Azure Health Bot adds eight new regions with additional language support, including India to support pandemic response

Azure Health Bot empowers developers in healthcare organizations to build and deploy artificial intelligence (AI)-powered, compliant, conversational healthcare experiences at scale. It combines built-in medical intelligence with natural language capabilities to understand clinical terminology and can be easily customized to support clinical and operational use cases. The service enables healthcare organizations to comply with industry requirements, including HIPAA and HITRUST. For example, Trinity Health, one of the largest healthcare systems in the U.S., caring for more than 30 million people across 22 states, has effectively utilized Azure Health Bot to make it easier for patients to quickly connect to the care they need.

Today, we are bringing Azure Health Bot to eight new regions:

◉ West U.S. 2

◉ East U.S. 2

◉ South Central U.S.

◉ UK South

◉ North Europe

◉ Southeast Asia

◉ Australia East

◉ India Central

In response to the surge of COVID-19 cases in India, we are also adding India Central to support the pandemic response efforts in the region. In addition to East U.S. and West Europe, these new regions bring the general availability of Azure Health Bot to a total of 10 regions across three continents.

Our customers have been using Azure Health Bot to drive engagement in a variety of use cases. For example, Sharecare leverages Health Bot’s global availability to fulfill its mission-critical services, including Sharecare VERIFIED™, a health security platform that empowers facilities such as hotels, stadiums, and schools to mitigate the operational and health safety challenges resulting from acute public health events such as  COVID-19. Debuted in November 2020 through a strategic partnership with Forbes Travel Guide, Sharecare VERIFIED™ is currently being used by nearly 700 hotels and resorts in over 70 countries. 

“Sharecare VERIFIED™ emerged from the pandemic as an opportunity for venues such as hotels and schools to restore confidence among employees and guests and teachers, parents, and students alike”. In addition to enabling us to scale much more quickly and efficiently than we would have otherwise, leveraging the Azure Health Cloud and Health Bot in Sharecare's health security platform enabled us to offer our new solution at a lower cost to organizations at a time when they needed it most.”—Erik Feingold, Chief Innovation Officer at Sharecare

New symptom checker languages

To make Azure Health Bot widely available and useful for more organizations across the globe, not only are we adding new deployment regions, but we are also adding 16 additional languages to the built-in symptom checker. A unique feature of the Azure Health Bot, the symptom checker contains healthcare information about conditions, doctors, and medications. It can be further tailored to your needs by extending the experience for a custom scenario. Once non-English speaking users or patients input their medical complaint, the Health Bot leverages neural machine translation from Azure Cognitive Services to extract the starting symptoms. It then provides the triage content in the user or patient’s native language.

AI is driving transformation across payors and providers alike, and we are humbled by the role our technology is playing in making that happen. Customers such as the Center for Disease Control and Helsinki University Hospital are using Health Bot to put more information in the hands of their users, enable self-service, and reduce costs. We continue to look forward to how organizations use these new technologies to deliver impact.

Source: microsoft.com