Microsoft unveiled a number of Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare innovations designed to connect experiences, boost team collaboration, empower healthcare workers and unleash clinical and operational insights.

The company is launching healthcare AI models, a collection of "cutting-edge" multimodal medical imaging foundation models that will be accessible in the Azure AI model catalog.

The models, developed in partnership with Providence and Paige.ai, allow healthcare organizations to integrate and examine various data types, including medical imaging, genomics and clinical records.

The advanced models, when utilized as a foundation, will help healthcare organizations quickly build, fine-tune and install AI solutions customized to their specific needs while reducing large-scale compute and data requirements linked with creating multimodal models from scratch. 

The company says that with assistance from new healthcare AI models in Azure AI Studio, healthcare data solutions capabilities in Microsoft Fabric (the healthcare agent service in Copilot studio) and the AI-driven nursing workflow offering, Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare, will support healthcare organizations in achieving their goals for the future.

"We are at an inflection point where AI breakthroughs are fundamentally changing the way we work and live," Joe Petro, corporate vice president of healthcare and life sciences solutions and platforms at Microsoft, said in a statement. 

"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." 

The company also launched new capabilities in public preview within healthcare data solutions in Microsoft Fabric that include: 

• Conversational data integration: The ability to send conversational data, such as patient conversations, from DAX Copilot to the Fabric platform.

• Social determinants of health (SDOH) public dataset transformation: Allows for organizations to ingest, harmonize, and consume SDOH national and international public datasets to spot risks and health-related social needs to help build fair healthcare for patients and communities.

• Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) claim and claim line feed (CCLF) data ingestion: Simplifies the ingestion of claims data and harmonizes with clinical, imaging and SDOH data to unlock actionable insights on patients and populations.

• Care management analytics: Leverages unified healthcare data and care management analytical templates to strengthen patient care by pointing out high-risk individuals, improving treatment plans and care coordination.

• Data discovery and cohorting: Utilizes an integrated workflow that permits healthcare organizations to produce, oversee, examine and share patient cohorts.

Additionally, Microsoft announced the public preview of healthcare agent service within Copilot Studio to create Copilot agents for appointment scheduling, clinical trial matching and patient triage.

With Copilot Studio, healthcare organizations will be able to leverage the healthcare agent service and build connected patient experiences, enhance clinical workflows, empower healthcare professionals and help organizations satisfy goals.

The company also reported that it is expanding its strategic alliance and joint development initiatives with Epic by 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.

The aim is to build an AI solution using ambient technology that focuses on nursing documentation by drafting flowsheets for review, allowing nurses to decrease the amount of paperwork and focus more on patients. 

THE LARGER TREND

In July, Microsoft partnered with Mass General Brigham, University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health and its health system UW Health to research and create advanced radiology-focused multimodal AI foundation models and develop medical imaging copilot applications. 

The institutions will work with Microsoft to investigate how applications and algorithms can help radiologists explain medical images, generate reports, analyze data and classify disease. 

In April, Microsoft, GE HealthCare and LG Electronics joined forces with the goal of supporting smart hospital constructions in South Korea. The three companies signed a memorandum of understanding to collaborate and contribute their own expertise in medical equipment and medtech solutions, smart hospital operation solutions, and cloud and platforms. 

In July, Abridge, Epic, and the Mayo Clinic,  partnered to create a genAI documentation platform that integrates Abridge's tools into Epic's EHR for Mayo Clinic nurses. The goal is to combine Abridge's AI technology, Epic's development expertise and Mayo Clinic's nursing practice knowledge to construct the genAI ambient documentation workflow tool.   

In 2019, American Well launched a patient facing app designed to integrate with Epic’s EHR system. The technology, named the American Well Telehealth Patient app, was offered within Epic’s App Orchard, an API marketplace. Patients utilizing the app can schedule or request telemedicine appointments via the MyChart platform. They can also access virtual videos through MyChart.