The new enhanced Bing Health search experience is live – focusing on further enabling people to quickly get relevant information and make better decisions. We’re providing more content from new partners and augmenting instant answers with hard-to-discover data that helps users get more out of their health search experience, both on- and off-line.

Consider a query like “type 2 diabetes”. Bing instantly highlights key pieces of information:

Bing discovers a relevant document in its library of health resources and presents a smart summary related to the query. In addition, Bing uncovers key related topics by analyzing an index of medical sources and extracting meaningful data automatically. In this case, the user receives instant guidance through short lists of other conditions related to the query (for example, “obesity”), medications that are important to know about (for example, “insulin”) and US medical centers that are active in the field. Users may select any of these points of interest to continue their search in a new area.

For example, by clicking on Massachusetts General Hospital the user can drill down into that medical center:

A new instant answer appears, now highlighting important “patient rating” information for this hospital as collected for the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) that compares this hospital to the state average (in the case, the hospital is given a HIGH rating by 77% of participating patients, compared to 65% on average for all participating hospitals in the state). More detailed information on hospital comparisons can be obtained at: http://www.medicare.gov/Hospital/Search/Welcome.asp.

This new instant answer also enables users to quickly explore other nearby facilities as relevant points of interest.

Medications are also addressed with new instant answers. For example, suppose the user selects Glucophage under related medications in the “type 2 diabetes” answer above. The following answer then appears in the search results page:

First, basic questions are addressed with easy-to-understand information on key topics. For example, by selecting “What side effects may I notice?”, a user is provided with the following:

In addition, a short list of key related medications are provided – generated through another automated knowledge analysis. With the introduction of these new knowledge-oriented features, Bing is providing even more tools for users to make better decisions.

In addition to the above instant knowledge capabilities, Bing Health is covering more areas of health and better living. Try different queries like the below to get access new content from additional providers:

or:

or:

We are looking forward to the next update as Bing Health continues in its mission to enable people to make better decisions in health.

Alain Rappaport – Bing