REDMOND,
Wash., Oct. 10, 2024 /PRNewswire/ -- On Thursday,
Microsoft Corp. is unveiling several Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare
innovations that connect care experiences, enhance team
collaboration, empower healthcare workers, and unlock clinical and
operational insights.
Through new healthcare AI models in Azure AI Studio,
capabilities for healthcare data solutions in Microsoft Fabric, the
healthcare agent service in Copilot Studio, and an AI-driven
nursing workflow solution, Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare is
supporting healthcare organizations on every step of their journey
toward shaping a healthier future.
"We are at an inflection point where AI breakthroughs are
fundamentally changing the way we work and live," said 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."
Expanding the reach of AI beyond text: healthcare AI models
in Azure AI Studio
Microsoft is announcing the launch of healthcare AI
models, a collection of cutting-edge multimodal medical
imaging foundation models available in the Azure AI model catalog.
Developed in collaboration with partners 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. By using these advanced models as a foundation, healthcare
organizations can rapidly build, fine-tune and deploy AI solutions
tailored to their specific needs, all 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 and a co-author of the Prov-GigaPath study.
"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."
Harnessing the power of healthcare data with Microsoft
Fabric
Historically, healthcare data has been difficult to access due
to its unstructured nature and the limitations of existing data
management systems. These challenges have limited organizations'
ability to gain a comprehensive view of patient experiences and
access valuable insights.
With the general availability of healthcare data solutions in
Microsoft Fabric, healthcare organizations can overcome these
barriers by reshaping how users access, manage and act on data with
a single, unified AI-powered platform. Additionally, healthcare
security application templates for Microsoft Purview, an innovative
suite of features designed to help govern healthcare data, are
available in public preview. We're also launching new capabilities
in public preview within healthcare data solutions in Microsoft
Fabric including:
- Conversational data integration: Send conversational
data, such as patient conversations, from DAX Copilot to the Fabric
platform. By sending DAX Copilot audio files, transcripts and draft
clinical notes to Fabric, customers and partners can leverage
various native tools in Azure and Fabric to analyze this data
and/or combine it with other data to generate comprehensive
insights.
- Social determinants of health (SDOH) public dataset
transformation: Ingest, persist, harmonize and consume SDOH
national and international public datasets to enable healthcare
organizations to identify risks and health-related social needs to
help create equitable healthcare for all patients and
communities.
- Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) claim and
claim line feed (CCLF) data ingestion: Streamline the ingestion
of claims data and harmonize with clinical, imaging and SDOH data
to unlock actionable insights on patients and populations.
- Care management analytics: Leverage unified healthcare
data and care management analytical templates to enhance patient
care by identifying high-risk individuals, optimizing treatment
plans and improving care coordination.
- Data discovery and cohorting: Utilize an integrated
workflow that allows healthcare organizations to create, manage,
analyze and share patient cohorts.
Building a safe and responsible healthcare agent
Healthcare organizations face numerous challenges, including
workforce 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 assisting healthcare
professionals in decision-making.
To address this, Microsoft is announcing the public preview of
healthcare agent service in Copilot Studio to build Copilot agents
for appointment scheduling, clinical trial matching, patient
triaging and more. Organizations can leverage the healthcare agent
service to help 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, which
provided feedback to help optimize the solution for a healthcare
setting, are already using these innovations to enhance patient
experiences and improve operational efficiency.
Enhancing nursing workflows with AI: nursing early
outcomes
With the World Health Organization (WHO)1 predicting
a shortage of 4.5 million nurses by 2030, the urgency to deliver
technology to support the nursing profession is felt more than
ever.
Last month at Epic's UGM, we announced the next focus area for
our collaboration in Epic Workshop. 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 — to
build an AI solution using ambient technology that addresses
nursing documentation by drafting flowsheets for review, allowing
nurses to focus less on paperwork and more on their patients. This
innovation expands on the company's long-standing strategic
collaboration and joint development initiatives with Epic.
"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. Nurses using the tool are already sharing positive
feedback on how it enhances personalized patient interactions."
"For nurses, the integration of AI-driven solutions into our
workflows is a game changer," said Terry
McDonnell, DNP, ANCP-BC, 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."
Empowering responsible AI practices across healthcare
In line with Microsoft's dedication to responsible AI, these new
solutions adhere to the company's AI principles established in 2018
to help guide AI development and use. Microsoft remains committed
to developing responsible AI by design, ensuring that these
technologies positively impact both the healthcare ecosystem and
broader society. In practice this means properly building, testing
and monitoring systems to avoid undesirable behaviors, such as
harmful content, bias, misuse and other unintended risks. Over the
years, we have made significant investments in building out the
necessary governance structure, policies, tools and processes to
uphold these principles and build and deploy AI safely. At
Microsoft, we are committed to sharing our learnings on this
journey of upholding our Responsible AI principles with our
customers. We use our own best practices and learnings to provide
people and organizations with capabilities and tools to build AI
applications that share the same high standards we strive for.
For more information on Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare and the
new data and AI solutions and their impact, visit
https://news.microsoft.com/hlth-2024, or visit Microsoft at booth
#4004 at HLTH 2024.
Microsoft (Nasdaq "MSFT" @microsoft) creates platforms and tools
powered by AI to deliver innovative solutions that meet the
evolving needs of our customers. The technology company is
committed to making AI available broadly and doing so responsibly,
with a mission to empower every person and every organization on
the planet to achieve more.
1 Nursing and midwifery, World
Health Organization, 2024
|
This press release includes key announcements on AI-driven
healthcare innovations by Microsoft and includes a quote
emphasizing AI's transformative role in healthcare.
Epic is a registered trademark of Epic Systems Corp.
View original content to download
multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/microsoft-expands-ai-capabilities-to-shape-a-healthier-future-302272648.html
SOURCE Microsoft Corp.