Creating a COVID-19 bot using Microsoft Healthcare Bot service

April 16, 2020

Creating a COVID-19 bot using Microsoft Healthcare Bot service

The Microsoft Healthcare Bot service is a cloud service that empowers healthcare organizations to build and deploy, AI-powered virtual health assistants and chatbots .Microsoft has a COVI9-19 Response template which can check COV1D-19 symptoms based on CDC recommendations.

This article will walk through the steps of setting up a COVID-19 bot based on Microsoft Healthcare Bot.

1. Open the Azure portal at https://portal.azure.com and select Azure Marketplace.

2. In Azure Marketplace, search for "Microsoft Healthcare bot" as shown below:

Azure marketplace

3. Select the software plan as "W1-Free" and click on "Create".

4. Enter the name of bot, select the subscription and click on "Subcribe" button.

5. You will receive an email with a link to the Health Bot Service portal. Click on the link and navigate to the portal.

6. Click on "Template Catalog" in left navigation menu and it will display the template scenarios.

7. Chose the "COVID-19 Assessment" Response Template and click on "Import Template".

8. Once you import the template you can see the Covid-19 Assessment scenario in the designer as shown below.

9. We need to create the Web chat channel and obtain the web chat secrets by going to "Integration/Secrets" in portal navigation and get the APP_SECRET and WEBCHAT_SECRET.

10. To deploy the web chat to Azure navigate to Github page https://github.com/Microsoft/HealthBotContainerSample/

Click on "Deploy to Azure".

10. The above step will create an app service and app service plan. Navigate to Azure app service "Healthbotcontainersample"

Open VSCode and connect to Azure and navigate to your App Service "Healthbotcontainersample" and locate "index.js" and change trigger to "covid19_assessment" as shown below.