Lupin unveils India’s first chatbot for patients

Lupin has announced the launch of a chatbot named “ANYA” specially designed to provide medically verified information for health-related queries. ANYA is the first bot of its kind to be launched in India for disease awareness. It’s a made in India for India initiative aimed at answering patient’s queries related to ailments.

Launched at the 46th Annual Meeting of the Research Society for the Study of Diabetes, ANYA is an intelligent and patient-friendly 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.

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 like 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.

Rajeev Sibal, President – IRF, Lupin, says, “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.”

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.

Once thought to be an ailment with genetic predisposition, today diabetes is one of the leading lifestyle ailments in India, and is the first therapy area for which ANYA will be making available relevant information to its users.

ANYA is currently hosted on Facebook Messenger and will connect with patients in three ways:

· Users can run 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

· ANYA will also have its own Facebook page and anyone visiting this page will automatically get a chat popup from ANYA