In today's fast-paced world, convenience is paramount, especially when it comes to healthcare. Imagine being able to book a doctor's appointment simply by having a conversation with a chatbot. This is now a reality, thanks to the power of Dialogflow and FHIR (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources).
This blog post will explore how we can create a seamless doctor appointment booking experience using Dialogflow, a natural language understanding platform, and FHIR, a standard for exchanging healthcare information electronically.
Here I will showcase a simple AI chat bot to book a doctor appointment and show how integration works from behind and how AI simplifies the process on front for a seamless user experience.
I have used following to develop this demo
- Google Dialogflow ES
- Medplum FHIR server
- Mirth Connect (HTTP Listener) to do the transformations between FHIR JSON payloads and Dialogflow Response Payloads.
Here Dialogflow ES simplifies the ML training, intent detection based on user inputs and Medplum FHIR server simplifies the FHIR related API stuff.
Our chat bot is developed for an imaginary ABC Pain Clinic. This clinic has couple of orthopaedic providers. For this demo we assume the patient is already registered (we won't capture patient demographics etc.) and provider schedule/slots are already configured on our FHIR server.
In the screenshots, the text displayed with right alignment with background color of gray is the user input and text / rich text displayed with left alignment is the bot response.
Here are the workflow images to explain the Bot Intents and FHIR Integration
Here are actual Chatbot screenshots
In the first step the bot greets the user.
