Microsoft recently introduced Azure Health Bot, an advancement of Microsoft Healthcare Bot that is coming to be an Azure service with included performances. Built for developing virtual health care aides, Azure Health Bot combines medical data sources with natural language capabilities.

With the migration of Microsoft Healthcare Bot to the Azure system, Microsoft plans to offer users and organizations an integrated service with further tooling, safety, as well as conformity alternatives.

The brand-new service targets designers in the medical care field who intend to tailor bots for scientific and functional use cases and construct brand-new conversational tools. Create online health assistants with health care capacities, support personal privacy and safety and security devices for conformity demands and also integrate with EMR information are some of the Azure Health Bot functions.

Among the layouts already readily available on the Azure service, flu vaccination, triage as well as handoff, psychological health screener as well as some layouts details to the COVID-19 feedback like injection qualification and COVID-19 triage. Health care carriers can migrate from Microsoft Healthcare Bot to Azure Health Bot without downtime. While Microsoft encourages existing clients to move to Azure Health Bot, the cloud company plans to support the existing service for at least one year.

Azure Health Bot is presently readily available in two regions, East US as well as West Europe, is privacy secured to HIPAA requirements and includes localization tools permitting to translate scenarios to several languages. While Azure offers a totally free monthly strategy of 3000 messages, limited at 10 messages per 2nd, and also 200 Medical Material Usage Device (MCU), the common plan begins at 501 USD every month as well as it boosts with use. An MCU is an extra cost element for using third-party medical material accredited by Microsoft.

The Health Bot Service is a cloud platform that encourages developers in Healthcare companies to develop as well as release their certified, AI-powered virtual health aides and health bots, that help them improve processes and reduce costs. It enables you to provide your users smart and personalized access to health-related information and interactions through a natural discussion experience.

The Health Bot Service is perfect for designers in IT divisions of healthcare companies such as service providers, pharmaceutical business, tele-medecine carriers, and also health insurance providers. Utilizing the service, health care companies can develop a "health bot circumstances” and also incorporate it with their systems that patients, nurses, physicians, and various other agents connect with. Developing an instance allows you to:

• Improve procedures
• Enhance services
• Improve outcomes
• Lowers price

The Health Bot Service consists of a built-in medical database, consisting of triage protocols. You can also expand a health bot instance to include your own circumstances and also integrate with other IT systems and also data sources.

A few of the Health Bot Service performances are only offered in chosen locations.

Why make use of the Microsoft Health Bot Service?

The Health Bot Service streamlines the procedure of producing a bot that attends to the compliance as well as governing demands of the healthcare sector. It does so by giving:

• An extensible management portal

• Healthcare-specific setup options

• Built in triage and symptom mosaic

• Integration with Language Understanding Intelligent Service (LUIS) and other cognitive services.

• Users interact with the conversation bot through text or voice in a self-service manner. The Health Bot Service implements natural language understanding (NLP) and artificial intelligence (AI) modern technologies to understand the users' intent and give exact details.

How to begin working with Azure Health Bot

In one of my previous articles, we talked about the workings of Azure Health Bot and the features of it. In this article, let’s dive straight away into a step by step demo to learn how to start working with Azure Health Bot.

When you are creating a bot, especially for a healthcare scenario, it can be a very tedious task for you as you need to take care of a lot of things. Factors such as localization of messages, edge cases and data privacy come into picture. Azure Health Bot can help you with this. Let’s see how to create a health bot.

→ Go to the Azure Portal and search for health bot. Click create when you find the service.

→ Create a new resource group for the health bot. Then give the health bot a name and choose the free tier pricing. Click Review + Create and then once the validation is passed, click create.

→ Once the health bot gets created, this is what your resource looks like. To start configuring it, you need to go to the management portal. Click on the management portal URL to start doing that.

→ This is what the health bot management portal looks like. Here you can create and manage as many bot scenarios as you like. You can also manage language models with natural language technology, integrate various data sources, various resources and also analyze Bot usage and configure your users.

→ You can configure bot medical protocols for vaious things.

→ For example for triage. Here you can add prompts for questions like asking the age range about pregnancy. 

→ Or even bots suggesting related symptoms during the triage.

This is one of the biggest advantages of the health bot where you get fully tailored work for multiple healthcare scenarios. 

→ You can also configure compliance and privacy along with setting terms and consent for your health bot.

→ You can also connect your bot to multiple channels like Microsoft Teams, Twilio, WhatsApp, Telegram, Alexa and so on.

→ The core feature of the Azure Health Bot is the scenarios. And you can get multiple templates for that as well.

→ For example, I want to try this Back to Work template.

→ This template will check if the employees of an organization are safe to enter the workplace again or not.

→ You get a ready-made template that you can edit that way you want. You get a comprehensive flowchart editor with a plethora of options. However, right now we are not going to get into editing that.

→ You can test the bot by clicking Run.

→ And you can see how the bot would work in an actual live environment.

That is it for this article. Go ahead and try the Azure Health Bot yourself and see how amazing the offering is.