Microsoft announces new healthcare AI tools | Wilnesh News

Microsoft New healthcare data and artificial intelligence tools were announced Thursday, including a range of medical imaging models, healthcare agency services and automated documentation solutions for caregivers.

These tools are designed to help healthcare organizations build AI applications faster and save clinicians time performing administrative tasks, a leading cause of burnout in the industry. According to statistics, nurse practitioners spend 41% of their time documenting a report From the surgeon’s office.

“By integrating artificial intelligence into health care, we aim to reduce the pressure on health care workers, promote collaboration among collective medical teams, and improve the overall efficiency of the national health care system.” Microsoft Health and Life Sciences said in a pre-recorded briefing to reporters expressed in.

The new tools are the latest example of Microsoft’s efforts to establish itself as a leader in artificial intelligence for healthcare. In October last year, the company launched a series of health features on its Azure cloud and Fabric analytics platform. It also spent $16 billion in 2021 to acquire Nuance Communications, which provides speech-to-text artificial intelligence solutions for healthcare and other industries.

Many of the solutions Microsoft announced Thursday are in early stages of development or only available in preview. Healthcare organizations will test and validate it before the company rolls it out more broadly. Microsoft declined to disclose the cost of the new tools.

Healthcare Artificial Intelligence Model

About 80% of hospital and health system visits include imaging tests, as doctors often rely on images to help treat patients.

Microsoft is launching a series of open source multi-modal artificial intelligence models that can analyze data types other than text, such as medical images, clinical records and genomic data. Healthcare organizations can use these models to build new applications and tools.

For example, digitizing a single pathology slide may require More than one gigabyte Due to the huge storage capacity, many existing artificial intelligence pathology models are trained on small slides at a time. According to reports, Microsoft and Providence Health and Services built a holistic slide model that can improve mutation prediction and cancer subtype analysis piece of paper Published in the peer-reviewed journal Nature.

Now, health systems can build on this foundation and improve upon it to meet their needs.

“Getting a full slide base model of pathology has been a challenge in the past… now we’re actually able to do that,” Sara Vaezy, chief strategist and digital officer at Providence, told CNBC. “It’s really A game changer.”

These models can be found in the models catalog within Azure AI Studio, Microsoft’s development center for generative AI.

Healthcare Agency Services

Microsoft also announced a new way to build artificial intelligence agents for medical systems.

AI agents vary in complexity, but they can help users answer questions, automate processes, and perform specific tasks.

Through Microsoft Copilot Studio, these organizations can build agencies with healthcare-specific safeguards. For example, when an answer contains a reference to clinical evidence, the source is shown, along with a note indicating whether the answer was generated by artificial intelligence. Fabrications and omissions were also flagged, Microsoft said.

For example, a healthcare organization could build an AI agent to help doctors identify patients for relevant clinical trials. Doctors can type in the question: “What clinical trials should be conducted on a 55-year-old man with diabetes and interstitial lung disease?” and receive a list of potential options, Microsoft said. This will save doctors time and energy searching for each test.

Hadas Bitran, general manager of health artificial intelligence at Microsoft Health and Life Sciences, said in an interview with reporters that artificial intelligence agents that can help patients answer basic questions are popular among medical systems that have begun testing the service. Agents who can help doctors answer questions about the latest guidelines and patient histories are also common, she added.

Microsoft’s healthcare agent service is available in preview starting Thursday.

Provide automated documentation for nurses

August, Microsoft declare The next phase of the company’s partnership with Epic Systems will focus on building AI-powered documentation tools for caregivers, the company detailed those plans Thursday.

Epic, a healthcare software provider that maintains electronic health records for more than 280 million people in the United States, has a multi-year relationship with Microsoft.

Microsoft’s Nuance already offers doctors an automated documentation tool called DAX Copilot, which it launched last year. It allows doctors to consensually record their visits with patients, and artificial intelligence automatically converts them into clinical notes and summaries.

Ideally, this means doctors don’t have to spend time printing these notes themselves each time they see a patient.

The technology has exploded in popularity this year. Nuance announces DAX Copilot generally available In January, the record appeared on Epic’s electronic health records, a coveted seal of approval within the healthcare industry. Integrating tools like DAX Copilot directly into physicians’ EHR workflows means they don’t have to switch applications to access it, which helps save time and reduce administrative work.

But so far, DAX Copilot has been available only to doctors. Microsoft says that’s changing. It is building a similar tool optimized for nurses.

“Nursing workflows are very different from physician workflows, and any solution developed for nurses needs to be integrated with the way they work,” Presti said in the briefing. “Our team spent hours tracking nurses’ shifts to see how they performed their tasks and discovered where the biggest friction points were throughout the day.”

Microsoft is working with organizations including Stanford Health Care, Northwestern Medicine, and Tampa General Hospital to develop it.