Orbita Brings Mayo Clinic to Google Assistant and a Voice-Interactive Chatbot for the Web
Photo Credit: Orbita
Announced last week, Orbita and Mayo Clinic are teaming up to publish a Google Assistant action as well as a voice-interactive chatbot. The voice-interactive chatbot will be available online at Mayo Clinic’s website. The action and chatbot are meant to mimic Mayo Clinic’s existing Alexa skill, which won 2019 Best of Show Bronze Award, the 2019 Best Third-Party Tool Award, as well as the 2019 Alexa skill of the Year for Healthcare Award at the Alexa Conference last month.
Mayo Clinic’s First Aid Skill, Action, and Online ChatBot
Mayo Clinic published the Mayo First Aid Alexa skill in Fall 2017. It provides information on first-aid topics, including care instructions and quick answers to common maladies. Some example use cases include instructions for handling a baby’s fever, treating a burn, or performing CPR. Although, the skill is quick to distance itself from being used as a solution in an emergency, stating multiple times in a given answer that a user should call 911 if the situation is life-threatening.
The success of the third-party Alexa skill (developed by the hospital) eventually led to Amazon leveraging the same content as the default first-party (used directly by Alexa) content for answering many common medical questions according to comments by Dr. Sadhya Pruthi of the Mayo Clinic at the Alexa Conference in January 2019. She also commented that the volume of interactions were growing on the third-party Alexa skill, but were far higher for first-party questions.
The Mayo First Aid Google Assistant action offers the same features as the Alexa skill, and so does the online chatbot. Assistant users can say, “Hey Google, talk to Mayo First Aid” to get started. The voice-interactive chatbot is available at www.mayoclinic.org/voice/apps, and the Mayo Clinic symptoms or disease conditions pages on the web and mobile browsers that support voice input. Pruthi is a general internal medicine physician and associate medical director of Mayo Clinic Global Business Solutions and commented on the new applications:
Expanding the delivery of Mayo Clinic content through more voice channels helps give consumers ready access to trusted health information where and when they need it.
Orbita Provides HIPAA-Compliant Voice and Chatbot Applications
The platform used to launch Mayo Clinic’s applications, Orbita Voice, was initially launched last year by Boston-based Orbita. The Orbita Voice platform is unique because it focuses on providing solutions for healthcare providers, allowing them to build one voice app and then publish to multiple voice and conversational AI channels such as Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, and chatbots.
Orbita Voice includes features like analytics tools to measure user engagement, the ability to switch between user interface modes, and integrated search feature and templates. Most notably, however, is that Orbita Voice addresses the challenge of including Protected Health Information (PHI) by ensuring its applications are HIPAA compliant.
Orbita works with many traditional healthcare organizations such as Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Merck. Since its initial launch, the Orbita Voice platform has partnered with Deloitte, HCL Technologies, Macadamian, ERT, and Worrell. Mayo Clinic and Orbita’s decision to expand the Mayo First Aid skill to a Google Assistant action and a web chatbot are more examples of a growing list of new use cases for conversational interactions in healthcare.
Orbita Launches Orbita Voice to Streamline Voice App Development for Healthcare Providers
