Microsoft announced new tools in the field of health data and artificial intelligence, including a set of medical imaging models, healthcare service, and automatic documentation tools for nurses. According to CNBC.
These tools aim to help healthcare organizations build AI applications faster and save doctors time on administrative tasks, which are a major cause of burnout. Nurses spend up to 41% of their time documenting, according to a report from the Surgeon General’s Office.
The new tools are the latest example of Microsoft’s efforts to strengthen itself as a leader in artificial intelligence with the healthcare field.
Last October, the company unveiled a series of health features through the Azure cloud computing platform and the Fabric analytics platform.
Microsoft acquired Nuance Communications, which provides artificial intelligence solutions for converting speech into text for healthcare and other sectors, in a deal worth $16 billion in 2021.
Artificial intelligence models for healthcare
Because approximately 80% of hospital and healthcare system visits rely on imaging scans, Microsoft has launched a set of open source multi-modal AI models to analyze types of data including medical images, clinical records and genomic data. Healthcare organizations can use the models to build new applications and tools.
For example, digitizing a single pathology slide can require more than a gigabyte of storage, so AI-powered pathology models are often trained on small pieces of slides at a time.
On the other hand, Microsoft has built a whole-chip model that improves prediction of genetic mutations and cancer classification, according to a paper published in the journal Nature. Now, healthcare systems can rely on it and adjust it to meet their needs.
“Getting a basic model for an entire segment of healthcare delivery was a challenge in the past,” said Sarah Vaze, chief strategy and chief digital officer at Providence. “But today we can actually do it.”
Health care proxy service
Microsoft announced a new way for the healthcare system to build artificial intelligence agents that can help users answer questions, automate processes, and perform specific tasks.
Through Microsoft Copilot Studio, these organizations can create agents equipped with healthcare-specific safeguards. When the answer refers to clinical evidence, the source is displayed and a note is added explaining that the answer was produced by artificial intelligence.
A healthcare organization can build an AI agent to help doctors identify relevant clinical trials for a patient. Microsoft said a doctor could write the question, “What are the clinical procedures for a 55-year-old man with diabetes and interstitial lung disease?” Receiving a list of potential options, this will save the doctor time and effort searching for each trial.
Hadas Bitran, general manager of artificial intelligence at Microsoft Health, said that artificial intelligence agents that can help patients answer basic questions have been popular among health systems that have already begun testing the service.
Agents who can help doctors answer questions about recent guidelines and patient histories are also popular, she added.
Providing automated documentation for nurses
Last August, Microsoft announced that the next phase of its partnership with Epic Systems would be dedicated to building an AI-powered documentation tool for nurses.
Epic is a company that sells healthcare software and contains electronic health records for more than 280 million people in the United States. It has a long-standing relationship with Microsoft.
On the other hand, Microsoft’s Nuance provides an automated documentation tool for doctors called DAX Copilot, which was unveiled last year. It allows doctors to record their visits to patients in a structured format, and artificial intelligence automatically turns them into clinical notes and summaries.
This means that doctors will not need to spend time writing these notes themselves every time they see a patient.
The popularity of this technology has increased dramatically this year. Nuance announced that DAX Copilot had become generally available within Epic’s electronic health record last January.
But until now, DAX Copilot has only been available to doctors. This will change, Microsoft said, as it is working on building a similar tool optimized for nurses.