4 Things to Know about Microsoft’s New AI Tools for Health Care

Microsoft’s recent unveiling of myriad new artificial intelligence (AI) and data capabilities for health care organizations has many tech experts excited about the tools’ potential impact on the field.

Among the new capabilities:

• New medical imaging models. A collection of medical imaging models available in the Microsoft Azure AI model catalog will allow health care organizations to test, fine-tune, and build AI solutions tailored to their specific needs. This would minimize the extensive computing and data requirements typically associated with building multimodal models from scratch, the company states. Developed in collaboration with partners like Providence and Paige.ai, these models enable health care organizations to integrate and analyze diverse data types — ranging from medical imaging to genomics and clinical records.
• AI agent services. This would allow companies to create AI tools with pre-built templates and data sources that could be used for appointment scheduling, clinical trial matching and patient triage. Currently in public preview, the service will offer broader access to the tools and lets organizations give feedback on the products.
• Expanded data analysis tools. The company’s health care-specific data tools are now typically available in Microsoft’s Fabric platform, which allows organizations to ingest, store and analyze health data. In public preview, organizations also will be able to use other types of data such as conversational information from Microsoft’s DAX Copilot AI documentation tool, public social determinants of health information and claims data from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.
• Nursing documentation. Working with the electronic health record vendor Epic and health care organizations like Advocate Health, Northwestern Medicine, Stanford Health Care and Duke Health, Microsoft is developing an AI documentation tool for nurses. The nurse-focused product has been deployed at multiple customer sites, Mary Varghese Presti, vice president of portfolio evolution and incubation at Microsoft’s Health & Life Sciences Division, recently told Healthcare Dive. The tool uses ambient voice technology to automatically draft flowsheets, or forms that collect patient data, for nurse review. The goal is to enable nurses to be “eyes-free and hands-free” in their documentation.