Choosing the right healthcare agent service plan
Healthcare agent service provide multiple tiers and pricing models. Customers can freely switch between free, Standard, and C1 price plans based on their organizations and financial requirements.
| Type | Azure |
|---|---|
| Free | F0 |
| Standard | S1 |
| Agent Tier (public preview) | C1 |
"Free (F0)"
A free tier is available for evaluation and development purposes. This is the recommended tier to start experimenting with the healthcare agent service. All features, except the Generative AI features, are available to the Free tier where customers can access the authoring environment with built-in medical intelligence.
The free tier isn't suitable for production deployments. Internally, the free tier compute resources are shared among multiple tenants from the same region. The message rate is throttled and traffic is limited to 3,000 monthly messages and 200 MCUs (Medical content consumption units). When your bot is ready to go live you can easily switch to a paid plan.
"Standard (S1) Tier"
The Standard tier plans allow flexibility and billing based on your actual usage. There are no messages or MCU (Medical content consumption unit) limits that interrupt the service. The Standard tier is suited for scenarios where you can't anticipate usage or where there are fluctuations in usage.
The Standard tier does not support any of the Generative AI features
The Standard tier consists of three billing components:
- $500 fixed monthly fee, which includes a base package of 10,000 Messages and 1000 Medical Content Consumption Units (MCUs)*
- Another $2.5 per 1000 messages ($0.0025 per message) that will be charged by consumption, for any messages consumed beyond the included base package
- another $0.18 per MCU* for any MCUs consumed beyond the included base package.
The Standard tier is suitable for high scale deployments where manually managing fixed tiers aren't suitable.
"Agent (C1) Tier"
Important
This feature is currently in Public Preview
The Agent C1 tier allows customers to utilize all the Generative AI features, this includes the healthcare adapted orchestrator, healthcare adapted Safeguards, Healthcare Intelligence and all other generative AI features. These aren't available in the standard or free tier. There are no messages or MCU (Medical content consumption unit) limits that interrupt the service.
The C1 tier consists of three billing components:
- $500 fixed monthly fee, which includes a base package of 10,000 Messages and 1000 Medical Content Consumption Units (MCUs)*
- An other $2.5 per 1000 messages ($0.0025 per message) that will be charged by consumption, for any messages consumed beyond the included base package
- another $0.18 per MCU* for any MCUs consumed beyond the included base package.
The C1 tier is well-suited for Generative AI projects where customers aim to harness the capabilities of Generative AI, enhancing operational efficiency and improving patient care.
What is an MCU?
An MCU is a Medical Content Consumption Unit. Essentially, it's another cost incurred for the use of certain third-party medical content that is licensed by Microsoft and made available through the service or the usage of Generative AI features.
For example:
- Triage session with the Infermedica symptom checker is considered an encounter and counted as one MCU. MCUs are charged in addition to the message cost, and are fixed per encounter (so a longer triage encounter with more messages wouldn't increase the MCU cost).
- A question answered by Generative AI - Customer Sources consumes 1MCU, after that answer, there are still 7 messages left to fully consume the MCU.
- A question answered by Generative AI - Healthcare Intelligence consumes 1MCU, after that answer, there are still 3 messages left to fully consume the MCU.
| Content Provider | Description | MCUs |
|---|---|---|
| Generative AI - Customer Sources | Customer sources powered by Generative AI, orchestrated by our healthcare adapted safeguards and and protected by our healthcare Safeguards | 1 MCU/ per 8 Generative AI responses |
| Generative AI - Healthcare Intelligence | Generative Answers based on Built-in healthcare sources, orchestrated by our healthcare adapted safeguards and and protected by our healthcare Safeguards | 1 MCU/ per 4 Generative AI responses |
| Medline Plus | credible content about various clinical concepts such as Conditions, Symptoms, Drugs, and Medications | 0 MCU/Encounter |
| Infermedica | Triage content that is used by the Infermedica triage solution to assess symptoms and identify possible causes | 1 MCU/Encounter |
What scenarios will NOT consume MCUs?
Descriptive scenarios within healthcare agent service won't spin the MCU meters. For example, traffic from tenant-authored scenarios, including healthcare agent service templates (such as the CDC COVID-19 triage and Back to Work scenarios) won't consume MCUs. Additionally, built-in first-party scenarios that surface freely available medical content, such as drugs and condition information from NIH will also not consume MCUs.
Usage Counter
At any time, you can view usage that impacts your billing through the usage counter. The counter shows usage of Messages and MCUs depending on the billing dimensions relevant to your plan. Access the counter from the Gear icon in the healthcare agent service management portal.
Update your healthcare agent service plan
Owners of the healthcare agent service Resource can manage various settings and change the billing plan. Where you change the plan depends on your version of healthcare agent service. Update the plan via the Azure portal. There's a quick link to the Azure resource from the healthcare agent service management portal in the profile menu (the icon in the top right corner with your initials).
In the Azure portal, go to the pricing tier section to make changes.
For our current pricing visit healthcare agent service pricing page.