Alice Chambers |
New artificial intelligence tools within Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare aim to enhance care experiences, empower healthcare workers and provide in-depth clinical insights.
“We are at an inflection point where AI breakthroughs are fundamentally changing the way we work and live,” said Joe Petro, corporate vice president of healthcare and life sciences solutions and platforms at Microsoft. “Microsoft’s AI-powered solutions are helping lead these efforts by streamlining workflows, improving data integration and utilising AI to deliver better outcomes for healthcare professionals, researchers and scientists, payors, providers, medtech developers and, ultimately, the patients they all serve.”
Microsoft’s healthcare AI models in Azure AI Studio, developed in collaboration with Microsoft partners Providence and Paige.ai, will integrate and analyse a range of data types including medical imaging and clinical records. The models will enable healthcare organisations to build and deploy AI solutions tailored to their needs.
“These models can complement human expertise by providing insights beyond traditional visual interpretation and, as we move towards a more integrated, multimodal approach, will reshape the future of medicine,” said Carlo Bifulco, chief medical officer of Providence.
Healthcare data will also become more accessible via new solutions in Microsoft Fabric. They include DAX Copilot – which will generate insights from patient conversations – care management analytics, and the ability to integrate workflows so healthcare workers can create, manage and share patient cohorts.
Microsoft’s healthcare agent service in Copilot Studio is also in public preview. This service allows customers to build their own AI agents with healthcare-specific features, pre-built healthcare intelligence and templates for use cases like appointment scheduling, clinical trial matching and allocating treatment to patients.
In addition, Microsoft and its partner Epic are working with several US healthcare organisations – including Advocate Health, Baptist Health of Northeast Florida, Duke Health, Intermountain Health Saint Joseph Hospital, Mercy, Northwestern Medicine, Stanford Health Care and Tampa General Hospital – to build an AI solution that addresses documentation challenges by drafting flowsheets for review. This will allow nurses to focus less on paperwork and more on their patients.
“AI is transforming nursing workflows by streamlining administrative tasks, allowing nurses to focus more on patient care,” said Corey Miller, vice president of research and development at Epic. “Together with Microsoft, we’re using AI-powered ambient voice technology to populate patient assessments. Nurses using the tool are already sharing positive feedback on how it enhances personalised patient interactions.”