Redmond, Washington — October 10, 2024 — Microsoft Corp. on Thursday unveils its Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare innovations that connect the healthcare experience, enhance team collaboration, empower healthcare workers, and deliver clinical and operational insights.
With new healthcare AI models in Azure AI Studio, healthcare data solution capabilities in Microsoft Fabric, healthcare agent services in Copilot Studio, and AI-powered nursing workflow solutions, Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare is supporting every step of the healthcare organization’s journey. Creating a healthy future.
“We are at an inflection point where AI innovation is fundamentally changing the way we work and live,” said Joe Petro, corporate vice president of Healthcare and Life Sciences Solutions and Platforms at Microsoft. “Across the broad healthcare and life sciences industry, these advancements are dramatically improving patient care and rekindling the joy of practicing medicine for clinicians. Microsoft’s AI-based solutions streamline workflows, improve data integration, and leverage AI to create better outcomes for healthcare professionals, researchers, scientists, payers, providers, health technology developers, and ultimately the patients they serve. We are helping drive this effort by delivering results.”
Expanding the reach of AI beyond text: Healthcare AI models in Azure AI Studio
Microsoft announced the launch of Healthcare AI Models, a collection of cutting-edge, multimodal medical imaging-based models available in the Azure AI Model Catalog. Developed in collaboration with partners like Providence and Paige.ai, this model allows healthcare organizations to integrate and analyze a variety of data types, from medical imaging to genomics and clinical records. By using these advanced models as a foundation, healthcare organizations can quickly build, fine-tune, and deploy AI solutions tailored to their specific needs while minimizing the extensive compute and data requirements associated with building multimodal models from scratch.
“The development of fundamental AI models in pathology and medical imaging will lead to significant advancements in cancer research and diagnostics,” said Carlo Bifulco, M.D., chief medical officer of Providence Genomics and co-author of the Prov-GigaPath study. “It is expected,” he said. “These models can complement human expertise by providing insights beyond traditional visual interpretation and will reshape the future of medicine as we move toward a more integrated, multimodal approach.”
Harness the power of healthcare data with Microsoft Fabric
Historically, healthcare data has been difficult to access due to its unstructured nature and limitations of existing data management systems. These challenges have limited organizations’ ability to gain a comprehensive view of the patient experience and access valuable insights.
With the general availability of Microsoft Fabric’s healthcare data solutions, healthcare organizations can overcome these barriers by reimagining how users access, manage, and work with their data through a single, integrated AI-powered platform. Additionally, the Healthcare Security Application Template for Microsoft Purview, a suite of innovative features designed to help you manage healthcare data, is now in public preview. We’ll also be releasing new features in public preview within Microsoft Fabric’s healthcare data solutions, including:
- Interactive data integration: Send conversational data, such as patient conversations, from DAX Copilot to the Fabric platform. By sending DAX Copilot audio files, transcripts, and clinical note drafts to Fabric, customers and partners can leverage a variety of native tools in Azure and Fabric to analyze this data or combine it with other data to generate comprehensive insights.
- Transform the Social Determinants of Health (SDOH) public dataset: SDOH collects, sustains, harmonizes and consumes national and international open data sets to help healthcare organizations identify risks and health-related societal needs to provide equitable healthcare for all patients and communities.
- Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) claims and claims line feed (CCLF) data collection: Streamline claims data collection and harmonize with clinical, imaging, and SDOH data to gain actionable insights for patients and populations.
- Treatment Management Analysis: Enhance patient care by leveraging integrated health data and care management analytics templates to identify high-risk individuals, optimize treatment plans, and improve care coordination.
- Data retrieval and cohort: Leverage integrated workflows that enable healthcare organizations to create, manage, analyze, and share patient cohorts.
Building Safe and Accountable Health Care Agents
Healthcare organizations face numerous challenges, including staffing shortages, rising costs, and increasing patient care demands. Generative AI offers a potential solution to these challenges by automating administrative tasks, analyzing vast amounts of data for actionable insights, and supporting decision-making by healthcare professionals.
