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Healthcare agent service Overview

  • Article

What is the Microsoft healthcare agent service?

The Healthcare agent service is a cloud platform designed to empower developers within healthcare organizations to build and deploy compliant Generative AI healthcare copilots. These advanced tools help streamline processes, enhance patient experiences, and reduce operational costs. By using Generative AI, healthcare organizations can create intelligent solutions that serve as copilots for healthcare professionals, enabling them to effectively manage administrative workloads and improve service delivery.

Infused with Generative AI capabilities, the service features a healthcare-adapted orchestrator powered by Large Language Models (LLMs). This orchestrator can seamlessly integrate with customer-defined sources, OpenAI Plugins, and built-in Healthcare Intelligence sources. Organizations can ground generative answers in their own data, utilizing the Azure AI Search service for vectorized document searches or Bing Custom Search to query specific customer websites.

To ensure the reliability of generated responses, all outputs are checked through comprehensive Healthcare Safeguards. These safeguards include evidence detection, provenance tracking, and clinical code validation, ensuring that every AI-generated answer meets high standards of accuracy and reliability. Moreover, the service incorporates Chat Safeguards, which provide a clear disclaimer, evidence attribution, feedback mechanisms, and abuse monitoring, enhancing transparency and user trust.

The Healthcare agent service is ideally suited for developers in IT departments across various healthcare sectors, including providers, pharmaceutical companies, telemedicine providers, and health insurers. By creating a tailored "healthcare agent service instance," organizations can easily integrate these intelligent tools into existing systems, benefiting patients, nurses, doctors, and other stakeholders.

Building an instance allows you to:

  • Enhance patient and clinician experiences
  • Streamline processes and improve operational efficiency
  • Deliver superior services and outcomes
  • Reduce costs while maintaining high-quality care

Why use the Microsoft healthcare agent service?

The healthcare agent service simplifies the process of creating a healthcare copilot that address the compliance and regulatory requirements of the healthcare industry. It does so by providing:

  • An extensible management portal
  • Healthcare adapted safeguards
  • Built in healthcare sources that can be used with Generative AI
  • A built-in healthcare adapted orchestrator.
  • Healthcare-specific configuration options
  • Built in triage and symptom checker
  • Integration with Language Understanding Intelligent Service (LUIS) and other cognitive services.

Users interact with the service via text or voice in a self-service manner.

Use cases

Our customers are using the healthcare agent service to build healthcare copilots that address a wide range of healthcare-specific use cases. For example:

  • Pharmaceutical Companies are using AI to enhance clinician workflows. They're using AI-powered copilot experiences that provide clinicians with a conversational interface to navigate complex clinical documentation and access relevant information more naturally, ensuring clinicians have quick, intuitive access to medical knowledge. These solutions, compliant with security standards, are being tailored to meet regional market needs.

  • Healthcare organizations are implementing AI-based tools to optimize the utilization of healthcare content. By incorporating generative AI and conversational interfaces, these tools improve access to clinical knowledge for healthcare professionals, offering fast, accurate answers and troubleshooting recommendations. This technology is designed to reduce time spent searching for information and to enhance the efficiency of patient care.

  • Hospitals are integrating AI chat experiences to support clinical in their administrative workload. By using generative AI to answer questions about medical protocols and treatment information, these solutions reduce physician workload, ensure compliance with established practices, and enhance patient safety. The goal is to help medical professionals validate their decisions and execute protocols more effectively, ultimately leading to improved patient outcomes.

Configurable and extensible

The healthcare agent service provides flexibility of use to customers and customers:

  • Unique scenarios can be authored by customers for their healthcare agent service instances to extend the baseline scenarios and support their own flows.
  • The healthcare agent service instance's behavior can be configured to match customer use cases, processes, and scenarios through features like "Generative Answers on Customer Sources" and "Healthcare Intelligence."
  • The healthcare agent service instance can easily be connected to customers' information systems—such as systems that manage EMR, health information, and customer information—by utilizing Azure OpenAI Data Connections and Customer Source Data Connections.
  • The healthcare agent service instance can be easily integrated into other systems such as websites, chat channels, and digital personal assistants by using the Healthcare Orchestrator and scenario editor functionalities.

Security and privacy

The information handled by each instance of the healthcare agent service is privacy protected to HIPAA standards and secured to the highest standards for privacy and security by Microsoft. Built on top of the industry-leading Microsoft Azure technology, the Azure architecture powers the healthcare agent service's ability to scale with resilience, while maintaining the highest standards of privacy and security.

Easy to manage

Each healthcare agent service instance is easily managed and monitored by Microsoft partners via the healthcare agent service's management portal and management API. The management portal provides the ability to define the healthcare agent service instance's behavior in fine detail and monitor usage with built-in reports. The management API allows the partner to embed the healthcare agent service instance and securely exchange data and information.

