Microsoft Healthcare Bot: Part 1 Introducing the Healthcare Bot

Did you know Microsoft has an AI-powered virtual health assistant that you can deploy in your health organization today? And, it’s free to up 3,000 messages per month!

Features

• Symptom Checker – based on data from trusted industry sources
• Hand-off to human – you can build your own business flows via a visual editing tool to provide just the right user experience
• Customizable – the Healthcare Bot is white-labeled and can be embedded and personalized
• Secure & Compliant – HIPPA, ISO 27001, 27018, and CSA Gold and GDPR
• Management Portal, Analytics and a Management API

Typical Uses

The built-in scenarios include the following:

• Triage/symptom checker, powered by built-in medical protocols: The end user describes a symptom to the health bot instance and the bot helps the user to understand it and suggests how to react; for example, “I have a headache.”
• General information about conditions, symptoms, causes, complications, and more: Loaded with medical content, the health bot instance can provide information about medical conditions, symptoms, causes, and complications; for example, “information about diabetes,” “what are the causes of malaria,” “tell me about the complications of arthritis.”
• Find doctor type: The health bot instance can recommend the appropriate type of doctor to treat an illness; for example, “What type of doctor treats diabetes?”

Examples of scenarios that can be added to the built-in functionality include:

• Health plan inquiries: Your health bot instance can be customized to access information about health plan details, such as pricing and benefits.
• Finding providers: Your health bot instance can allow customers to search for doctors by specialty, in-network status, and other specifications.
• Scheduling appointments: Your health bot instance can be designed to allow your customers to schedule appointments easily and securely.

Costs

The Healthcare Bot is installed and run from your Azure tenant. Costs depend on usage and based on the number of interactions the bot has with users – each message to and from the bot counts as a message. Costs are correct at December 2018 (source):

FREE – Up to 3,000 messages per month (up to 10 messages per second)
US$500.00/month – Up to 10,000 messages per month (up to 30 messages per second)
US$2,000.00/month – Up to 50,000 messages per month (up to 30 messages per second)
US$3,000.00/month – Up to 100,000 messages per month (up to 30 messages per second)
US$6,500.00/month – Up to 250,000 messages per month (up to 30 messages per second)

Show Me!

If you’re really keen to just see what it looks like, here’s an example. This is the Healthcare Bot configured with a default triage template. Normally this would hand-off to a human expert but I haven’t configured it to do so because I don’t have a team of medical experts on hand (shocker).

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Want to know more?

This is part 1 in a series of posts about the Microsoft Healthcare Bot. If you want to know more about how to install and configure the Healthcare Bot then look out for the next post, coming soon. You can subscribe to the newsletter and I’ll email you weekly with a summary of posts. Or there’s an RSS feed, YouTube channel, Podcast, Twitter… you get the idea.