Read Microsoft’s new report on healthcare security trends

Prior to 2020, there was an unspoken rule of threat actors to not launch attacks against schools and children, infrastructure, and healthcare organizations.¹ However, that “rule” no longer applies, and in the past four years the healthcare threat landscape has seen tremendous shifts for the worse.

To put this shift into context, consider these trends from the Microsoft Threat Intelligence report showing healthcare cybersecurity challenges:

• Healthcare is one of the top 10 most targeted industries in the second quarter of 2024²—and has been for the past four quarters.
• Ransomware attacks are costly, with healthcare organizations losing an average of $900,000 per day on downtime alone.³
• In a recent study, out of the 99 healthcare organizations that admitted to paying a ransom and disclosed the ransom paid, the average payment was $4.4 million.⁴

The serious impact of ransomware on healthcare

While the potential financial risk for healthcare organizations is high, lives are at stake because ransomware attacks impact patient outcomes. If healthcare providers are not able to use diagnostic equipment or access patient medical records because it’s under ransom, care will be disrupted.

Healthcare facilities located near hospitals that are impacted by ransomware are also affected because they experience a surge of patients needing care and are unable to support them in an urgent manner. As a result, patients can experience longer wait times, which studies show could lead to more severe stroke cases and heart attack cases.⁵

These attacks don’t just impact facilities in large cities; in fact, rural health clinics are also a target for cyberattacks. They are particularly vulnerable to ransomware incidents because they often have limited means to prevent and remediate security risks. This can be devastating for a community as these hospitals are often the only healthcare option for many miles in the communities they serve.  

Why healthcare is an appealing target for threat actors

Healthcare organizations collect and store extremely sensitive data, which likely contributes to threat actors targeting them in ransomware attacks. However, a more significant reason these facilities are at risk is the potential for huge financial payouts. As referenced earlier, lives are at stake and healthcare facilities committed to patient care can’t risk poor patient outcomes if their systems are taken down. They also can’t risk their patients’ data being exposed if they don’t pay the ransom. That reputation for paying ransoms—for understandable reasons—makes them a target.

What is phishing?Learn more 

Healthcare facilities are also targeted because of their limited security resources and cybersecurity investments to defend against these threats compared to other sectors. Facilities often lack staff dedicated to cybersecurity and in fact, some facilities don’t have a chief information security officer (CISO) or dedicated security operations center at all. Instead, their IT department may be tasked with managing cybersecurity. Doctors, nurses, and healthcare staff may not have received any cybersecurity training or know the signs to look for to identify a phishing email.

Explore healthcare security trends in new Microsoft report

How cyber criminals target healthcare organizations

Financially motivated cyber criminals are using an evolving set of ransomware tactics on healthcare organizations. One common approach involves two steps. First, they gain access to an organization’s network, often using social engineering tactics through a phishing email or text. Then, they use that access to deploy ransomware to encrypt and lock healthcare systems and data so they can seek a ransom for their release.

“Once ransomware is deployed, attackers typically move quickly to encrypt critical systems and data, often within a matter of hours,” said Jack Mott of Microsoft Threat Intelligence in the Microsoft ransomware report. “They target essential infrastructure, such as patient records, diagnostic systems, and even billing operations, to maximize the impact and pressure on healthcare organizations to pay the ransom.”

Social engineering tactics often involve convincing the email recipient to act in ways they normally wouldn’t, such as clicking on an unknown link, and using the tactics of urgency, emotion, and habit. Social engineering fraud is a serious problem. In just this fiscal year, a staggering 389 healthcare institutions across the United States fell victim to ransomware attacks, according to the 2024 Microsoft Digital Defense Report.⁶ The aftermath was severe, resulting in network closures, offline systems, delays in critical medical operations, and rescheduled appointments.

Another common approach is ransomware as a service (RaaS), a cybercrime business model growing in popularity. The RaaS model is an agreement between an operator, who develops extortion tools, and an affiliate, who deploys the ransomware. Both parties benefit from a successful ransomware and extortion attack, and it’s “democratized access to sophisticated ransomware tools,” Mott said. This model enables cyber criminals without the means of developing their own tools to launch their nefarious activities. Sometimes, they may simply purchase network access from a cybercrime group that has already breached a network. RaaS severely widens the risk to healthcare organizations, making ransomware more accessible and frequent.

Cybercrime tactics continue to grow in sophistication. Microsoft is continually tracking the latest cybercrime threats to support our customers and increase the knowledge of the entire global community. These threats include actions by threat actor groups Vanilla Tempest and Sangria Tempest, which are known for their financially motivated criminal activities.

US healthcare at risk: Read the report

Take a collective defense approach to boost your cyber resilience and visibility

We recognize that not all organizations have a robust cybersecurity team or even the resources to enable a cybersecurity resilience strategy. This is why it is important for us as a community to come together and share best practices, tools, and guidance. We encourage your organization to collaborate with regional, national, and global healthcare organizations such as Health-ISAC (Information Sharing and Analysis Centers). The Health-ISAC provides healthcare organizations with platforms to exchange threat intelligence. Health-ISAC Chief Security Officer Errol Weiss says these organizations are like “virtual neighborhood watch programs,” sharing threat experiences and defense strategies. 

