“Tell me, is peeing sitting down really better for the prostate?” Baden Cantonal Hospital (AG) has recently been answering its patients’ medical questions using artificial intelligence (AI). And this, thanks to a health chatbox, launched on its website. A first in Switzerland.
This bot is not like those we are used to using, with more or less success, with company customer services. “KS_Bot” was custom-developed and trained for a year to respond in a clear and concise manner, but without encroaching on the role of healthcare professionals: it does not offer diagnoses, treatments or prescriptions.
KS_Bot will draw its knowledge from the thousands of web pages from the hospital website, which have been developed over the years with the help of doctors and nurses. “Tired searches from page to page are now a thing of the past,” says Adrian Schmitter, Managing Director of the Baden Cantonal Hospital.
At the HUG in Geneva, the idea is being observed very closely since it is planned that a similar bot will be launched during the winter. Tested since the summer of 2024, it will replace the robot offered since 2021, which is limited to answering questions related to covid. “We will find a lot of general medicine data there, on a large number of pathologies,” explains Franck Schneider, from the communications department. In order to prevent the machine from starting to diagnose itself, “cautionary mechanisms” are provided, he explains. For example, users will have to choose for themselves, firstly, the pathology for which they want information.
Not even afraid at the doctors
The progressive integration of AI in the field of care does not frighten the umbrella organization of Swiss H+ Hospitals, even if it is “of course necessary to take into account important questions linked to security and data protection”, notes its director Anne-Geneviève Bütikofer. The Federation of Swiss Doctors believes that AI “must make it possible to develop and improve in a judicious and adequate manner all the processes that mark the patient’s journey”. But according to her, it is unlikely that one day she will fully assume the roles of the doctor.
