Microsoft has unveiled a series of data and artificial intelligence products tailored for the healthcare sector through Azure Health Insights. These tools are designed to help healthcare organizations harness the vast amounts of data they generate, aiming to improve patient care and streamline operations.
Improving Healthcare with Microsoft Fabric
Microsoft introduced healthcare-specific tools in its data and analytics platform, Microsoft Fabric. The platform, announced earlier this year, is designed to amalgamate data from diverse sources like electronic health records, images, lab systems, medical devices, and claims systems. By doing so, it provides a unified platform for organizations to standardize and access their data. It is aimed to eliminate the often “time-consuming” task of sifting through these sources individually.
“Data is king now within health care, and that goes from everything from understanding what's happening in the OR, to how many patients are coming in? How many patients are leaving the house or the hospital? And then how can you get them in faster?” Doug King, the CIO at Northwestern Medicine, commented on the potential of consolidating data.
Three new AI Models
Azure AI Health Insights is introducing three new models. The patient timeline model offers clinicians a chronological overview of a patient's medical history by consolidating information from different unstructured data sources. The clinical report simplification model aims to translate complex medical jargon into more understandable language for patients. Lastly, the radiology insights model seeks to assist clinicians by pinpointing errors and inconsistencies in various reports, even offering follow-up recommendations.
“You're able to visually see, immediately, there was a medical encounter here, there was a procedure done here, this is the medication that someone took, and [the clinician's] able to get a really good picture,” Vaz elaborated on the patient timeline model.
Azure AI: A New Era of Patient Care
In addition to Fabric, Microsoft also rolled out new tools within its Azure AI services. One notable introduction is the Azure AI Health Bot, a generative AI chatbot for Azure Health Bot. The chatbot can extract information from both a health organization's internal data and reputable external sources, such as the FDA and the National Institutes of Health. Linishya Vaz, a principal product manager at Microsoft Health and Life Sciences, emphasized the chatbot's potential in assisting staff with treatment protocols and aiding patients with their queries.
Another significant addition is the Text Analytics tool, which can label and extract crucial medical information from various unstructured data sources. The tool will soon be available in multiple languages, including Spanish, French, Italian, German, Portuguese, and Hebrew.
