Microsoft Health Bot Service
Empowers healthcare organizations to build compliant, AI-powered chat bots
“The use of AI allows us to leverage technology to meet consumers where they are; online, mobile, chat, text and to help them navigate the complexity of healthcare.”
About Microsoft Health Bot Service
The Microsoft Health Bot Service is a SaaS offering that empowers healthcare organizations to build and deploy compliant, AI-powered health agents, allowing them to offer their users intelligent, personalized, conversational access to health information.
The Health Bot Service supports building personalized health-related scenarios. Customers typically implement scenarios around:
- Symptom checkers, based on built-in medical protocols or their own protocols
- Information about conditions, symptoms, type of doctors
- Health plan services, benefits, eligibility and costs information
- Service providers lookup and scheduling
- Clinical trials information
The Health Bot Service enables enterprise developers in healthcare organizations (including providers, insurers and pharma) to build their own personal health assistants that empower patients, nurses, and doctors with self-serve capabilities. These bots can help improve processes, services, and outcomes, while helping to reduce costs.
Journey
When the Health Bot project was created during the 2016 Hackathon, it caught on immediately. While the potential was there, it wasn’t an easy road.
The team has overcome multiple challenges with this product including evolving language understanding models, addressing scale needs, sandboxing partner flows and providing multiple integration routes.
This last year, the team has taken the service into a private preview as a new AI-powered project from Microsoft’s Healthcare NExT initiative, which is designed to enable healthcare partners to easily create intelligent and compliant healthcare virtual assistants and chatbots. These bots are powered by cognitive services and enriched with authoritative medical content, allowing our partners to empower their customers with self-service access to health information, with the goal of improving outcomes and reducing costs. If you are using a bot built by one of our partners through this project, you can interact in a personal way, typing or talking in natural language and receiving information to help answer your health-related questions.
The private preview will allow the team to learn about the industry needs and evolve the product. Looking forward, they are working to onboard the service to the Azure marketplace and enable self-serve onboarding for our customers. In parallel, the HealthBot team is working to enhance the products’ language understanding and add more built-in capabilities to address scenarios that many customers have in common.
Team
Back row: Adam Walker, Arie Schwartzman, Shahar Yekutiel, Oren Barnea, Amir Taub, Gil Shacham, Omri Haviv
Front row: Eldar Cohen, Hadas Bitran, Shahar Admati, Efrat Kliger, Danny Karmon
Press
Microsoft announces private preview, partnerships for AI-powered health bot project
Microsoft Enterprise
Microsoft Takes Another Crack at Health Care, This Time With Cloud, AI and Chatbots
Bloomberg
Microsoft’s Strategy for Finding What’s Next in Healthcare A.I.
Xconomy
