Microsoft expands healthcare AI, analytics capabilities
New Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare offerings will focus on multimodal foundation models, data integration, healthcare agent services and nursing workflow improvements.
Microsoft announced an expansion of its Cloud for Healthcare capabilities, with new offerings and features aimed at enhancing AI models, data access and integration, administrative task automation and nursing workflows.
In response to the need for healthcare organizations to be able to integrate and analyze diverse data types, Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare launched healthcare AI models in Azure AI Studio. These foundation models -- a collection of multimodal AI tools created in collaboration with Providence, Paige.ai and others -- are set to allow stakeholders to process large amounts of clinical, imaging and genomic data. Further, users can utilize the foundation models to build and fine-tune AI tools specific to their needs.
"The development of foundational AI models in pathology and medical imaging is expected to drive significant advancements in cancer research and diagnostics," said Carlo Bifulco, M.D., chief medical officer of Providence Genomics, in the press release. "These models can complement human expertise by providing insights beyond traditional visual interpretation and, as we move toward a more integrated, multimodal approach, will reshape the future of medicine."
New updates to healthcare data solutions in Microsoft Fabric aim to address some of the data access and management challenges health systems face.
Updated capabilities include: conversational data integration via DAX Copilot, in which users could generate insights from patient encounters; social determinants of health (SDOH) data set transformation, enabling stakeholders to ingest and analyze public data sets to inform strategies around health-related social needs and risk factors; claim data ingestion, allowing healthcare organizations to harmonize information from CMS with clinical, SDOH and imaging data for population health management; care management analytics to improve risk stratification and care coordination; and data discovery workflows to help stakeholders develop and analyze patient cohorts.
In light of industry-wide challenges like rising costs and workforce shortages, Microsoft has also announced a generative AI-powered healthcare agent service within Copilot Studio. The offering -- currently in public preview -- allows organizations to develop Copilot agents for patient triage, appointment scheduling and clinical trial matching, in an effort to streamline and automate time-consuming tasks.
We are at an inflection point where AI breakthroughs are fundamentally changing the way we work and live.
Joe PetroCorporate vice president of healthcare and life sciences solutions and platforms, Microsoft
Finally, Microsoft provided additional information on its work to build an AI-driven nursing documentation tool. The proposed solution -- developed in collaboration with Advocate Health, Baptist Health of Northeast Florida, Duke Health, Epic, Intermountain Health Saint Joseph Hospital, Mercy, Northwestern Medicine, Stanford Health Care and Tampa General Hospital -- will utilize ambient technology to draft "flowsheets" for nurses, which is set to help populate patient assessments and streamline clinical documentation.
"For nurses, the integration of AI-driven solutions into our workflows is a game changer," explained Terry McDonnell, senior vice president and chief nurse executive, Duke University Health System, vice dean for clinical affairs, Duke University School of Nursing, Duke Health. "It allows us to focus more on patient care rather than the administrative burden of documentation. By automating tedious tasks, Microsoft's ambient AI solution helps alleviate burnout and gives us more time to connect with our patients at the bedside, where we truly make a difference."
Microsoft's leadership emphasized that these expanded Cloud for Healthcare capabilities were designed to support healthcare organizations as they pursue digital transformation through AI adoption.
"We are at an inflection point where AI breakthroughs are fundamentally changing the way we work and live," stated Joe Petro, corporate vice president, healthcare and life sciences solutions and platforms at Microsoft. "Across the broader healthcare and life sciences industry, these advancements are dramatically enhancing patient care and also rekindling the joy of practicing medicine for clinicians. Microsoft's AI-powered solutions are helping lead these efforts by streamlining workflows, improving data integration, and utilizing AI to deliver better outcomes for healthcare professionals, researchers and scientists, payors, providers, medtech developers, and ultimately the patients they all serve."
Shania Kennedy has been covering news related to health IT and analytics since 2022.
