Microsoft built a chat bot to match patients to clinical trials — from fortune.com by Dina Bass
Excerpt:
A chat bot that began as a hackathon project at Microsoft’s lab in Israel makes it easier for sick patients to find clinical trials that could provide otherwise unavailable medicines and therapies.
The Clinical Trials Bot lets patients and doctors search for studies related to a disease and then answer a succession of text questions. The bot then suggests links to trials that best match the patients’ needs. Drugmakers can also use it to find test subjects.
Half of all clinical trials for new drugs and therapies never reach the number of patients needed to start, and many others are delayed for the same reason, Bitran said. Meanwhile patients, sometimes desperately sick, find it hard to comb through the roughly 50,000 trials worldwide and their arcane and lengthy criteria—typically 20 to 30 factors. Even doctors struggle to search quickly on behalf of patients, Bitran said.