It’s also important to foster a security-first mindset among healthcare staff. Dr. Christian Dameff and Dr. Jeff Tully, Co-directors of the University of California San Diego Center for Healthcare Cybersecurity, emphasize that breaking down silos between IT security teams, emergency managers, and clinical staff to develop cohesive incident response plans is key. They also recommend running high-fidelity clinical simulations that expose doctors and nurses to real-world cyberattack scenarios.

For rural hospitals that provide critical services to the communities they serve across the US, Microsoft created the Microsoft Cybersecurity Program for Rural Hospitals, which provides affordable access to Microsoft security solutions, builds cybersecurity capacity, and helps solve root challenges through innovation.

For healthcare organizations that have the resources, as part of this report we provide guidance on how to:

• Establish a robust governance framework.
• Create an incident response and detection plan. Then be prepared to execute it efficiently during an actual attack to minimize damage and ensure a quick recovery.
• Implement continuous monitoring and real-time detection capabilities.
• Educate your organization using our cybersecurity awareness and education #BeCyberSmart Kit.
• Harness more resilience strategies found in the report.

Given the serious cyberthreats against healthcare organizations, it’s critical to protect your assets by understanding the situation and taking steps to prevent it. For more details on the current healthcare cyberthreat landscape and ransomware threats, and for more in-depth guidance on boosting resilience, read the “US healthcare at risk: Strengthening resiliency against ransomware attacks” report and watch our healthcare threat intelligence briefing video, which is included in the report. To stay up-to-date on the latest threat intelligence insights and get actionable guidance for your security efforts, bookmark Microsoft Security Insider.

Learn more

To learn more about Microsoft Security solutions, visit our website. Bookmark the Security blog to keep up with our expert coverage on security matters. Also, follow us on LinkedIn (Microsoft Security) and X (@MSFTSecurity) for the latest news and updates on cybersecurity.

¹How to protect your networks from ransomware, justice.gov.

²Threat Landscape: Healthcare and Public Health Sector, April 2024. Microsoft Threat Intelligence.

³On average, healthcare organizations lose $900,000 per day to downtime from ransomware attacks, Comparitech. March 6, 2024.

⁴Healthcare Ransomware Attacks Continue to Increase in Number and Severity, The HIPAA Journal. September 2024.

⁵Ransomware Attack Associated With Disruptions at Adjacent Emergency Departments in the US, JAMA Network. May 8, 2023.

⁶Microsoft Digital Defense Report 2024.

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Learn more about how Microsoft is enhancing healthcare with data and responsible AI. Read the latest Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare announcements.

We are thrilled to announce the general availability of healthcare data solutions in Microsoft Fabric, a comprehensive solution that enables organizations to ingest, store, and analyze healthcare-related data from various sources and modalities into one unified data store for analytics and AI. Also, the healthcare application templates in Microsoft Purview, an innovative suite of features designed to help you govern your healthcare data with confidence, is now available in public preview. With these advancements, Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare now offers an expanded bundle of general availability services to further empower healthcare organizations in their digital transformation journey.

EPAM, renowned for supporting Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare clients with advanced technical solutions, has experienced substantial benefits from leveraging healthcare data solutions in Microsoft Fabric. These advantages manifest as heightened customer satisfaction, notable cost savings, and accelerated project timelines. The solution’s impact is particularly noteworthy as it provides healthcare clients with reliable, AI-ready data in an efficient manner.  

“For a recent AI and Advanced Analytics Solutions, our projections estimated a significant investment to develop the necessary data products for the analytics needs, with a substantial portion dedicated to establishing the data foundation. However, with the launch of this solution and a successful pilot, we were able to revise the project scope significantly. This resulted in more than 40% reduction in implementation time and costs, highlighting the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of the solution.” 
—Brian Blanchard, Cloud Chief Technology Officer, EPAM

Unify your multi-modal healthcare data for analytics and AI with healthcare data solutions in Microsoft Fabric 

The general availability of healthcare data solutions in Microsoft Fabric represents a significant leap in the journey towards data-centric healthcare. This all-encompassing platform streamlines the integration, preservation, and examination of diverse biomedical data, bridging the gaps between isolated data repositories and fostering powerful analytical insights. 

Healthcare data solutions in Microsoft Fabric enables healthcare organizations to ingest, store, and analyze data from various sources and modalities. These data solutions provide a set of capabilities that enable a multi-modal biomedical lakehouse, which can handle clinical, imaging, claims, conversational, and social determinants of health (SDOH) data. It adheres to Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) and Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM) standards, introduces data transformations, and ensures a secure, regulatory-compliant framework for managing data. 

By using healthcare data solutions, you can benefit from the following features:  

• A unified data model that supports industry standards such as FHIR and DICOM. 

• A rich set of data transformation and enrichment tools that prepare your data for analysis, as well as add clinical and demographic annotations.  

• A suite of data visualization and cohorting experiences, that can help you discover patterns, trends, and outliers in your data, as well as create dashboards and reports.  

• A secure and compliant environment that aims to meet the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), Health Information Trust Alliance (HITRUST), and General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) requirements, with role-based access control, data governance, and data lineage.  

