COVID-19 Return To Work solution with Microsoft Healthcare Bot, Azure platform and Teams

NOTE: Hi! This is my personal repository with contributions from Han Zhang & Greg Beaumont working on COVID-19 Back To Work Solution at Microsoft. This is not production-grade code and has not been stress-tested. All instructions, code and templates are subject to review, modification and extensive testing from the individual user

As countries worldwide seek to re-open their economies by relaxing “stay-at-home” orders, many employers are considering how to prepare their facilities and employees for the return to the physical workplace. To do this in a more safe manner, it is critical to monitor employees for common COVID-19 symptoms and provide a simple way for affected employees to physically return to the workplace once they are cleared to do so. Microsoft teams have developed a special solution template to enable employers worldwide to easily create deploy Microsoft technologies to scale and automate those critical steps for return to the workplace. We call it the “Back to Work” solution Accelerator Kit and below you will find detailed instructions on how to use this to empower a safer return to the workplace for your organization.

The COVID-19 Back-to-Work solution template is an ACCELERATOR KIT to help you quickly build and deploy a custom solution for your organization. Organizations across all industries, such as healthcare, education, retail, manufacturing, and financial services can use this highly customizable template. Microsoft’s platform provides the necessary capabilities by combining our Healthcare Bot service with the Azure platform and Microsoft Teams as shown below:

Step 1: Choose your preferred data store

1. Azure API for FHIR

The Healthcare bot Back To Work template comes with built-in support for FHIR persistence. This is our primary recommendation for healthcare organizations to provide data interoperability from different health systems. Step-by-step instruction guide on using the Healthcare Bot template with Azure API for FHIR are available here

2. Azure SQL Database

Follow instructions in Step 2 if you want to persist data in Azure SQL Database For step-by-step instructions, follow the Azure SQL persistence specific README.md Below you can find high level steps and upcoming custom options:

Step 2: Choose your preferred UI channel

Choose a UI channel to run this solution. Two options available using this GitHub are - Web Chat and Microsoft Teams (Instructions for using MS Teams are being refined)

Web Chat Channel

Method 1: Use ARM templates to deploy required Azure services

Configure Healthcare Bot host using web chat channel
Use ARM template to deploy required Azure SQL database and Azure Functions
Create reports and dashboards with Power BI for real-time visualization

Method 2: Manual steps to help you understand all underlying details

Configure Healthcare Bot host using web chat channel
Create the backend Azure SQL Database
Configure Data Connection calls to Azure function . This Azure function handles write to and read from backend database
Configure Azure function to Send automated notifications for taking assessment
Create reports and dashboards with Power BI for real-time visualization

List of Microsoft services required:

Healthcare Bot
Azure App Service
Azure SQL Database
Azure function apps
Power BI Pro or Premium

Microsoft Teams Channel - This is a work in progress

For using Microsoft Teams as a channel, follow steps 1-3 from Web Chat channel config. Then follow these steps:

Integrate with Microsoft Teams
In the left pane of Healthcare bot admin portal, navigate to Integration > Channels. Click the activate toggle of the Microsoft Teams and Click Save to create the channel
Click on View and copy the Bot Id from Step 1 above. Search for this ID in your Teams client top Search bar and look for People tab to find a bot with configured bot name and type begin covid19_backToWork_sql
Register App and provide API permissions to allow Teams to interact with Health bot using RegisterApp-APIpermissions
Create reports and dashboards with Power BI for real-time visualization