close the mental health treatment gap and make our society happy. As a result, we want to inform the executives of global institutions, governmental agencies, and healthcare organizations about the therapist chatbots’:

  • Use cases and some real life examples
  • Challenges developers need to be aware of.
  • Best practices that help organizations to overcome challenges. 

What are therapist chatbots?

Therapist chatbots, also known as therapy chatbots, are conversational AI-powered tools created to assist psychologists, psychotherapists, and other healthcare providers in enhancing the well-being of patients who are dealing with psychiatric disorders, trauma, or stress.

Therapy chatbots are created with machine learning features like NLU and intent recognition to help healthcare professionals. Thanks to machine learning, AI-driven chatbots can understand questions or inputs from users and respond appropriately (see Figure 2).

Figure 2: Stanford University’s therapy chatbot (Woebot). interacts with a user:

Image shows an example of conventional therapy session between a chatbot and a patient.
Figure 1. Source4

Depending on their training, chatbots can respond to speech (voice bots) or text data. Also it is possible to deploy therapy chatbots on different platforms such as:

How can chatbots combat the mental health treatment gap?

By automating some of the routine operations that were previously handled by psychotherapists, psychologists, and other healthcare professionals, therapy chatbots can augment their work. For instance, chatbots can onboard patients and help them to fill out questionnaires with them. Then, therapy bots analyze the answers to categorize patients.

Therapy chatbots can also assist with: 

  • Symptom evaluation 
  • Determining severe clinical patients (e-triage) and even be used to 
  • Estimating the likelihood of hospitalization. 

Therapist chatbots can also enhance the quality of personalized health services. Chatbots examine various data sources thanks to API integrations such as IoT devices (like smart watches or phones) to produce useful insights that can significantly advance medical care. Such knowledge helps psychiatrists and therapists provide highly customized and preventive care.

Together, these factors make healthcare staff’s work easier and more effective. Thus, therapy bots are an effective tool to combat mental health treatment gaps. 

Top 5 use cases of therapy chatbots

1. Patient onboarding

Patient onboarding is a crucial but tedious and time-consuming task. To onboard patients, healthcare professionals need to gather their data. Chatbots can now automate the onboarding process. The users can be asked the necessary questions, and chatbots can gather and verify the users’ responses and related documents.

2. Diagnosis of the illness

AI-powered therapy chatbots can evaluate patient symptoms and, in many situations, diagnose them. In such a workflow, chatbots handle mild cases who do not need hospitalization. Disorders like mild issues with stress management are one example of this. On the other hand, chatbots can direct patients with severe psychiatric disorders who need clinical help to the professionals.

Since just 25% of patients in the USA have significant mental health problems, chatbot diagnosis may help the majority of people deal with their problems without seeing doctors. Thus, the overwhelming problem of doctor shortage can be reduced.5 Doctors can use this time to concentrate on handling patients with more severe symptoms.

3. Psychotherapy

People with mental health issues like obsessive-compulsive disorder benefit from psychotherapy.6 In conventional psychotherapy, a patient and human therapist have discussions about personal traumas, routines, and behaviors of the patient. The aim of this practice is to understand what causes dysfunctional behavior.

Nowadays, AI chatbots with excellent NLP and NLU capabilities can replace human therapists. Thus, patients can access digital therapy services from any location and at any time.

Another benefit of digital therapy is the ability to remain anonymous while exposing personal problems. On the therapist’s couch, having unpleasant conversations with doctors can be challenging for a person with mental health problems.

Today, psychotherapy with chatbots is not a common practice. Chatbot failures are the main reason for it. However, thanks to advancements in conversational AI and NLP technologies, AIMultiple anticipates that in the near future, treatments like cognitive behavioral therapy will be delivered more regularly by chatbots.

4. Track patients’ progress

As part of treatment, patients might need to complete some best practices such as: 

  • Having healthy eating habits
  • Doing exercise 
  • And completing meditation exercises.

Conversations can be used to monitor a patient’s development via mobile apps or WhatsApp chatbots. Chatbots can notify users of the best practices a patient should follow. As a result, people have more tools in their recovery process from their mental problems.

5. Life coaching services

Despite having a mental condition, depression and overwhelming feelings might be linked to a variety of situations such as the way of life of an individual. According to positive psychology, increasing happiness and self-esteem can be a preventative measure against developing serious mental illnesses.7 And self-esteem or improved quality of life is related with:

  • Social bonding.

Chatbots can work as life coaches and provide best practices to people that improve their happiness. For instance, chatbots can:

  • Encourage people to socialize: Many people are interested in some hobbies. Chatbots can look for activities connected to their passions that will help individuals socialize.
  • Advocate healthy eating: Chatbots can lead people to restaurants that serve healthy cuisine or provide receipts for them to cook healthy.
  • Motivate fitness: Chatbots can guide people to make sports and monitor their progress.
  • Teach meditation exercises: Yoga and other comparable practices are now widely studied by those looking to enrich their lives. Yoga instruction can be provided by a chatbot.

Note: Although chatbots have other benefits and generic applications, in this article we only focused on mental health care, and stress management related use cases.

What are the challenges of therapist chatbots?