Additionally, we are pleased to announce the public preview of additional functionality that enhances the existing capabilities within our healthcare data solutions offering. These include: 

• Conversational Data Integration: Enable customers to send their conversational data, such as patient conversations from DAX Copilot to Fabric. By sending DAX audio files, transcripts, and draft clinical notes to Fabric, customers and partners can leverage various native tools in Azure and Fabric to analyze this data or combine it with other data to generate comprehensive insights. 

• Social determinants of health public datasets transformation: Ingest, persist, harmonize, and consume SDOH public datasets such as Location Affordability Index, Food Environment Atlas and Rural Atlas from the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), Environmental Justice Index, ACS Education Attainment, SDOH Dataset from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), Australian Socio-Economic Indexes for Areas (SEIFA), and United Kingdom Indices of Deprivation to enable healthcare organizations to identify risks and health-related social needs to create equitable health care for all patients and communities. 

• Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Claim and Claim Line Feed Files (CMS CCLF) claims data ingestion: Streamline the ingestion of CMS CCLF claims data and harmonize with clinical, imaging, and SDOH data to unlock actionable insights on patients and populations. Use this data to understand and manage healthcare costs, identify care gaps, and help health outcomes. 

• Care management analytics: Leverage unified healthcare data and care management analytical templates to enhance patient care by identifying high-risk individuals, optimizing treatment plans, and improving care coordination and empower your organization to deliver personalized, efficient, and proactive care. 

• Data discovery and cohorting: An integrated workflow that allows you to create, manage, analyze, and share patient cohorts. Create cohorts using natural language and export cohorts into AI pipelines, notebooks, or downstream applications.

With healthcare data solutions, you can unlock the value of your data and enable data-driven healthcare. You can use your data to help improve patient outcomes, enhance population health, optimize operational efficiency, and accelerate research and innovation. You can also leverage the power of AI and machine learning to build predictive models, identify risk factors, and personalize interventions.  

Unlock the full potential of your healthcare data with the new features and capabilities now available in Microsoft Fabric’s healthcare data solutions. Don’t miss out on the opportunity to revolutionize your healthcare services; start your free trial now.

Healthcare data solutions in Microsoft Fabric

Unlock the full potential of your healthcare data with the new features and capabilities now available

Learn how

Protect your data with the healthcare application templates in Microsoft Purview 

Healthcare organizations need to govern their data with assured confidence—guaranteeing robust security and strict compliance. Microsoft Purview is a unified data governance service that helps you discover, catalog, and classify data across your data estate. The healthcare application templates for Microsoft Purview accelerates our customers journey by providing healthcare-specific classifications, glossaries for healthcare standards, and guidelines on how to use them together with healthcare data solutions in Microsoft Fabric. 

“Healthcare application templates in Microsoft Purview strengthens Microsoft’s commitment to support its clients in the healthcare industry. Here at Sentara we have been leveraging its glossaries and classifications to identify and tag our critical assets. We look forward to partnering with them on their journey continuous advancement in data governance.”
—Abdul Ghani Mohammed, IT Manager (Data Governance & Data Quality), Sentara Health 

Identify sensitive healthcare data with healthcare classifications 

One of the key challenges of governing healthcare data is identifying and protecting sensitive information, such as protected health information (PHI) or personal identifiable information (PII). Microsoft Purview addresses this challenge by providing a set of healthcare-specific classifications based on HIPAA privacy rules. These classifications cover important healthcare classifications such as date of admission, date of discharge, and more. You can also create custom classifications using regular expressions or keywords, allowing you to automatically discover and classify sensitive data across different data sources like Azure Data Lake Storage, Azure SQL Database, Azure Synapse Analytics, and Power BI. 

Understand your healthcare data with glossaries based on healthcare standards 

Healthcare data is often complex and diverse, coming from various sources and formats. To help you understand and manage your data, Microsoft Purview provides glossaries for healthcare standards such as Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) and Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM). These glossaries contain definitions and metadata for common healthcare terms and concepts, improving data quality, consistency, and interoperability across your data estate. 

Test your governance solution with healthcare sample data 

Sample data is essential for evaluating, testing, and validating the custom healthcare classifications and glossaries. By providing a realistic and relevant healthcare dataset, customers can validate if the Purview healthcare application templates meet their organization’s needs without bringing in their own production or sample data. 

Protect your data in healthcare data solutions in Microsoft Fabric 

The healthcare application templates provided by Microsoft Purview facilitate the discovery, cataloging, and classification of data, thereby enhancing data quality, consistency, and interoperability across the healthcare data estate.  

Using these templates, you can enhance your healthcare data solutions in Microsoft Fabric with data governance capabilities that help protect your data. You can use Microsoft Purview to scan your healthcare data solutions in Microsoft Fabric data lake and catalog your data assets with classifications and glossaries. You can also use Microsoft Purview to monitor your data lineage, data quality, and data access across your healthcare data solutions in Microsoft Fabric pipelines and applications. By integrating Microsoft Purview with healthcare data solutions in Microsoft Fabric, you can gain a holistic and trusted view of your healthcare data and leverage it for better insights and outcomes. This unified approach not only strengthens security but also ensures strict compliance, enabling healthcare organizations to govern their data with confidence.  

