Microsoft announced Thursday latest healthcare data and artificial intelligence tools, including a group of medical imaging models, a service for healthcare agents and an automatic documentation solution for nurses.
The tools aim to assist healthcare organizations develop AI applications faster and save physicians time on administrative tasks, a number one explanation for burnout within the industry. According to this, nurses spend as much as 41% of their time on documentation a report from the Office of the Surgeon General.
“By integrating AI into healthcare, our goal is to reduce the burden on medical staff, promote collective collaboration among the healthcare team, and increase the overall efficiency of healthcare systems across the country,” said Mary Varghese Presti, vp of portfolio development and Incubation at Microsoft Health and Life Sciences said in a pre-recorded briefing with reporters.
The latest tools are the most recent example of Microsoft's efforts to determine itself as a frontrunner in healthcare AI. Last October, the corporate unveiled a set of health features for its Azure cloud and fabric analytics platform. In 2021, the corporate also acquired Nuance Communications, which provides voice-to-text AI solutions for healthcare and other sectors, in a $16 billion deal.
Many of the solutions announced by Microsoft on Thursday are in early development or only available in preview. Healthcare organizations will test and validate them before the corporate rolls them out more broadly. Microsoft declined to reveal the associated fee of those latest tools.
AI models for healthcare
Approximately 80% of visits to hospitals and health systems involve an imaging study because physicians often depend on images to treat patients.
Microsoft is launching a group of open-source, multimodal AI models that may analyze data types beyond just text, akin to medical images, clinical records and genomic data. Healthcare organizations can use the models to develop latest applications and tools.
For example, digitization of a single pathology slide could also be required greater than a gigabyte Due to the high storage capability, many existing AI pathology models were trained on small slides. Microsoft and Providence Health & Services have developed a whole-slide model that improves mutation prediction and subtyping of cancer, in keeping with Microsoft a paper published within the journal Nature.
Now health systems can construct on it and adapt it to their needs.
“In the past, it's been a challenge to develop a comprehensive foundation model for pathology… and now we're actually able to do it,” said Sara Vaezy, chief strategy and digital officer at Providence, in an interview with CNBC. “It really was kind of a game changer.”
The models can be found within the model catalog in Azure AI Studio, which serves as Microsoft's generative AI development center.
Health agent services
Microsoft also announced a brand new way for healthcare systems to develop AI agents.
AI agents vary in complexity but might help users answer questions, automate processes, and perform specific tasks.
Through Microsoft Copilot Studio, these organizations can create agents equipped with health-specific protections. For example, if a solution incorporates a reference to clinical evidence, the source is displayed and a note indicates whether the reply is AI-generated. According to Microsoft, counterfeits and omissions are also reported.
For example, a healthcare organization could develop an AI agent to assist doctors discover relevant clinical trials for a patient. Microsoft said a physician can type within the query: “What clinical trials for a 55-year-old man with diabetes and interstitial lung disease?” and get an inventory of possible options. This would save the doctor the effort and time of finding each study.
AI agents that might help patients answer basic questions are gaining popularity amongst health systems which have already began testing the service, said Hadas Bitran, general manager of health AI at Microsoft Health and Life Sciences, in a question-and-answer session with reporters. Agents that might help doctors answer questions on current guidelines and patients' medical history are also widely available, she added.
Microsoft's Health Care Agent service is obtainable in preview starting Thursday.
Providing automated documentation for caregivers
In August, Microsoft announced that the following phase of its partnership with Epic Systems can be dedicated to developing an AI-powered documentation tool for nurses, and the corporate detailed those plans on Thursday.
Epic is a healthcare software provider that manages the electronic health records of greater than 280 million people within the United States. The company has had a long-standing relationship with Microsoft.
Microsoft's Nuance already offers an automatic documentation tool for doctors called DAX Copilot, which was introduced last 12 months. It allows doctors to consensually record their visits to patients and the AI routinely converts them into clinical notes and summaries.
Ideally, this implies doctors don't need to spend time typing up these notes themselves each time they see a patient.
The technology is having fun with enormous popularity this 12 months. Nuance announced that DAX was co-pilot generally available added to Epic's electronic health record in January – a coveted seal of approval within the healthcare industry. By integrating a tool like DAX Copilot directly into physicians' EHR workflows, they don't have to change apps to access it, saving time and reducing administrative burden.
But until now, DAX Copilot was only available to doctors. Microsoft said that’s changing. The same tool optimized for nurses is being developed.
“The nursing workflow is very different than that of physicians, and any solution designed for nurses must integrate into the way they work,” Presti said in the course of the briefing. “Our team has spent hours following nurses throughout their shift to see how they complete their tasks and identify where the greatest points of friction exist throughout the day.”
Microsoft is collaborating on development with organizations akin to Stanford Health Care, Northwestern Medicine and Tampa General Hospital.
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