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The adoption of conversational AI for digital mental health intake and screening plays a pivotal role in alleviating the burden on clinical staff and enhancing the overall efficiency of mental health care processes. By automating routine aspects of intake and screening, conversational AI systems enable clinical staff to focus more on complex cases and direct patient care. This not only accelerates the entire assessment process but also ensures that human resources are allocated more strategically, maximizing their impact. The technology's ability to conduct initial screenings and gather relevant information in a conversational manner minimizes the administrative workload on clinical staff, allowing them to dedicate their expertise to critical decision-making and patient interactions.
Azure Health Bot introduces conversational AI to the healthcare landscape, empowering organizations to construct their own AI-driven virtual health assistants. In the field of mental health, Azure Health Bot not only streamlines the process of mental health intake but also enhances the utilization of healthcare professionals, ultimately bolstering the overall efficiency and accessibility of mental health services.
Today we announce a new category for the Azure Health Bot template gallery – Mental health. This category encompasses the existing template for PHQ-SADS, and a new template coming out this month- Primary Care PTSD Screen for DSM-5 (PC-PTSD-5). The PHQ–SADS template incorporates the depression scale from the Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ-9), a 7-item anxiety measure (GAD-7), and the somatic symptoms scale from the Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ-15) measures, plus panic measure from the original PHQ. The new PTSD template is a 5-item screen that was designed to identify individuals with probable PTSD in primary care settings.
Figure 1 - new template category
This new template has been created using the Primary Care PTSD Screen for DSM-5 (PC-PTSD-5) questionnaire as published by the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs - Primary Care PTSD Screen for DSM-5 (PC-PTSD-5) - PTSD: National Center for PTSD (va.gov). The template supports four languages: English, Russian, Hebrew and Arabic.
Figure 2 - Sample of PTSD screener in different languages
For more details on setting up Azure Health Bot visit Azure Health Bot | Microsoft Azure