Remote Healthcare with Microsoft Azure Health Bot
The world is seeing an unprecedented turn towards making everything work remote. While millions of workers around the world are working remote, abiding by stay-at-home orders from their local governments, health care institutions have been overflowing.
Remote Healthcare driven by intelligent virtual assistants can be a solace for health care institutions for handling all non-emergency non-urgent questions, while reserving the in-person visits for everything else that may need a more personal attention.
Microsoft recently announced the Health Bot which is an Azure-hosted solution enabling healthcare providers to build and deploy HIPAA compliant, AI-powered virtual assistants, allowing the providers to offer their patients with personalized access to medical and health information and other actions like managing appointments, health plan inquiries, finding providers etc through a natural conversational experience.
The Health Bot has several out of the box features including a symptom checker, medical content from trusted sources and language understanding capabilities.
Healthcare providers can easily extend the bot’s capabilities to provide their own personalized support to their clients. The bot can be customized in the following ways.
- Proactive scenarios
These are scenarios when the bot has to initiate a conversation with a specific user over a pre-configured channel. In this scenario the bot is proactive and sends the first message in the conversation, thereby triggering a sequence of conversations with the user. For instance, reminding the user that they are due for an upcoming follow up and continuing the sequence of conversations to answering specific questions and scheduling an appointment.
2. Programmatic Client Side Scenario Invocation
This is useful when you are looking to invoke a scenario even before the user has asked their question. For instance, you may want to show a numbered menu-style message inside the chat channel as soon as the user opens the chat application.
Additionally, you can also programmatically import or export a scenario from Scenario editor.
Scenario Template Catalog
To make the process of scenario creation simple for health care providers, the Azure Health Bot comes with a set of predefined templates which can be used and extended as needed to quickly create and roll-out out healthcare scenarios including a COVID-19 FAQs template and more coming soon.
Technical Architecture
Azure Heath Bot is powered by LUIS (Language Understanding Intelligent Service) which is part of Microsoft Azure Cognitive Services suite. The Health Bot uses Microsoft Bot Framework as a messaging and routing platform to deliver messages to and from the end user. The conversational intelligence is provided by the Health Bot service in the following ways.
- Integrated with partner content — Microsoft has partnered with trusted content providers to provide credible sources of medical information
- Custom scenarios developed with the visual designer tool — this can accommodate many complex requirements. The bot creator can call enterprise resources using secure authorization and authentication methods.
The Azure Health Bot will be an important step to assist healthcare providers at times like these.
