{"id":2125,"date":"2016-11-11T02:08:04","date_gmt":"2016-11-11T02:08:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/reallifecode\/index.php\/2016\/11\/11\/extending-microsofts-bot-framework-with-graph-based-dialogs\/"},"modified":"2020-03-15T06:32:10","modified_gmt":"2020-03-15T13:32:10","slug":"extending-microsofts-bot-framework-with-graph-based-dialogs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/ise\/extending-microsofts-bot-framework-with-graph-based-dialogs\/","title":{"rendered":"Extending Microsoft’s Bot Framework with Graph-Based Dialogs"},"content":{"rendered":"

Image: DNA<\/a> by Arthur Caranta<\/a>, used by CC BY 2.0<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

Background<\/h2>\n

Pager<\/a> uses technology to help patients better navigate an expansive healthcare landscape and connect them to quality care. The company is exploring using bot technology to automate larger portions of their platform, and we collaborated with them on this project.<\/p>\n

Many patients are not aware that the assessment of the nature and severity of their condition begins the moment they to arrange an appointment or walk into a hospital. Whether through a phone call, in person, or online, health systems solicit a patient\u2019s chief complaint in order to understand the urgency of a situation. Patients first identify themselves, and then a representative asks a series of questions in order to understand whether the patient is the right fit for that specific venue of care. For acute conditions, the process follows a triage protocol based on the patient\u2019s description of symptoms. For example, a patient with a headache would be asked details about the type of pain, speed of onset, associated symptoms such as numbness, weakness, or fever.<\/p>\n

For experienced nurses and other clinicians, the protocols are second nature and committed to memory and are used to identify potentially unstable conditions that require more immediate attention. Past medical history, risk factors, and other demographic information is used to risk stratify patients. In addition, insurance and other financial data is obtained to determine whether the care will be covered, and together with the medical data, to direct the patient to the most suitable care environment.<\/p>\n

For Pager, using human representatives (nurses in this case) to conduct scripted protocols through a text interface is time-consuming, hard to scale, and error prone.<\/p>\n

The Problem<\/h2>\n

Before this engagement, if a developer wanted to build a dialog for a protocol using the Microsoft Bot Framework<\/a>, they had to hard-code each of the individual dialog steps in the bot service. Since Pager has hundreds of different protocols, they wanted to be able to dynamically load the dialogs from an external data source, such as a file, or a database. Dynamic loading of protocols also allows Pager to update their bot without needing to change and redeploy its code.<\/p>\n

Additionally, Bot Framework uses a relatively basic waterfall conversation paradigm for modeling conversations:<\/p>\n