Learn more about how to get access to the public preview, and learn how you can use healthcare application templates to protect your data in the healthcare data solutions in Microsoft Fabric. 

Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare is helping your organization shape a healthier future with data and AI 

We are excited to strengthen our data and AI investments through the Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare. Our healthcare solutions are built on a foundation of trust and Microsoft’s responsible AI principles. Through these innovations, we are making it easier for our partners and customers to create connected experiences at every point of care, empower their healthcare workforce, and unlock the value from their data using data standards that are important to the healthcare industry. 

Learn more about all of our solutions in healthcare: Microsoft Cloud Solution Center.

The post Power healthcare AI with unified and protected multi-modal healthcare data appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs.

Healthcare systems face numerous challenges, including workforce shortages, rising costs, and increasing patient care demands. Clinical staff in health organizations are overburdened with workloads resulting in high levels of stress and long hours, burnout among healthcare professionals, and higher rates of attrition and staff shortage. Generative AI offers a potential solution to these challenges by automating administrative tasks, analyzing vast amounts of data for actionable insights, and assisting healthcare professionals in decision making. 

Healthcare agent service in Microsoft Copilot Studio

Revolutionizing healthcare with generative AI solutions.

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To address this, Microsoft is announcing the public preview of healthcare agent service for Microsoft Copilot Studio. Copilot Studio serves as the single platform to build powerful and connected agents, offering a comprehensive suite of tools and features. With the addition of the healthcare agent service, users can now create safer healthcare agents by using generative AI and a healthcare-specialized stack. This service allows customers to build their own agents with reusable healthcare-specific features, pre-built healthcare intelligence from credible sources, templates, and pre-built healthcare use cases. It ensures that these agents meet industry standards and address safety in healthcare by offering state-of-the-art healthcare specific chat, clinical, and compliance safeguards.

The healthcare agent service enables healthcare organizations to develop their own generative AI-powered agents for patients or clinicians, supporting diverse use cases across appointment scheduling, clinical trial matching, patient triaging, and more. The service also supports extending an organization’s agents with additional plugins, no matter where the plugins were built.

Reinforcing our commitment to responsible AI safeguards

Healthcare is a truly unique industry. It is a sensitive domain that impacts people’s health and well-being. When it comes to generative AI, issues like fabrications, omissions and inaccurate answers become more important to address and need to be handled in a way that is specific to the needs of the healthcare industry.

To address these concerns, we are making our clinical safeguards APIs available as private preview to select customers, to be used for evaluation and additional verification of generative AI outputs. The following safeguards will be available as part of this private preview:

• Clinical fabrications and omissions detection, helping detect them in generative answers compared to grounding data.
• Clinical anchoring, providing clinical context and concept identification to clinical elements within prompts, making them more prominent to the AI system.
• Clinical provenance, helping identify the source of claims against the grounding data
• Clinical coding verification, helping verify that clinical codes provided by generative AI actually exist and are relevant to context.
• Clinical semantic validation, helping verify that responses conform to known valid clinical semantic structures.

Revolutionizing healthcare with generative AI

Recently, two prominent healthcare institutions, Cleveland Clinic and Galilee Medical Center, have been at the forefront of integrating advanced AI technologies into their services. Their collaboration with Microsoft has led to significant advancements in patient care and information accessibility.

Cleveland Clinic took part in the private preview of healthcare agent service in Microsoft Copilot Studio.

“We are constantly seeking innovative ways to improve the patient experience and provide seamless access to relevant information. Utilizing AI technologies opens up new possibilities for how patients can interact with us, and we appreciate the opportunity to collaborate with Microsoft on this project. Our goal is to help develop AI-powered tools that will make it easier for our patients to find the information they need, ask health-related questions, and navigate our services”

Cleveland Clinic

Galilee Medical Center has also embraced advanced AI solutions to simplify complex medical data for patients, it has been using Clinical safeguards API as an early adopter.

“In collaboration with Microsoft, we developed a patient-friendly radiology report, powered by [Microsoft] Azure OpenAI [Service], making complex radiology data accessible in simple, layman’s terms. Patients not only receive this simplified report but can also ask follow-up questions. They can query specific findings and track how each element relates to the original radiology report. Leveraging the Clinical Provenance Safeguard, which is part of the Clinical safeguards API, we ensured traceability, providing clear evidence of where each piece of simplified information originates from within the original medical report.”

Dr. Dan Paz, Head of Radiology Department, Galilee Medical Center

Do more with your data with Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare

With healthcare agent service in Microsoft Copilot Studio infused with generative AI and healthcare safeguards, health organizations can transform their medical professionals and patient experiences, integrate those with health data services and with AI models that discover new insights using the power of machine learning and AI in a safer way, and manage protected health information (PHI) data with confidence. Enable your future of healthcare innovation with Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare. We look forward to being your partner as you build the future of health.

• Discover how we are shaping the future of health with cutting-edge solutions and collaborative efforts.
• Learn more in the healthcare agent service in Copilot Studio documentation.
• Apply for the private preview of clinical safeguards in healthcare agent service in Copilot Studio.
• Explore the possibilities with Microsoft Copilot Studio.
• Expand your knowledge about Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare.

