Checking an app
The Coronavirus Self-Checker, created by Microsoft and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, can be used at home to determine whether you should contact a health care provider. (Microsoft Photo)

To cope with the global coronavirus outbreak, Microsoft is bringing out the bots — and that’s just the beginning.

Software developers are also working on software tools to trace the people who came into contact with COVID-19 patients before they knew they were sick, to work through the molecular modeling for new vaccines and therapies, and to simulate how different responses change the course of an outbreak.

The pandemic calls for all the tools that tech companies can muster, said Desney Tan, who is managing director of Microsoft Healthcare as well as chief technologist at IntuitiveX, a Seattle-based life sciences consulting firm.

“It is unlikely COVID-19 will be the one that takes humanity down,” Tan said today during a COVID-19 Technology Innovation Summit presented by IntuitiveX and the U.S. China Innovation Alliance. “We’re pretty confident this isn’t the one, but this is a pretty decent shot across the bow.”

Desney Tan
Desney Tan is managing director of Microsoft Healthcare and chief technologist at IntuitiveX. (Microsoft Photo)

Microsoft worked with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to adapt its existing Healthcare Bot service as a self-screening tool for people wondering whether they need treatment for COVID-19.

The Coronavirus Self-Checker, which made its debut on the CDC website a couple of weeks ago, asks users questions about their location and their symptoms, and advises them whether to call a medical provider.

Microsoft’s bot, which is named Clara, has been far more successful that Tay, the AI chatbot gone bad that caused the company so much trouble back in 2016.

“This is now deployed in hundreds of provider systems,” Tan said. “The CDC continues to see very heavy traffic. We’re tracking millions of interactions each day with this chatbot.”

Microsoft is also tracking information about the outbreak.

On one side, there’s the COVID-19 Open Research Dataset, a project launched in cooperation with Seattle’s Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence and other partners to make high-quality information about coronavirus more accessible to researchers. On the flip side, Tan said Microsoft is monitoring data flows to flag “the fake and misleading information that’s popping up all over the place.”

Behind the scenes, Microsoft is working with public health experts to develop predictive models for the spread of the virus, software tools for allocating medical resources, and methods to trace the contacts of COVID-19 patients efficiently while protecting personal data privacy.

“This turns out to be a really tricky one, with much debate within Microsoft, within various levels of government and within our communities,” Tan said.

Coronavirus Live Updates: The latest COVID-19 developments in Seattle and the world of tech

Another one of Microsoft’s key tasks will be to help lay the digital groundwork for diagnostic testing as well as for the development of new vaccines and therapeutics. Microsoft is already part of a consortium that is making high-performance computing resources more accessible to COVID-19 researchers.

“Simulations that would have taken months to run … we’ve now got it down to where we can run these simulations in days, sometimes hours, which I think will form the new normal,” Tan said.

The lessons learned are likely reverberate long after the current outbreak has faded.

“It’s probably a little early to project what happens when this is all over, but I do believe that a crisis on this scale reorders society and business in some pretty dramatic ways,” Tan said.

He said AI, robotic augmentation, telework and telemedicine are sure to loom larger on the post-pandemic scene. “This will be coupled, I would guess, with a broader set of landscape changes as well,” Tan said. “Government medical reserves and preparedness, domestic manufacturing and supply lines, perhaps drastic reconsideration of regulatory barriers.”

Tan marveled at how quickly the world has changed.

“It seems pretty clear now, at least as it regards to health care and pandemic preparedness, that no one can go it alone,” he said. “It’s amazing to look across the landscape and see folks in all industries and all walks of life really start to collaborate and partner globally. … Individuals and enterprises, I would guess, that can reason through these changes and adapt quickly will end up benefiting greatly and leading us into the future.”

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