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The global healthcare virtual assistant market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 24.7% from 2018 to reach $1.76 billion by 2025, according to market research published by Meticulous Research.
The emergence of Healthcare Virtual Assistant Market
Virtual assistants are AI and rule-based systems that interact with humans to perform various tasks. These assistants use cognitive technologies such as machine learning, natural language processing, and neural networks to enable interactive communications with the end-users. Virtual assistant technology in the healthcare industry can assist in transforming various health processes and improve healthcare delivery, worldwide. It helps in improving healthcare quality, patient care, and patient outcome at lower costs.
Key Market Drivers
Currently, there is an increasing demand for various types of virtual assistant solutions, globally, which is primarily attributed to the increasing focus on patient-centric care delivery, growing adoption of IoT, growing internet connectivity and smartphone devices, and increasing focus on patient engagement. In addition, the shortage of healthcare professionals, increasing burden of lifestyle diseases, and need of reducing healthcare costs are also expected to contribute to the growth of the healthcare virtual assistants market. However, lack of awareness among healthcare professionals, data privacy and security awareness may dampen the growth of this market during the forecast period of 2018 to 2025.
Benefits of Healthcare Virtual Assistants
Increasing need and demand of the healthcare professionals to spend more time with patients and better communication through incorporation of technological tools in healthcare practices are driving the focus on various patient engagement technologies. Virtual assistants can easily automate the task of patient engagement by automating patient interactions through the use of chatbots or smart speakers. The chatbots product segment is estimated to command the largest share of the overall healthcare chatbots market in 2019, mainly due to increasing advancements in natural language processing & machine learning models.
Healthcare Virtual Assistants Market by Product
The global healthcare virtual assistants’ market is primarily segmented by product
1. chatbots and smart speakers)
2. Technology (speech recognition)
3.  Text-to-speech, and text based)
4.   End user (providers, payers, and other end users)
Largest Market Share Segment: Speech Recognition-based Virtual Assistants
In the healthcare industry, speech recognition-based virtual assistants form one of the most promising technologies currently being explored by various technology providers for a variety of applications. Currently, applications of speech recognition-based virtual assistants for the healthcare industry is focused on aiding the administrative tasks for physicians by automating the operational processes, such as medical transcription, scheduling, chart search, and medical information search. This technology commanded the largest share of the overall healthcare virtual assistants market; however, error in the transcription, high cost, challenges of adoption among healthcare professionals, and variation in the quality and security issues are the major factors that may hamper the growth to a certain extent.
North America Dominates Healthcare Virtual Assistant Market
Geographically, North America has been at the forefront of the technological advancements in the healthcare industry and has evidenced a sequential change in adoption of various patient engagement technologies, including healthcare virtual assistants over the past few years. Majority of the growth in this market is driven by high technology adoption among healthcare providers in the region, high awareness among healthcare payers and providers for new technologies available in the market, increasing need to reduce healthcare cost and rising demand of the technologically advanced solutions to maximize efficiency of healthcare systems.
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