Sources:

1. Burned Out on Burnout — The Urgency of Equity-Minded Structural Approaches to Support Nurses

The post Introducing healthcare agent service in Microsoft Copilot Studio appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs.

Existing language models have revolutionized how we interact and use powerful AI models for text-based use cases in healthcare. But the practice of modern medicine is chiefly multimodal. Effectively assessing the complete picture of patient health requires moving beyond medical text comprehension to sophisticated AI models capable of integrating and analyzing diverse data sources across modalities such as medical imaging, genomics, clinical records, and more.

The creation of comprehensive multimodal models has traditionally been hindered by the need for large-scale, integrated datasets and the significant computational power needed to train these models. These barriers have limited the ability of many healthcare organizations to fully leverage AI.

Microsoft Azure AI Studio

Transform the way your organization uses AI.

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Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare helps to bridge this gap and accelerate AI development. We’re announcing the launch of healthcare AI models, a collection of cutting-edge multimodal medical imaging foundation models available in the Microsoft Azure AI model catalog. Developed in collaboration with Microsoft Research and strategic partners, these AI models are specifically designed for healthcare organizations to test, fine-tune, and build AI solutions tailored to their specific needs, all while minimizing the extensive compute and data requirements typically associated with building multimodal models from scratch. With healthcare AI models, health professionals have the tools they need to explore the full potential of AI to transform patient care.

Healthcare AI models include:

• MedImageInsight: An embedding model enables sophisticated image analysis, including classification and similarity search in medical imaging. Healthcare organizations and researchers can use the model embeddings and build adapters for their specific tasks, streamlining workflows in radiology, pathology, ophthalmology, dermatology, and other modalities. For example, researchers can explore how the model can be used to build tools to automatically route imaging scans to specialists, or flag potential abnormalities for further review, enabling improved efficiency and patient outcomes.¹
• MedImageParse: Designed for precise image segmentation, this model covers various imaging modalities, including x-rays, CTs, MRIs, ultrasounds, dermatology images, and pathology slides. It can be fine-tuned for specific applications such as tumor segmentation or organ delineation, allowing developers to test and validate the ability to leverage AI for highly targeted cancer and other disease detection, diagnostics, and treatment planning.²
• CXRReportGen: Chest x-rays are the most common radiology procedure globally. They’re crucial because they help doctors diagnose a wide range of conditions—from lung infections to heart problems. These images are often the first step in detecting health issues that affect millions of people. By incorporating current and prior images, along with key patient information, this multimodal AI model generates detailed, structured reports from chest x-rays, highlighting AI-generated findings directly on the images to align with human-in-the-loop workflows. Researchers can test this capability and the potential to accelerate turnaround times while enhancing the diagnostic precision of radiologists. This model has demonstrated exceptional performance on the industry standard MIMIC-CXR benchmark.³

These foundational models can accelerate the arrival of groundbreaking AI models that bring intelligent workflows, efficient report generation, and advanced view identification and segmentation to the radiologist experience. In addition to supporting report accuracy, AI can help advance patient care by unlocking new insights from radiology and pathology and genomics, accelerating the discovery of new treatments for disease, and predicting outcomes and optimal treatment plans.

Resources are no longer a barrier to innovation

With so many demands on healthcare and life sciences organizations, it’s challenging to dedicate time, resources, and budget to experiment with AI. Healthcare AI models feature open source, pretrained models that represent some of the highest level of performance currently achievable on public benchmarks.

In aggregate, the healthcare AI models and others in our catalog of multimodal medical foundation models span a wide range of modalities and a growing catalog of competencies, enabling the testing and validation of a wide range of use cases, including:

• Using an image embedding model to search for similar images or facilitate detection of anomalies that could indicate potential data issues or system errors (Fig. 2: Image embedding).
• Building an adapter to the embedding model for a specific task. (Fig. 3: Adapter to specific task)
• Fine-tuning pretrained unimodal models to create a narrow model. (Fig. 4: Fine-tuning for a specific task)
• Integrating language models to enable the extraction of insights across modalities and enhance the interpretability of multimodal data. (Fig. 5: Adapter to general reasoner)
• Connecting different data modalities for a more comprehensive, holistic view of data that derives new insights and enables the discovery of previously hidden correlations and patterns.

With the flexibility and breadth of models, individual unimodal health models can be used independently, connected to different modalities, or further combined with advanced general reasoning models like GPT-4o and Phi to create powerful multimodal models without the need for massive integrated datasets from the outset. Azure AI Studio and healthcare AI models complement the healthcare data solutions available in Microsoft Fabric, creating a unified environment for comprehensive analysis and vital patient insights.

Created by a collaborative network of partners

Our ecosystem of partners dedicated to advancing the industry’s use of AI made healthcare AI models possible. Paige, Providence Healthcare, Nvidia, and M42 contributed foundational models to the catalog, spanning pathology, 3D medical imaging, biomedical research, and medical knowledge sharing. Developed under a core set of shared AI principles, these models provide a powerful starting point for organizations as they launch their own AI projects, while embedding responsible practices across the industry. Microsoft is committed to responsibly scaling AI and to listen, learn, and improve our tools. We work with organizations to help them harness the data to build the predictive and analytical power required for their own competitive advantage.

