Public health organizations, healthcare providers, hospitals and others on the frontline of COVID-19 response have had to act quickly to support the sudden spike in inquiries from patients and constituents looking to get answers to a common set of requests such as up-to-date outbreak information, assess symptoms and risk factors for people worried about infection, and suggest a next course of action. Many of these organizations have expressed concerns with being able to support the volumes of inquiries, and consequently have been using the Microsoft Healthcare Bot to help provide critical information to their patients.
Microsoft’s Healthcare Bot is a scalable Azure-based SaaS solution that empowers Microsoft customers and partners to build and deploy compliant, AI-powered health agents, allowing them to offer their users intelligent, personalized access to health-related information and interactions through a natural conversation experience. It is one solution that uses AI to help the CDC and other frontline organizations to provide help to those who need it.
The Healthcare Bot can easily be customized to suit an organizations scenarios and protocols. To assist in the rapid deployment of COVID-19 specific bots Microsoft has made available a set of COVID-19 templates that customers can use and modify:
- COVID-19 Risk Assessment
- COVID-19 Frequently Asked Questions
- COVID-19 Worldwide metrics
- COVID-19 Clinical Triage
Deployment of COVID-19 Healthcare Bot in your environment
To help you deploy your COVID-19 healthcare bot, Microsoft has created a Reference architecture, deployment template and supporting How to videos and guides.
Reference Architecture
The reference architecture provides guidance on a High Availability deployment of the Healthcare Bot and associated Azure services across 2 regions.
Note: The architecture can also be deployed in a single region, if you choose to deploy in a single region it is recommended that you model and estimate your peak traffic expectations to ensure that a single region deployment is appropriate for your situation.
Deployment Template
To assist in deploying the reference architecture we have developed an ARM template for you to use. The step by step instruction to deploy and configure the reference architecture can be found here:
Deploy Microsoft Health Bot Reference Architecture
To then set up your Health Bot – follow the instruction in the Quick Start: Setting Up Your COVID-19 Health Bot
If you are ready to deploy and would like assistance:
- Contact your account team for a quick demo and/ or alignment of resources.
- Speak to one of our Health Bot Partners who can help you deploy and customize your own COVID-19 Health Bot.
Additional Resources
- Quick Start: Setting Up Your COVID-19 Health Bot
- Video Series – Microsoft Healthcare Bot Service for COVID-19: Getting Started
- Demo Bot (Not COVID-19 Specific). Click on: Try a demo of an example
- Healthcare Bot Documentation
- Blog: Delivering Information and eliminating bottlenecks with CDC’s COVID-19 assessment bot
Thanks for reading and let us know how else we can help!
Mark Perry, Microsoft Director - Customer Success
Ganesh Radhakrishnan, Microsoft Cloud Solution Architect