What do doctors think about AI based symptom checks or healthbots?

Do doctors use or even care about health care chatbots, and if yes then what are their benefits, challenges, and risks to patients? 

Based on a recent research ( Palanica et al 2020 ) A wide variety of positive and negative perspectives were reported on the use of health care chatbots, including the importance to patients for managing their own health and the benefits on physical, psychological, and behavioral health outcomes. More consistent agreement occurred with regard to administrative benefits associated with chatbots; many doctors believed that chatbots would be most beneficial for scheduling doctor appointments , locating health clinics , or providing medication information (71%). Conversely, many doctors believed that chatbots cannot effectively care for all of the patients’ needs , cannot display human emotion , and cannot provide detailed diagnosis and treatment because of not knowing all of the personal factors associated with the patient . Many physicians also stated that health care chatbots could be a risk to patients if they self-diagnose too often  and do not accurately understand the diagnoses .

As Dr Palanica et al concluded doctors believed in both costs and benefits associated with chatbots, depending on the logistics and specific roles of the technology. Chatbots may have a beneficial role to play in health care to support, motivate, and coach patients as well as for streamlining organizational tasks; in essence, chatbots could become a surrogate for nonmedical caregivers. However, concerns remain on the inability of chatbots to comprehend the emotional state of humans as well as in areas where expert medical knowledge and intelligence is required.

Dr EHF's AIDO - Health Symptoms Checker proposes to remedy the negativity by being more accurate and easily understandable thereby removing away the medical jargon that limits a patients understanding.