The open access to AI models on the catalog and modular approach allows healthcare organizations to customize solutions, maintain control over their data, and build trust through shared development and oversight. This approach aligns with our commitment to responsible AI, ensuring our technologies meet ethical standards and earn the trust of the medical community.

The catalog’s ongoing evolution will be a collaborative effort—not just among those providing foundational models, but also with the support of customers and partners that are building on these models to develop their own research or clinical systems.

Microsoft is committed to fostering transparency and community involvement within an ecosystem that empowers partners, developers, and researchers to push the boundaries of what is possible in healthcare and empower healthcare and life sciences organizations to achieve more. It’s not just about building models; it’s about unlocking new insights, accelerating innovation, and ultimately improving patient outcomes on a global scale, from pioneering cutting-edge pharmaceutical research to delivering life-changing medical care.

Innovation in action

Several customers are already taking advantage of the possibilities unlocked by healthcare AI models.

Mass General Brigham, as well as the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine, Public Health and UW Health are targeting advanced report generation from medical imaging analysis. With ever-increasing imaging volumes colliding with the ongoing combination of radiologist burnout and shortages, a state-of-the-art medical imaging model can be used to build an application that can transform a medical image into a draft note. Projects like these can transform the efficiency of core healthcare workflows, supporting better outcomes for patients while helping clinicians focus on the hands-on components of their roles.

“Grounded report generation from medical images is a new frontier. Our shared collaboration brings diverse expertise to developing, testing, and validating new models. We are working to identify and overcome the challenges of how models can be integrated into real clinical systems and workflows so that a pathway exists for these capabilities to have the potential to impact real patient care in the future.”

—Richard Bruce MD, radiology Vice Chair of Informatics, University of Wisconsin-Madison

In life sciences, Paige is working to combine radiology, pathology, and genomic insights for a more comprehensive approach to disease diagnosis, aimed at accelerating the discovery of new treatments. AI has a key role to play throughout the healthcare continuum, and advances made in our understanding of risks, diseases, and treatments will be instrumental for improving downstream patient care.

“The collaboration with Microsoft has enabled Paige to unlock insights from millions of digitized pathology slides, clinical reports, and genomic data, to gain a more holistic understanding of cancer. Together, we are pioneering frontier multi-modal AI models that have the potential to accelerate and redefine cancer detection, diagnosis, and treatment. We are thrilled to continue to lead the charge and shape the future of precision oncology.”

—Razik Yousfi, Chief Executive Officer & Chief Technology Officer of Paige

And it’s not just human health that healthcare AI models are supporting; Mars PETCARE is exploring use cases in veterinary medicine, such as data evaluation for radiology and pathology teams. Treating pets is every bit as complicated as treating humans, so this work just goes to show the platform’s versatility—each of these models can be turned to a novel application with the right approach.

“Our strategic partnership with Microsoft represents a significant leap forward in veterinary diagnostics. As early adopters of AI in digital pathology and radiology, we’ve seen firsthand how this technology can transform animal care. By combining our veterinary expertise with Microsoft’s frontier AI models, we’re not just advancing diagnostics, we’re creating a better world for pets. This collaboration will accelerate our AI R&D [research and development] efforts, empowering veterinarians with more accurate and efficient tools. Together, we’re setting new standards in veterinary medicine and reinforcing our commitment to innovation in animal health.”

—Jerry Martin, Vice President, Research & Development, Mars Science & Diagnostics

“Sectra is exploring how image and text embeddings from foundational models can be leveraged to transform workflow tasks in radiology. Traditionally managed through static configurations, these tasks are now being revamped to adapt to the diverse nature of healthcare data using generative AI.”

—Fredrik Häll, Head of Product, SECTRA

“Topcon Healthcare is building a multimodal and three-dimensional ophthalmic imaging Foundation Model (FM) to phenotype healthy populations by leveraging data collected from large population-based screening environments. This FM facilitates exploration of biomarkers in the eye that are early indicators of eye and systemic diseases.”

—Mary Durbin, Vice President of Clinical Science, Topcon Healthcare

“We are excited to offer Med42, our leading clinical LLM, through Azure AI Studio. With Med42, we are harnessing the power of AI to impactfully disrupt traditional healthcare systems and deliver value for clinicians, scientists, and patients. With advancements like our Med42 suite of healthcare foundation models to MEDIC, our comprehensive clinical evaluation framework for LLMs, M42 is advancing global innovation in healthcare.”

—Dr. Ronnie Rajan, Associate Director, AI & Applied Science, M42

“The development of foundational AI models in pathology and medical imaging is expected to drive significant advancements in cancer research and diagnostics. These models can complement human expertise by providing insights beyond traditional visual interpretation, and as we move toward a more integrated, multimodal approach, will reshape the future of medicine.”

—Carlo Bifulco, MD, Chief Medical Officer, Providence Genomics and a co-author of the Prov-GigaPath study

Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare is helping your organization shape a healthier future with data and AI

We’re excited to strengthen our data and AI investments through the Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare. Our healthcare solutions are built on a foundation of trust and Microsoft’s Responsible AI principles. Through these innovations, we’re making it easier for our partners and customers to create connected experiences at every point of care, empower their healthcare workforce, and unlock the value from their data using data standards that are important to the healthcare industry.

