November 2022 Issue Close-Up
Telehealth and Medicine Today (THMT) is the international open access peer reviewed journal bringing you high quality,
breakthrough, and frontline research and reviews that bridge knowledge gaps from research lab to real world market impact in telehealth and frontier technologies healthcare.
Click the 100% OPEN ACCESS article link below to stay up to date. Learn what practicing professionals and researchers have recently reported in the field,
A Digital Intervention to Reduce Disparities in Well-Child and Immunization Completion in Community Health
Nivedita Mohanty
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.30953/thmt.v7.375
Well-child visits and immunizations among children in the U.S. declined at the pandemic’s onset and vulnerable populations have been disproportionately affected. This pilot projects tested
an innovative mechanism to use chatbots to engage caregivers in evidence-based preventive care for children.
Artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled chatbotswere used to personalize messages and facilitate appointment scheduling over a five-month period. Chatbots introduced a novel way to connect vulnerable populations to care and challenged traditional convention of provider-patient
engagement.
The pilot study was conducted at a Community Health Center in Chicago, Illinois that serves roughly 10,500 children, with targeted outreach to 200 English and Spanish-speaking families with children 0-17 years of age for proactive outreach using chatbots.
Learn how chatbots increased well-child
visits and immunizations by 27% in the intervention group. Survey results and patient interviews indicated a high level of patient satisfaction using the chatbot, favorable perceptions and identified future use cases.
Learn how to optimize vaccination uptake and realize a societal public health achievement in decreasing the spread of communicable diseases.
