Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare Innovations
Microsoft Corp. is set to unveil several groundbreaking innovations in Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare, designed to revolutionize patient care, enhance team collaboration, and unlock clinical and operational insights. The tech giant is leveraging new healthcare AI models in Azure AI Studio, advanced capabilities for healthcare data solutions in Microsoft Fabric, the healthcare agent service in Copilot Studio, and an AI-driven nursing workflow solution to support healthcare organizations on their journey toward a healthier future.
Expanding AI Capabilities Beyond Text
Microsoft is launching healthcare AI models, a collection of cutting-edge multimodal medical imaging foundation models available in the Azure AI model catalog. Developed in partnership with organizations like Providence and Paige.ai, these models enable healthcare organizations to integrate and analyze diverse data types, ranging from medical imaging to genomics and clinical records. This innovation allows healthcare organizations to rapidly build, fine-tune, and deploy AI solutions tailored to their specific needs while minimizing the extensive compute and data requirements typically associated with building multimodal models from scratch.
“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, MD, chief medical officer of Providence Genomics. “These models can complement human expertise by providing insights beyond traditional visual interpretation and will reshape the future of medicine.”
Harnessing the Power of Healthcare Data
Historically, healthcare data has been challenging to access due to its unstructured nature and limitations in existing data management systems. Microsoft is addressing this issue with the general availability of healthcare data solutions in Microsoft Fabric, enabling healthcare organizations to access, manage, and act on data with a single, unified AI-powered platform. Additionally, healthcare security application templates for Microsoft Purview are available in public preview, designed to help govern healthcare data.
New capabilities in public preview within healthcare data solutions in Microsoft Fabric include conversational data integration, social determinants of health (SDOH) public dataset transformation, Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) claim and claim line feed (CCLF) data ingestion, care management analytics, and data discovery and cohorting. These features aim to enhance patient care by identifying high-risk individuals, optimizing treatment plans, and improving care coordination.
Building a Safe and Responsible Healthcare Agent
To address challenges such as workforce shortages and increasing patient care demands, Microsoft is introducing the public preview of healthcare agent service in Copilot Studio. This service enables organizations to build Copilot agents for tasks like appointment scheduling, clinical trial matching, and patient triaging, thereby improving clinical workflows and empowering healthcare professionals.
Early adopters, such as Cleveland Clinic, are already utilizing these innovations to enhance patient experiences and improve operational efficiency. “AI is transforming nursing workflows by streamlining administrative tasks, allowing nurses to focus more on patient care,” said Corey Miller, vice president of R&D at Epic. “Together with Microsoft, we’re using AI-powered ambient voice technology to populate patient assessments, enhancing personalized patient interactions.”
Empowering Responsible AI Practices
Microsoft remains committed to developing responsible AI by design, ensuring that these technologies positively impact both the healthcare ecosystem and broader society. The company has made significant investments in building governance structures, policies, tools, and processes to uphold its AI principles and safely deploy AI solutions.
For more information on Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare and its new data and AI solutions, visit https://news.microsoft.com/hlth-2024.