To address this issue, Microsoft announced the public preview of Copilot Studio’s healthcare agent service for building Copilot agents for appointment scheduling, clinical trial matching, patient triage, and more. Organizations can leverage healthcare agent services to create connected patient experiences, improve clinical workflows, and empower healthcare professionals while helping organizations meet industry expectations with Microsoft Copilot Studio. Early adopters like Cleveland Clinic, whose feedback helped us optimize the solution for the healthcare environment, are already using these innovations to improve patient experiences and improve operational efficiency.
Improving Nursing Workflow with AI: Initial Nursing Results
With the World Health Organization (WHO)1 With a projected shortage of 4.5 million nurses by 2030, providing the skills to support the nursing profession has never been more urgent.
Last month at Epic’s UGM, we announced the following focus areas for collaboration at Epic Workshops: Today we’re sharing more about how we’re actively collaborating with several leading healthcare organizations, 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 — Build an AI solution using ambient technology to process nursing documentation by drafting flowsheets for review, allowing nurses to focus more on patients and less on paperwork. These innovations expand the companies’ long-standing strategic collaboration and joint development initiatives with Epic.
“AI is transforming nursing workflows by streamlining administrative tasks so nurses can focus more on patient care,” said Corey Miller, vice president of R&D at Epic. “Together with Microsoft, we are using AI-based ambient speech technology to create patient assessments. “Nurses using this tool are already sharing positive feedback about how it improves personalized patient interactions.”
“For nurses, integrating AI-based solutions into their workflow is a game changer,” said Terry McDonnell, DNP, ANCP-BC, executive vice president and chief nurse at Duke University Health System and associate dean for clinical affairs at Duke. Duke Health University School of Nursing. “This allows us to focus more on patient care and less on the administrative burden of documentation. Microsoft’s ambient AI solutions truly make a difference by automating tedious tasks, alleviating burnout and giving us more time to connect with patients at the bedside.”
Strengthening responsible AI practices across healthcare
In line with Microsoft’s commitment to responsible AI, these new solutions adhere to the company’s AI Principles, established in 2018 to guide AI development and use. Microsoft is committed to developing responsible AI design so that these technologies can have a positive impact on the healthcare ecosystem and broader society. In practice, this means properly building, testing, and monitoring systems to prevent undesirable behavior such as harmful content, bias, misuse, and other unintended risks. Over the years, we have invested significantly in maintaining these principles and building the governance structures, policies, tools, and processes necessary to safely build and deploy AI. At Microsoft, we’re committed to sharing the lessons we’ve learned along our journey to uphold responsible AI principles with our customers. We use our own best practices and learnings to provide people and organizations with the capabilities and tools to build AI applications that share the same high standards we pursue.
For more information about Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare and new data and AI solutions and their impact, visit https://news.microsoft.com/hlth-2024 or visit Microsoft at HLTH 2024 booth #4004.
Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT” @microsoft) creates platforms and tools powered by AI to deliver innovative solutions to meet the changing needs of our customers. The technology company is committed to delivering AI broadly and doing so responsibly, with a mission to help every person and every organization on the planet achieve more.
1 Nursing and Midwifery, World Health Organization, 2024
Click Next for more details.
Microsoft Media Relations, WE Communications, (425) 638-7777; (email protected)
Notes to editors: For more information, news, and views from Microsoft, visit Microsoft Source (https://news.microsoft.com/source). Web links, phone numbers and titles were accurate at the time of publication but may have changed. For additional assistance, journalists and analysts may contact Microsoft’s rapid response team or other appropriate contacts listed at https://news.microsoft.com/microsoft-public-relations-contacts.
This press release contains key announcements about Microsoft’s AI-powered healthcare transformation and includes quotes highlighting the transformative role of AI in healthcare.
Epic is a registered trademark of Epic Systems Corp.
