A pharmacist partner in a general practice has developed an AI chatbot to help with patient queries on its website.

Pharmacist and partner Shilpa Patel developed the chatbot to help relieve winter pressures on her practice.

And she used a chatbot that selects information from specific pages on the practice website, including offering advice on self-care or help with general practice processes like ordering repeat prescriptions.

'We had to think about working cleverer'

Ms Patel told The Pharmacist that demand on the practice was 'crazy' during the winter.

'This morning, we haven't even opened yet, and we're getting loads of queries coming through.'

This prompted Ms Patel to think about 'different ways to work more cleverly and try and be able to deal with it'.

'Even though we work hard on our website, patients struggle to find what they need'

Ms Patel said the practice worked hard to keep its website up to date, clear and accessible, with advice on common conditions and queries about the practice answered.

But despite these efforts, 'people just don't seem to be able to find stuff', she told The Pharmacist.

'It's so much easier to just pick up the phone and call us. And we're really trying to get people to use the website rather than call us.

'We've been really drumming up the website and putting lot of self care tips on it.

'But although we share NHS self care tips, patients still think they need to see their doctor. Three or four of our doctors are very well respected, and they just want to hear it from them.

'So we've made some little videos to go on our website, which are the GP recording themselves saying, "if you've got a cough that's lasted three days, you don't need to come here". And then talking about Pharmacy First, and saying "only contact us if you've got these red flags".'

'So we've done a lot of work on the website itself to make sure it's got personalised solutions for people.

'Every week, one of our senior clinicians will write an article about something that we're getting a lot of queries about, and then we'll post the article on the website, and we make sure it's really prominent.

'Right now, it's coughs and colds. But we're still getting a good 40-50 queries on coughs and colds every day,' Ms Patel said.

Chatbot makes it 'quicker and easier' to find information on GP website

The chatbot does not replace a reception team – for instance, it does not ask for patient details like date of birth or have access to patient records.

But using a chatbot on the website does make it 'quicker and easier' for patients to find the information that the practice already shares online, Ms Patel said.

And she said it was 'a lot more specific' in responding to questions than the site's internal search.

'We've got to be really careful that it's all correct'

'Obviously, because it's a GP practice, we've got to be really careful that all the advice we give is correct,' Ms Patel told The Pharmacist.

She said that the practice did not want to use a chatbot that would 'just take random information from Google and everywhere'.

Instead, Ms Patel looked for a bot that would only take information from specific pages on the practice website, to make sure that any information it shared was up-to-date and from the practice team.

The chatbot, trained on specific pages on the practice website, was then tested by clinical staff, who could rate the answer it gave and train the chatbot to answer differently in the future.

'If it gives an answer, you can say, "I don't like that answer. Next time someone asks, do this",' she said.

The chatbot has also been trained to include links to other pages on the website, including the videos recorded by practice GPs.

The team has also added a warning sign to the interface to explain that it is not a replacement for urgent medical advice.

For the first few months of operating, all answers that the chatbot gives will be reviewed by a senior clinician, to ensure that the answers it gives are adequate.

'We're hoping that our time invested in this will save us time going forward,' Ms Patel told The Pharmacist.

Try out the chatbot on the WellBn practice website.