Partnerships among tech giants and global health experts, which aim to develop new digital health tools, are evolving as these companies lean into more and more AI-powered solutions.
One of the latest news comes from Microsoft, as the company has introduced new tools in Microsoft Fabric and Azure AI for healthcare organizations. These new products aim to assist healthcare organizations in managing patient data.
Tuesday, Microsoft announced that it has developed new solutions through its Fabric platform, which is capable of processing data from multiple sources at the HLTH conference in Las Vegas. The goal is to standardize patient data using electronic medical records, streamlining data collection processes. The health and life sciences sector is, indeed, responsible for over 30% of all global data production. This is estimate is disproportionate to the human resources available to manage such data. Over 97% of this data will remain unused, imposing a significant burden on hospitals.
The first clients to test this software are Northwestern Medicine, Arthur Health, and SingHealth. After the initial trials, the emerging data are quite promising. Duog King, Chief Information Officer at Northwestern Medicine, wants to deploy Microsoft’s application at a deeper level. He intends to extend its use throughout the healthcare ecosystem to achieve larger goals. For example, one of King’s ideas is to utilize Fabric outside the hospital, enabling remote tracking of patient recovery.
Azure AI getting closer to implementation in healthcare management
And these innnovations don’t stop with Fabric; they also extend to the creation of a new chatbot.
Microsoft will offer a new generative AI chatbot named “Azure AI Health Bot”. It can retrieve data from reliable external sources, such as the National Institutes of Health and the Food and Drug Administration, in addition to a health organization’s own data.
The chatbot will help the organization’s staff ask questions, for example, about how to treat a specific disease and what protocols are associated with it. However, the use of the bot will also be extended to patients, allowing them to request explanations of terms used by doctors. This is an innovative way to increase the active role of patients in their healing process while also reducing the overall workload on healthcare staff.
Microsoft has unveiled three new models within Azure AI Health Insights. These models are designed to help physicians and researchers make more informed decisions.
The first one provides a chronological overview of a patient’s medical history, helping physicians to profile it for use in further treatments.
The second model, called clinical report simplification, helps physicians write simpler reports with fewer technicalities, making them more accessible to patients without special training.
The final model, Radiology Insights, helps radiologists identify errors and inconsistencies while reading data.
This new approach to medicine is the result of a society moving increasingly towards new transformational processes. Microsoft’s team mentioned that they are concurrently developing new AI while investing a significant amount of time in creating software to verify data’s accuracy.