Common scenarios

The healthcare agent service contains several built-in scenarios, a scenario editor and a healthcare adapted orchestrator Some common scenarios are:

  • Healthcare Plugin Integration: Customers can utilize the orchestrator to connect one or more healthcare plugins, such as the Healthcare Intelligence plugin, Generative Answers on Customer Sources plugin, or their own OpenAPI plugin. This allows the Generative AI model to determine which plugin to trigger, providing relevant answers based on end-user questions. With the orchestrator, customers can use the intelligence of Generative AI to find the most relevant plugin without needing to create a complex decision tree, all protected by the healthcare safeguards

  • Triage/symptom checker, powered by built-in medical protocols: The end user describes a symptom to the healthcare agent service instance and the bot helps the user to understand it and suggests how to react; for example, "I have a headache."

  • Generative Answers on Customer Sources: Customers can apply their own data (documents or websites) as inputs for personalized responses, enhancing user interaction by allowing the bot to provide tailored answers based on the customer’s specific information.

  • Healthcare Intelligence : The healthcare agent service instance can access a range of market-credible healthcare sources, offering users information based on established medical information, ensuring credible responses.

  • Scheduling appointments: Your healthcare agent service instance can be designed to allow your customers to schedule appointments easily and securely.

  • ...

Scalable Platform

The healthcare agent service is a cloud platform for developers, built on top of Microsoft Azure. This multitenant service provides unique healthcare agent service instances for Microsoft partners. The management portal gives each partner detailed control over configuration and extensibility. Authored scenarios are unique to the partner's healthcare agent service instance. The healthcare agent service instance can be embedded within the partner's digital experience.

Healthcare agent service use Bot Framework under the hood as a messaging and routing platform to deliver messages to and from the end user. The conversational intelligence and medical knowledge is provided by the healthcare agent service in two ways:

  1. Integrated third-party content - Microsoft partners with trusted content providers to deliver extensive and credible sources of medical knowledge.
  2. Custom conversational scenarios developed with our visual designer tool to accommodate his most complex and intricate needs. The author can call backend resources using secure and standard authorization and authentication methods.

Partners can integrate the open source Web-Chat client into their native or web applications.

Encryption

There are many controls in place to protect customer data transmitted and stored within the healthcare agent service. Encryption is an important component in a multi-layered defense-in-depth data protection strategy to safeguard customer data in the healthcare agent service and ensure the service meets your organization’s security and compliance needs.

Customer data stored by the healthcare agent service uses Azure storage and Azure Cosmos DBs under the hood. Healthcare agent service only use persistent storage services that are always encrypted at rest. Encryption keys are managed by Microsoft and rotated periodically to prevent exposure. More over the healthcare agent service only allows incoming and outgoing data connections over HTTPS ensuring the data in transit is also always encrypted.

Medical Device Disclaimer

Healthcare agent service (1) isn't intended or made available as a medical device, (2) isn't designed or intended to be used in the diagnosis, cure, mitigation, monitoring, treatment or prevention of a disease, condition or illness, and no license or right is granted by Microsoft to use the healthcare add-on or online services for such purposes, and (3) aren't designed or intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, treatment, or judgment and shouldn't be used to replace or as a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, treatment, or judgment. Customer shouldn't use healthcare agent service as a medical device. To the extent customer makes healthcare agent service available as a medical device, or puts it into service for such a use, customer is solely responsible for such use and acknowledges that it would be the legal manufacturer in respect of any such use. Customer is solely responsible for displaying and/or obtaining appropriate consents, warnings, disclaimers, and acknowledgments to end users of customer’s implementation of Microsoft healthcare agent service. Customer is solely responsible for any use of healthcare agent service to collate, store, transmit, process, or present any data or information from any third-party products (including medical devices).

Trust and Compliance

  • The healthcare agent service is HIPAA-ready and has also the following list of certification (alphabetic order):

    • 23 NYCRR 500
    • AFM and DNB (Netherlands)
    • AMF and ACPR (France)
    • APRA(Australia)
    • Argentina PDPA
    • CDSA
    • CFTC 1.31
    • CSA STAR Attestation
    • CSA STAR Certification
    • CSA STAR Self-Assessment
    • Canadian Privacy Laws
    • DPP(UK)
    • EU ENISA IAF
    • EU Model Clauses
    • European Banking Authority
    • FCA and PRA (UK)
    • FERPA (US)
    • FFIEC(US)
    • FINMA (Switzerland)
    • FSA (Denmark)
    • GDPR Compliant
    • GLBA (US)
    • Germany C5
    • GxP (FDA 21 CFR Part 11)
    • HITRUST
    • ISO 20000-1:2011
    • ISO 22301:2012
    • ISO 27001:2013
    • ISO 27017:2015
    • ISO 27018:2014
    • ISO 9001:2015
    • Japan My Number Act
    • KNF(Poland)
    • MAS and ABS (Singapore)
    • MPAA(US)
    • NBB and FSMA (Belgium)
    • NEN 7510:2011 (Netherlands)
    • NHS IG Toolkit (UK)
    • Netherlands BIR 2012
    • OSFI(Canada)
    • RBI and IRDAI (India)
    • SOC 1 Type 2
    • SOC 2 Type 2
    • SOC 3
    • SOX (US)
    • Spain DPA
    • TISAX
    • TruSight
    • WCAG 2.0

  • The healthcare agent service is built on top of Azure. Learn more about Azure compliance offerings.

  • Microsoft is committed to security, privacy, and compliance. Learn more at the Microsoft Trust Center.