Hospitals can now easily build their own virtual health assistants using Microsoft service

Back in 2017, Microsoft first announced the new AI-powered research project under Healthcare NExT initiative that enables healthcare providers to easily create intelligent and compliant healthcare virtual assistants and chatbots. Last year, Microsoft announced the preview of Healthcare Bot service on Azure Marketplace that enabled healthcare organizations to build and deploy, AI-powered virtual health assistants and chatbots. Microsoft today announced the general availability of the service. Virtual health assistants built using this service can be used for enhancing processes, self-service support, and cost reduction efforts.

• Built-in healthcare intelligence: The Healthcare Bot comes with built-in healthcare AI services, including a symptom checker and medical content from known industry resources, and language understanding models that are tuned to understand medical and clinical terminology.
• Customizable and extensible: You will receive your own white-labeled bot instance that can be embedded within your app or website. You can customize the built-in functionality and extend to introduce your own business flows through simple and intuitive visual editing tools.
• Security and Compliance: The service aligns to industry and globally recognized security and compliance standards such as ISO 27001, 27018, and CSA Gold and GDPR and provides tools that help our partners create HIPAA compliant solutions.

Quest Diagnostics in Cary, NC recently built a bot using the Microsoft Healthcare Bot service. This bot helps Quest Diagnostics‘ patients in finding testing locations, schedule appointments and get answers to non-medical questions such as whether to fast before a blood test or when to expect results. If users are not satisfied with the answer, the bot will transfer the user to a real health specialist for more advanced support.

Source: Microsoft