IBM Watson Health, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA.
Vanderbilt University Medical Center, Nashville, Tennessee, USA.
J Am Med Inform Assoc. 2021 Mar 18;28(4):850-855. doi: 10.1093/jamia/ocaa316.
The rapidly evolving science about the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic created unprecedented health information needs and dramatic changes in policies globally. We describe a platform, Watson Assistant (WA), which has been used to develop conversational agents to deliver COVID-19 related information. We characterized the diverse use cases and implementations during the early pandemic and measured adoption through a number of users, messages sent, and conversational turns (ie, pairs of interactions between users and agents). Thirty-seven institutions in 9 countries deployed COVID-19 conversational agents with WA between March 30 and August 10, 2020, including 24 governmental agencies, 7 employers, 5 provider organizations, and 1 health plan. Over 6.8 million messages were delivered through the platform. The mean number of conversational turns per session ranged between 1.9 and 3.5. Our experience demonstrates that conversational technologies can be rapidly deployed for pandemic response and are adopted globally by a wide range of users.
关于 2019 年冠状病毒病（COVID-19）大流行的快速发展的科学知识引发了前所未有的健康信息需求，并在全球范围内对政策产生了巨大影响。我们描述了一个名为 Watson Assistant（WA）的平台，该平台已被用于开发会话代理来提供与 COVID-19 相关的信息。我们描述了在大流行早期的各种用例和实施情况，并通过许多用户、发送的消息和会话轮次（即用户和代理之间的交互对）来衡量采用情况。2020 年 3 月 30 日至 8 月 10 日期间，有 9 个国家的 37 个机构使用 WA 部署了 COVID-19 会话代理，其中包括 24 个政府机构、7 个雇主、5 个提供商组织和 1 个健康计划。通过该平台共发送了超过 680 万条消息。每次会话的平均对话轮次在 1.9 到 3.5 之间。我们的经验表明，会话技术可以快速用于应对大流行，并且受到全球范围内各种用户的广泛采用。
