HealthTap’s Dr. A.I. Meets Amazon’s Alexa — Say “Hello” to Your New “Always-On Physician”
HealthTap, the world’s first Global Health Practice, providing 24/7 immediate access to top doctors via video, text, and voice, today made available a voice-activated Doctor A.I. on Amazon’s Alexa.
Powered by artificial intelligence and easily operated by a natural voice-activated interface, Doctor A.I. gives Alexa users personalized, doctor-recommended insights, helping guide them to find the right care at the right time at the right cost. Just as a sympathetic physician, Dr. A.I. is also trained in the art of emotional intelligence (EQ) and bedside manners to listen and ask relevant questions in user-friendly language using a natural voice via an intuitive conversational interface.
“Making healthcare intuitive, user-friendly, and accessible to all is at the core of HealthTap’s mission,” said Sean Mehra, HealthTap’s Head of Products. “By creating hands-free smart voice-activated interfaces, we’re now making immediate access to high-quality healthcare also available to the elderly, the disabled, and the frail. Over the years, HealthTap made available its network of more than 100,000 top doctors and their knowledge with a few simple taps from any mobile device or personal computer. Starting today, even people who cannot easily use their hands or eyes to operate smartphones, tablets and PCs can now get the same level of life-saving access with a simple spoken word!”
Using a friendly voice, Dr. A.I. and Alexa immediately route patients towards effective solutions that doctors previously suggested in similar situations. These custom-tailored doctor-created pathways range from relevant doctor insights and contextual content, to immediate connectivity to live virtual consults with doctors, and from scheduling an in-person office visit with the right specialist, to directing the patient to more urgent care based on the patient’s symptoms, characteristics, and contextual data.
“Having served more than 5.5 billion doctor answers over the past six years, HealthTap has developed, together with thousands of dedicated doctors, the world’s most advanced health ontology,” said Sastry Nanduri, HealthTap’s CTO and Co-founder. “This comprehensive proprietary ontology helps us understand the ways people and doctors speak, teach, and learn about health and well-being, as well as map the intricate relationships among all medical concepts. With this trove of data, our team of top Silicon Valley developers created highly advanced natural language processing (NLP) algorithms that help us translate a patient’s concerns expressed in natural language into structured contextualized data. Using advanced artificial intelligence and deep learning, we process this data into the right explanations and the best courses of action based patients’ symptoms, their medical histories, and a variety of contextually relevant data.”
The basic version of Dr. A.I.and Alexa is accessible for consumers through Amazon Echo starting today. More advanced premium services, powered by HealthTap’s Health Operating System (HOPES™), are available for enterprise customers (clinics, hospital systems, insurance companies, large self-insured employers, and governments) via the HealthTap Cloud™.
“The connection between Dr. A.I. and Alexa was digital love at first sight,” said Ron Gutman, HealthTap Founder and CEO. “Voice-activated interfaces create the kind of human-computer connection that’s needed to unlock the huge potential that exists in augmenting human decision-making in healthcare with artificial intelligence and cognitive computing. With this revolutionary release of Dr. A.I. and Alexa, our top engineers, designers, and data scientists are making a huge leap forward in bringing better care at a lower cost to billions of people worldwide.”
