Keep your Amazon Echo close to your bed for when you really need it. When you wake up feeling groggy and sick, the last thing you want to do is get out of bed and go see the doctor. Fortunately, if you've got your Amazon Echo ($70 at Amazon) at your side (or even the Alexa app), you can get diagnosed right from your comfy zone. While Alexa isn't a doctor and can't physically examine you, it can use the web and its smarts to help give you a diagnosis based on the condition you've described. Not to mention, you can avoid that dreaded copay and doctor bill.

The rate at which medical questions are asked online significantly exceeds the capacity of qualified people to answer them, leaving many questions unanswered or inadequately answered. Many of these questions are not unique, and reliable identification of similar questions would enable more efficient and effective question answering schema. While many research efforts have focused on the problem of general question similarity, these approaches do not generalize well to the medical domain, where medical expertise is often required to determine semantic similarity. In this paper, we show how a semi-supervised approach of pre-training a neural network on medical question-answer pairs is a particularly useful intermediate task for the ultimate goal of determining medical question similarity. While other pre-training tasks yield an accuracy below 78.7% on this task, our model achieves an accuracy of 82.6% with the same number of training examples, an accuracy of 80.0% with a much smaller training set, and an accuracy of 84.5% when the full corpus of medical question-answer data is used.

Montreal-based VirtualMED is partnering with HealthTap, an American healthtech company, to offer AI-powered virtual care to Canadians. VirtualMED's licensed physicians will now be available through an app, which provides personalized diagnoses and treatment plans through artificial intelligence. "HealthTap is excited to partner with VirtualMED to overcome the issues that affect Canadian healthcare." HealthTap provides access to primary healthcare through an AI-powered platform, which personalizes users' care and enables an instant connection between the members and doctors. VirtualMED said its members can also receive affordable virtual care while travelling in the US.

HealthTap, a Palo Alto, California-based company delivering connected health apps, announced a slew of platform updates today at VentureBeat's Transform 2018 conference that "augmented the patient experience" with artificial intelligence. It also revealed that it has served more than seven billion answers to health patients' queries -- nearly one for each human on earth. "It's amazing to consider that what might once have required 7 billion doctor visits can now be achieved digitally thanks to the power of augmented intelligence," Geoff Rutledge, chief medical officer at HealthTap, said. "We're drawing on the shared expertise of … doctors to deliver meaningful insights, but we also understand how important it is to connect directly with a doctor when the time is right. By rewiring the health care experience to be as useful and convenient as your favorite consumer apps, everybody wins." It learns about patients' symptoms over time and directs them to next steps of care -- anything from text-based answers culled from historical data to doctor-authored care guides, treatment reminders, and online videoconference consultations.

From all the fields that Artificial Intelligence will disrupt in coming years, HealthCare may see the highest paradigm shift. Artificial Intelligence's influence in HealthCare industry will be wide and immense. Image recognition algorithms already help detect diseases at an astounding rate. This shift should be welcome. Artificial Intelligence at first glance, will bring remarkable well-being to humans.

Amazon Alexa users with health issues can now have Alexa call Healthtap's Doctor AI to help figure out what's wrong and direct them to act accordingly. Doctor AI initially supported Apple iOS and Android devices and its first voice application, Talk to Docs launched for those same devices in 2013. But support for Alexa, the smart voice-activated software that debuted with the Amazon Echo connected speaker, brings Dr. AI to home users who might not be adept at using screens. "We'd been doing text and video before, then expanded into voice and that's exciting in healthcare because we serve many populations that are older, disabled, or frail," said Ron Gutman, founder and chief executive of Palo Alto, California-based digital health company which claims 107,000 doctors in its network. Records and data from those doctors make up Dr. AI's health care data trove.

HealthTap, the "world's first global health practice," is introducing an artificial intelligence engine to triage cases automatically. Doctor A.I., is a personal AI-powered physician that provides patient with doctor recommended insights. More than a billion people search the web for health information each year, with approximately 10 billion symptom related searches on Google alone. Whilst many resources provide useful information, web search results can only provide content semantically related to symptoms. Dr. A.I. aims to provide more accurate analysis by using what is known as'medical triage', that doctors use to assess what care to provide based on a patient's personal health situation.

Digital health platform provider HealthTap is betting its new Dr. A.I. mobile app will eliminate the risk of a patient incorrectly self-diagnosing their condition through online searches by providing accurate, online triage that directs patients to the right level of care. The app, which uses artificial intelligence to perform online triage based on a patient's symptoms, can help reduce the risk of a patient incorrectly self-diagnosing her symptoms, which happens frequently with Internet searches, HealthTap says. There are 10 billion symptom-related health searches per year on Google, says HealthTap CEO Ron Gutman. "Search engines can't consult a patient's health records or ask follow-up questions to put a person's symptoms into proper context," Gutman says. "Effective triage requires detailed knowledge of a patient's personal health situation, making context critical to providing optimal care."

From all the fields that Artificial Intelligence will disrupt in coming years, HealthCare may see the highest paradigm shift. Artificial Intelligence's influence in HealthCare industry will be wide and immense. Image recognition algorithms already help detect diseases at an astounding rate. This shift should be welcome. Artificial Intelligence at first glance, will bring remarkable well-being to humans.

"My vision is to give people immediate gratification in healthcare," says Ron Gutman the high-energy and affable founder and CEO of HealthTap, a mobile health platform that connects customers with trusted health information and doctors in near real-time at any given time of day or day of the week from a network of over 50,000 U.S.-licensed doctors. "We call people'patients' but they are anything but patient when they are in pain or desperate to talk to a doctor during the day or in the middle of the night," continues Gutman. In creating a customer–focused health information service, Gutman sees the opportunity to build the world's first global mobile health brand. There is nothing small about Ron's ambitions or business opportunity. HealthTap looks to disrupt the model and bring high-quality information directly to the customer, instantly through their mobile devices for free or very modest costs.