Learn more about AI with healthcare

• Join us at HLTH2024, Booth #4004 to see healthcare AI models in action.
• Starting on October 20, 2024, visit Microsoft Azure AI Studio to learn more about healthcare AI models and explore how its foundational models could help you transform the way your organization uses AI.
• Connect and learn about Microsoft Research’s advancements in AI and language models
• Learn more about healthcare data solutions in Microsoft Fabric.
• Watch the AI for Business Transformation: Multimodal Models interview.

Medical device disclaimer: Microsoft products and services (1) are not designed, intended or made available as a medical device, and (2) are not designed or intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, treatment, or judgment and should not be used to replace or as a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, treatment, or judgment. Customers/partners are responsible for ensuring solutions comply with applicable laws and regulations.

Generative AI does not always provide accurate or complete information. AI outputs do not reflect the opinions of Microsoft. Customers/partners will need to thoroughly test and evaluate whether an AI tool is fit for the intended use and identify and mitigate any risks to end users associated with its use. Customers/partners should thoroughly review the product documentation for each tool.

¹MedImageInsight: An Open-Source Embedding Model for General Domain Medical Imaging, 2024.

²BiomedParse: a biomedical foundation model for image parsing of everything everywhere all at once, 2024.

³MAIRA-2: Grounded Radiology Report Generation, 2024.

The post Unlocking next-generation AI capabilities with healthcare AI models appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs.

Growing demand, excessive documentation requirements, and inefficient workflows are all contributing to nurses’ exhaustion, feelings of burnout, and high turnover rates.

Based on recent conversations I’ve had with nursing executives, one thing is crystal clear: to make a real difference for patients and clinicians, innovation needs to flow throughout the care continuum—and the nursing workflow is no exception. It is the most ubiquitous given nurses comprise the largest workforce in healthcare.

With 32% of nurses planning to exit the US workforce this year¹ and the World Health Organization (WHO) predicting a shortage of 4.5 million nurses by 2030,² the urgency to deliver technology to support the nursing profession is felt more than ever.

Nursing info hub

Empower nurses to efficiently document care

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Listening to nurses’ voices

The people who truly understand the intricacies and challenges of nursing workflows are those who live and breathe it every day. To build an innovative solution that’s impactful, nurses and their leadership need to be the guiding light of the process, from design to launch and all the way through to successful adoption by the workforce.

As Lea Ann Arnold, Director of Nursing Informatics at Northwestern Medicine, explains:

“Nurses need to be at the table. They need to be a voice; they need to be able to help technology teams figure out you can’t just put a solution out there. You must get into the actual workflows and understand how nurses work.”

Lea Ann Arnold, Director of Nursing Informatics at Northwestern Medicine

Terry McDonnell, Senior Vice President and Chief Nursing Executive at Duke Health, agrees: “The number one key in ensuring that any technology is going to be successful or useful for nurses is to really involve nurses in the design.”

“Setting nurses up for success and making sure that they are part of the solution is crucial. We cannot expect them to accept a solution just because we think it is the way to do it. We need to bring nurses along with the decision and make sure they feel that they understand how to use the technology,” said Tammy Daniel, Senior Vice President and Chief Nursing Officer at Baptist Health of Northeast Florida. 

AI in the nursing workflow

AI is rapidly evolving technology, and it’s crucial that its powers are extended to nursing workflows. Nurses need to manage their workloads in a way that doesn’t lead to increased stress and burnout, allowing nurses to focus their energy on patient care.

“It’s so critical for our nurses to understand AI,” says Arnold. “Then they start to realize that that adding AI is not meant to replace the human factor, but it’s really meant to augment and take off that work that could be done by a machine.”

Microsoft is committed to empowering customers with cutting-edge tools designed to harness the power of generative AI. Our dedication to innovation continues in our latest investment in industry-specific solutions that enable businesses to adopt and integrate AI technologies swiftly and efficiently. We are seizing the remarkable opportunity that AI presents in healthcare, propelling the industry towards a transformative future.

Creating a purpose-built solution with nurses at the table

Though physicians and nurses work closely together to treat and care for patients, the working day of a nurse looks very different to that of a physician, and nursing documentation workflow is likewise separate and distinct. Nurses are mobile during their shift, moving between rooms to see their patients. They have bedside conversations and capture patient information in highly structured formats such as flowsheets.

Microsoft has been on a multi-year journey to address the challenge of nursing documentation and complex workflows with sophisticated AI to build a solution we’ve deployed at multiple customers.

We gathered feedback from hundreds of frontline nurses, nurse managers, and executives. Our team has spent hours shadowing nurses during their shifts to see how they carry out their tasks and to discover where the greatest points of friction exist throughout their day.

We established the ambient category five years ago for physician documentation and now hundreds of organizations use our AI capabilities for clinical workflow. We are building on that success and defining the standard for AI in nursing. 