If the challenges with therapy bots are not taken into account, a digital transformation project to cure more patients could be disastrous. Therefore, we want to highlight the top 4 challenges (see Figure 6). 

Figure 6: Top 4 challenges of therapy chatbots.

Image shows the top 4 challenges of therapy bots.

1. False diagnosis

Therapy chatbots may incorrectly diagnose mental disorders or be unable to detect an illness due to a variety of factors, such as insufficiency of AI capabilities. Being unable to diagnose an illness poses a particular risk to medical professionals since, as we already mentioned, chatbots are designed to distinguish between serious and mild patients to make doctors’ jobs easier.

However, if an AI algorithm categorizes a person as a healthy or mild patient, he or she may never be examined by a human doctor. 

2. False treatment

Another risk associated with therapy bots is false treatment. Chatbots may endanger certain users’ health if they provide general treatment methods. Think about a chatbot that offers a diet. Users of such a chatbot can receive advice to eat as little salt as possible. However, if the patient has low blood pressure, this general health advice may worsen his condition. 

3. Chatbot failure

When a chatbot fails it might cost significantly and chatbots can fail due to lots of reasons:

  • Their capabilities: AI capabilities of chatbots might not allow them to understand and solve some queries.
  • Complex nature of language: The act of communicating is a complex process. Additionally, people misuse words, utilize slang, make typos, and speak languages in which they are not native speakers or fluent.
  • Complex nature of psychology: Understanding what motivation lies behind a patient’s behavior is challenging for experienced psychologists. Interpreting patients’ history (which can sometimes be false memory) is a challenging task for chatbots. 
  • Trolling: Sometimes people purposely miss introducing themselves to have fun with chatbots. Such actions can lead to a chatbot failing. 

4. Data leakage 

Data leaks can have both short- and long-term negative effects on an organization’s finances and reputation (see Figure 7). Data leaks involving patient information are especially hazardous because medical institutions are required to follow certain data protocols (HIPAA, GDPR etc.). Chatbots used in therapy record a lot of private patient data. All of this data is vulnerable to hacking without adequate security measures in place.

Figure 7: Cost of data breaches.

Image shows the possible damage of data breaches.

Top 5 therapist chatbot best practices

You can use the following top 5 best practices to deploy therapy chatbots more successfully and reduce any potential negative consequences of the top 4 therapy bots challenge (see Figure 8). 

Figure 8: Top 5 therapist bot best practices

Image shows best therapist chatbots practices organizations should imply.
  1. Consider deploying it on WhatsApp: Since millions of people combat mental health problems, institutions need to deploy chatbots on the platform that people use the most. As of today, 2 billion people are using WhatsApp. Thus, deploying chatbots on WhatsApp can be an effective strategy.
  2. Design multiple choice chatbots to reduce chatbot failure: You can prevent misunderstanding based on slang, typos, or word misuse if users have multiple options to select.
  3. Reduce the probability of false diagnosis and treatment via advanced NLU and NLP: The understanding and analyzing abilities of chatbots are positively correlated with their NLU and NLP capabilities. Thus, advancements in both capabilities lessen the possibility of chatbot failure. (You can read our Top 7 Conversational AI Platforms of 2023: Detailed Guide article to find chatbot vendors that provide advanced NLU and NLP capabilities.)
  4. Partner with a chatbot company that has experience in healthcare: Your chatbot developer can create an excellent mortgage or hospitality chatbots. However, specific features are needed for healthcare chatbots such as experience in this domain. Therefore, we recommend institutions to assess healthcare industry experience of chatbot companies by assessing their references and case studies.
  5. Partner with a chatbot company that complies with HIPAA or GDPR: To ensure patients’ data security, you should check whether or not your chatbot provider complies with HIPAA or GDPR.

If you have further questions regarding therapist chatbots you can reach us:

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This article was drafted by former AIMultiple industry analyst Görkem Gençer.

Access Cem's 2 decades of B2B tech experience as a tech consultant, enterprise leader, startup entrepreneur & industry analyst. Leverage insights informing top Fortune 500 every month.
Cem Dilmegani
Principal Analyst
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Cem Dilmegani
Principal Analyst

Cem has been the principal analyst at AIMultiple since 2017. AIMultiple informs hundreds of thousands of businesses (as per similarWeb) including 60% of Fortune 500 every month.

Cem's work has been cited by leading global publications including Business Insider, Forbes, Washington Post, global firms like Deloitte, HPE, NGOs like World Economic Forum and supranational organizations like European Commission. You can see more reputable companies and media that referenced AIMultiple.

Throughout his career, Cem served as a tech consultant, tech buyer and tech entrepreneur. He advised businesses on their enterprise software, automation, cloud, AI / ML and other technology related decisions at McKinsey & Company and Altman Solon for more than a decade. He also published a McKinsey report on digitalization.

He led technology strategy and procurement of a telco while reporting to the CEO. He has also led commercial growth of deep tech company Hypatos that reached a 7 digit annual recurring revenue and a 9 digit valuation from 0 within 2 years. Cem's work in Hypatos was covered by leading technology publications like TechCrunch and Business Insider.

Cem regularly speaks at international technology conferences. He graduated from Bogazici University as a computer engineer and holds an MBA from Columbia Business School.

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