109 saves them an average of five minutes per patient encounter, while 70 per cent credited it for reducing burnout and fatigue, and 62 per cent stated that they are now less likely to leave their organisation. DAX Copilot is positively impacting the patient experience too. When Microsoft surveyed more than 400 patients whose clinicians use the tool, it discovered that 93 per cent reported a better overall care experience. Microsoft integrated DAX Copilot’s ambient listening capabilities with Dragon Medical’s natural language voice dictation capabilities into a new Dragon Copilot in March 2025. The AI assistant allows clinicians working across ambulatory, inpatient, emergency departments and other care settings to streamline documentation, automate key tasks, and conduct general-purpose medical information searches from trusted content sources. Healthcare providers around the world are using Microsoft OpenAI Service to build generative AI assistants too. In Australia, tertiary referral and teaching hospital Liverpool Hospital has created an assistant that enables cardiologists to query vast volumes of literature to answer clinical questions. US-based healthcare system Mercy has built chatbots to allow workers to find policy and procedural information, as well as to complete tasks such as scheduling appointments when taking patient calls. Meanwhile, Chi Mei Medical Center has used AI assistants to cut the time it takes for doctors to write medical reports from 60 to 15 minutes, enabled nurses to document bed transfers in fewer than five minutes rather than 20, and empowered pharmacists to serve double the number of patients per day. Other AI assistants are helping staff to identify patients at risk of falls, supporting nutritionists to produce diet recommendations and creating personalised educational materials for patients with comorbidities. Rhew expects more healthcare applications to emerge as generative AI technology continues to evolve. “The generative AI outputs demonstrate increasingly higher levels of performance as a result of improvements in the AI model technology and in the application of more sophisticated safeguards,” he says. Overcoming trust barriers While many patients and healthcare professionals acknowledge the potential of AI-powered solutions to significantly improve PUBLIC SECTOR Doctors, nurses and other staff at Chi Mei Medical Center are using copilots to streamline administrative tasks and enhance patient care Photo: Billy H. C. Kwok, Microsoft
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