“Patients are complex, and we need to think about how we’re going to document differently—because ultimately the value of nursing is back at the bedside, it is not the taxing work of documenting in a flowsheet. With the work that Microsoft has done with providers, I was very excited to be chosen as one of the pilot sites to truly inform that roadmap.”

Gretchen Brown, Chief Nursing Information Officer at Stanford Health Care

We are actively collaborating with several leading healthcare organizations—including Advocate Health, Baptist Health of Northeast Florida, Duke Health, Intermountain Health Saint Joseph Hospital, Mercy, Northwestern Medicine, NYU Langone Health, Stanford Health Care, and Tampa General Hospital—and building an AI solution that addresses nursing documentation by completing flowsheets supported by ambient technology, allowing nurses to focus less on paperwork and more on their patients.​ Many of these organizations have already deployed a preview version as we further optimize the capabilities before making them generally available.

Tapping into our proven track record with Dragon Medical and electronic health record (EHR) embedded workflows, our initial work in this space builds on a longstanding strategic relationship and joint development collaboration with Epic.

Explore the potential of AI for nursing

Nursing is on the brink of significant innovation. We see this with the momentum of virtual nursing, where health systems are investing in technologies focused on supporting nursing care teams. We aim to meet the immediate pain point of documentation and, in time, fundamentally reshape the experience of nurses, helping to evolve that experience into something intuitive and efficient, where the non-patient care work can be facilitated by cutting edge technologies working in the backdrop, returning the human connection of patient and nurse to the forefront.

As I engage in the dialogue between nursing leaders and industry innovators, I have no doubt the future will be transformed. Collectively, we have the ambition and the conviction to point these breakthrough technologies at our most critical problems, in support of some of the most essential members of the healthcare industry: our nurses!

¹Surveyed nurses consider leaving direct patient care at elevated rates, McKinsey, 2022.

²Nursing and midwifery, World Health Organization, 2024.

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In a Microsoft survey of 879 clinicians using DAX Copilot (July 2024)¹:

• 5 minutes saved per clinician per encounter on average
• 77% say it improves documentation quality
• 70% say it improves work-life balance, and reduces feelings of burnout and fatigue

In a survey² of more than 400 patients whose clinicians are using DAX Copilot:

• 93% say their clinician is more personable and conversational
• 85% say their clinician is more focused
• 90% say their clinician spends less time on the computer

Get documentation done your way

Like many clinicians, you have your own documentation style and preferences for organizing and communicating clinical information. Allowing you to choose your own format and customize your style helps cut down on documentation time by letting you input details in a way that makes the most sense for you and your practice. 

Style and formatting customizations—design and define your style

Clinicians spend 25% more time on documentation now than 10 years ago³

Whether you prefer your documentation to be concise or verbose, in bulleted or paragraph form, DAX Copilot lets you easily design and define your style, and apply these preferences automatically or on-demand, including adjusting pronouns with a single click. 

This “do it your way” approach makes documentation easier and expedites your ability to recognize and retrieve information later.  

More than AI notes

Beyond automating notes, DAX Copilot now supports a series of new advanced AI-powered capabilities including referral letters, summaries of evidence, after-visit summaries, encounter summaries, and coaching. Designed to further enhance, improve, or ease workflows and how clinicians capture and create patient-related documentation, these capabilities simplify and streamline processes—giving clinicians more time to focus on taking better care of their patients, and themselves.

Referral letters—more from your patient conversations without extra work

Clinicians spend 50% of their day on documentation⁴

The process is simple and seamless. Once DAX Copilot has drafted your clinical note, it can quickly and easily use the same information gathered during a patient encounter to create a referral letter. 

While serving as a critical communication tool to ensure a smooth transition of care, the process to create a referral can be tedious and time-consuming. 

Copilot automatically extracts key information, medical history, and the requested services along with pertinent test or imaging results from notes. Information is promptly repurposed in the form of a referral letter and readily available to facilitate next steps.

Summarize diagnosis evidence—helps validate medical information in your note

Clinicians see up to 20 patients a day⁵

More than just linking notes to transcripts, DAX Copilot curates diagnosis evidence from subjective elements such as symptoms, objective elements including labs and imaging, as well as other relevant information shared during the encounter.

Clinicians ask patients questions to assess their symptoms, the severity of those symptoms, and any notable changes. But patients may not remember everything and are even less likely to know specific details about previous testing. Copilot’s automated summaries of evidence provide a quick, objective, and reliable way to validate a patient’s clinical history. Instead of just linking to a key word, it cites the origin and context of any included information—allowing clinicians to proceed with trust and confidence.

​After visit summaries—empower patients without adding to your workload

Patients forget about 40 to 80% of medical information⁶

Between the stress of their situation and potential confusion around medical terminology, patients may have difficulty remembering or processing their doctor’s advice. To help them follow their care plan, DAX Copilot can create succinct and easy-to-understand summaries—highlighting key details and important instructions for patients and their caretakers. 

Most medical instructions are given to patients verbally even though written instructions help increase the likelihood of those instructions being followed properly—especially when a patient relies on others to assist with their care needs. Copilot converts clinical documentation from encounter visits into written patient-friendly after-visit summaries, providing an easy reference for key clinical highlights and important directions. It helps eliminate forgotten or ