Communicating a global pandemic with WhatsApp and HealthBot in Croatia

The Covid-19 pandemic has caused a series of hasty changes and spurred the digital transformation of various services. The pandemic itself has the greatest impact on the health system, which faces several challenges. Health-focused chatbots (“healthbots”) and apps have more and more important role in collecting quality information about health from credible sources and by doing so, they contribute to quality healthcare. Chatbots, which were used exclusively in connection with the pandemic, were used in more than thirty countries in the world. But there is limited evidence on how such healthbots are perceived in public. This paper is a contribution to this field of research – it deals with the analysis of media presentation of the healthbot Andrija, which was developed and used in Croatia during the Covid- 19 pandemic. Using the research matrix from the paper “Chatbot use cases in the Covid-19 public health response” by P. Amiri and E. Karahanna published in Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, we analysed the health chatbot used in Croatia, with the emphasis on its design features and also media presentation of the project, which was crucial in popularization of the healthbot. Because of the need for a quick response to crisis, this chatbot was developed very quickly. As such, design is relatively simple, using system-directed initiatives and it is focused on a narrow set of simple tasks. In conclusion, the ease of use, and fast information dissemination provide complementary functionality which can potentially reduce the pressure on health workers in situations of increased need for access to primary health care. The use of health chatbots is confronting with many obstacles both at the level of the social system (consumers’ acceptability) as well as the technical system (design and usability). More sophisticated chatbot designs and opportunities for synergies with machine learning should be explored in the future in combination with more developed and sophisticated methods of media presentation.