Chatbots for Change Playbook: A Practical Guide and Modular Toolkit on How to Create, Grow, and Sustain Your Chatbot for Disaster Medicine

Abstract

Objective

Chatbots, conversational agents providing access to information and services through interaction in everyday language, can make essential health information and services more accessible, available, and affordable. Kati Collective, together with Meta, worked to identify, outline, and develop some of the most critical tools and processes required to leverage chatbots for social good with a focus on health. The results of this work are compiled in a comprehensive, modular playbook. We propose to share our learnings and guide participants of our session to explore the existing uses, benefits, trade-offs, and challenges of using chatbots in disaster medicine.

Methods

There are significant challenges and barriers to scale, impact, and sustainability of their chatbot interventions. In response to these challenges, we used a participatory design process, landscape analysis, desk research and interviews with key stakeholders in the digital for development space to inform which content to include and in what format to best connect information to action.

Results

The Playbook contains key information, tools, exercises, and resources organized into four interrelated modules based on barriers and enablers.

Conclusions

This Playbook is particularly relevant in analysis, planning, strategizing and design phases of the chatbot project lifecycle and is highly extensible to disaster medicine.