Bringing Timely Data to a Rich Health Search Experience

The Bing Health search experience is continuing to grow – focusing on providing more data-oriented answers and richer experiences in critical areas of Health. We are continuing to expose more hard-to-discover data in an instant way that helps users make more informed decisions in health. The new features include:

· Tweets from select health publishers in instant answers

· Instant health data tables for common inquiries like blood pressure or cholesterol levels

· Shortcuts to clinical trials for conditions including various cancer types and other major diseases

· New content partners including Harvard Health and the CDC

First, we’re introducing important and filtered Twitter updates from authoritative sources in connection with many medical conditions.  This provides a compelling combination of knowledge and real-time social features in the same rich experience for health searches.

In the example below, the tweet is from the National Psoriasis Foundation, highlighting new research on the connection with arthritis:

psoriasis

Consider now a query like “cholesterol level”. Bing instantly highlights key pieces of information on cholesterol test ranges:

cholesterol

In fact, if you want to know more, you can access directly an article from Mayo Clinic providing detailed explanation of this table’s content.

Another example is the query “CRP test” for the C-Reactive Protein test used as an indicator of heart disease, which leads to an instant visualization of risk categories:

CRP Test

Bing Health will continue to increase the scope of such data-oriented results for users.

Another key direction for Bing Health is providing smart access to highly valuable services, such as clinical trials. For example, clinical trials are an essential tool for cancer patients and there is a strong interest for experimental treatments in complex diseases like the different cancers. To serve people better, Bing Health has developed answers to connect users to the clinicaltrials.gov site maintained by the NIH.

For example, the query “breast cancer clinical trials” leads to not just ten blue links but several in-context focused search pages:

Breast cancer

By clicking on “Open Studies”, the user sees the list of clinical trials related to breast cancer that are or will be recruiting new patients according to the NIH database.

From there, users can further explore the available trials or go back to Bing and directly obtain, for example, studies that have published results, by clicking on the “With Results” link.

Bing also provides this search capability automatically in the middle of search results for a number of diseases such as prostate cancer, without requiring users to ask for clinical trials specifically.

In addition, Bing Health has partnered with new authoritative content providers including Harvard Health Publications, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and Natural Standard. The following are example pages:

mri

Content from the CDC provides our users with information on important health and prevention factors:

Diabetes Pregnancy

Bing Health is dedicated to innovations that help people get answers and continue to make better informed health decisions.

Please do not hesitate to provide us with your feedback.

Alain Rappaport – Bing

 

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