Microsoft on Thursday unveiled several Microsoft Cloud artificial intelligence enhancements for healthcare innovation, including new healthcare AI models in Azure AI Studio, new healthcare data capabilities in Microsoft Fabric, and developer tools in Copilot Studio. Announced. Many of the artificial intelligence enhancements are available in preview.
At a media briefing on Tuesday, company executives also revealed details about the company's collaboration with Epic, an AI-powered nursing workflow company.
“Across the broader healthcare and life sciences industry, these advances will dramatically enhance patient care and improve the ability of clinicians to “It's rekindling the joy of practicing medicine for many people.” Learn about new features.
Capturing genAI data for clinical insights
Microsoft Fabric's ability to integrate structured and unstructured data is helping reimagine how users access, manage, and act on their data, the company said.
Some of the new AI-driven innovations will combine data from electronic medical records to generate comprehensive insights, including clinical imaging, billing centers for Medicare and Medicaid services, health Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare can facilitate use cases including social determinants and more.
“Organizations around the world are now relying on solutions to build integrated data hubs that enable them to not only generate new insights but also create new AI models to improve patient care and drive outpatient efficiencies. ,” Rustogi said during his talk. Briefing session.
A key new feature is conversational data integration.
Nuance's DAX Copilot, a generative AI voice-enabled tool, has been generally available for a year, and the company said in a blog post last month that it's seeing significant momentum.
According to the company, physicians at Northwestern Medical School in Chicago assist in at least 50% of their patient interactions, reducing the time they spend taking notes by an average of 24% and increasing the number of patients they see. The number has increased by an average of 11.3 people.
Health system integrated AI co-pilot with Epic EHR.
“With this integration, organizations can now securely access DAX Copilot conversation data, including audio files and draft clinical notes,” Rustogi said.
Azure and Fabric's native analytics tools allow healthcare organizations to analyze data and combine it with other patient data, such as EHR data and patient engagement insights, to create comprehensive data.
For example, by leveraging and harmonizing national and international SDOH public datasets, healthcare organizations can identify risks and health-related social needs and improve equity in healthcare.
The tool can also leverage integrated medical data and care management analytics templates to enhance patient care by identifying high-risk individuals, optimizing treatment plans, and improving care coordination. said the company.
New healthcare security application templates to help you manage your data are also available in public preview in Microsoft Purview, the company said.
Validating genAI output
Hadas Bitran, Head of Health and Life Sciences at Microsoft Israel R&D Center, said on Tuesday that he now has secure access to Copilot Studio's healthcare-specific stack, including pre-built healthcare intelligence and use cases. said.
Bitran leads the development of AI-driven language services, natural language processing technology, conversational intelligence, and personal health assistants. For developers, the Clinical Safeguards API is available in private preview for additional use cases, she said.
“These APIs can be used, for example, to evaluate or further validate the generated AI output,” she explained. “Clinical excellence helps to identify the cause of an answering claim to underlying data or facts.”
He said clinical semantic validation safeguards help test whether answers comply with validated clinical standards and ensure reliability and stability.
Automated documentation for nurses
Through a partnership with Epic Systems announced in August, Microsoft is building an AI-powered documentation tool for nurses. Mary Varghese Presti, vice president of portfolio evolution and incubation at Microsoft Health & Life Sciences, said this tool can be leveraged with Epic Rover to best serve them. Nurse-centered experience.
She said in a media briefing that beyond the high levels of burnout among nurses due to administrative burden, the impetus for collaboration in nursing workflows is that nurses “do not use their eyes” when drafting documents. He explained that this was so that he could do it without using his hands.
“Using voice can transform nursing documentation,” she said. “We are also keenly aware that collaboration creates the best experience for nurses, and our goal is to enable a seamless workflow, not add more steps. .”
The company is actively collaborating with 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 create nursing documentation flow sheets. said they are building ambient technology to address nursing documentation. review.
“AI is transforming nursing workflows by streamlining administrative tasks and allowing nurses to focus more on patient care,” Corey Miller, Epic's vice president of research and development, said in a statement.
“We are collaborating with Microsoft to input patient assessments using AI-powered ambient voice technology. We're already sharing positive feedback on how we're doing it.”
Efficiency of AI development
A collection of multimodal medical image infrastructure models available in the Azure AI Model Catalog analyze a variety of data types, including genomics and clinical records.
The company says they were developed in collaboration with partners such as Providence and Paige.ai. These allow healthcare organizations to quickly build, refine, and deploy custom AI tools while minimizing the compute and data requirements typically associated with building multimodal models from scratch. can.
“The development of fundamental AI models in pathology and medical imaging is expected to facilitate significant advances in cancer research and diagnosis,” said Dr. Carlo Bifulco, chief medical officer at Providence Genomics, in a statement. “
“These models can complement human expertise by providing insights beyond traditional visual interpretation, and will shape the future of healthcare as we move toward a more integrated, multimodal approach. will be rebuilt.”
Building a secure AI agent
New tools in Microsoft Copilot Studio also allow health systems to build custom AI agents for appointment scheduling, clinical trial matching, patient triage, connected patient experiences, improved clinical workflows, and more. Masu.
Microsoft said early adopters such as the Cleveland Clinic have helped develop the service by providing feedback on its use in clinical settings and are already using it.
A public preview of the Healthcare Agent service is available.
Andrea Fox is a senior editor at Healthcare IT News.
Email: afox@himss.org
Healthcare IT News is a publication of HIMSS Media.
