BENGALURU: Pharma major Lupin launched a chatbot named ‘ANYA’ designed to provide medically verified information for health-related queries. The disease awareness bot aims to answer patient queries related to ailments.
Launched at the 46th Annual Meeting of the Research Society for the Study of Diabetes, ANYA is chatbot trained to help patients with health-related concerns as part of their disease-management. As a start to digitize the patient journey in the overall healthcare space, Lupin is starting with ANYA to address queries related to diabetes.
“At Lupin, we continue to explore ways to integrate technology to support effective patient care. Chatbot as a technology has enormous potential to aid in medical assistance and to support in building awareness and breaking myths associated with various therapies. We are taking the first step to offer this AI-based chatbot for patients and health-givers and we believe this will be a game changer in the field of disease management in the future. This will also be a significant step in providing better access in rural markets as we adopt and launch digital healthcare platforms for better outreach.” said Rajeev Sibal, President – IRF, Lupin.
Recent research suggests that India is estimated to have had 72 million cases of diabetes in 2017 and the figure is expected to almost double to 134 million by 2025. Patients today are technologically advanced and are likely to be well informed on managing their health conditions. However, there is a lack of trusted and comprehensive sources on disease-management information for patients. The idea behind launching ANYA is to bridge this gap by providing medically verified information and acting as a preferred partner for doctors in resolving patient queries anytime, the company said in a release.
ANYA in Sanskrit means inexhaustible or limitless and this is the prime quality of the bot. As it evolves, ANYA will address all queries of patients and ensure their health conversations continue. ANYA is essentially a disease-management partner who aims to facilitate users in partnering with doctors in their journey to manage ailments. The main idea is to create a platform where patients can get easy and ready access to medically verified information, for their queries at any given time. ANYA will not replace Doctor’s diagnosis but rather act as a trusted information provider.
ANYA is currently hosted on Facebook Messenger and will connect with patients in three ways: Users can run a search for @askanyabot on Facebook Messenger and can start chatting, anyone visiting Lupin’s ShapingHealth Facebook page will automatically get a chat popup from ANYA, the bot will also have its own Facebook page and anyone visiting this page will automatically get a chat popup from ANYA.
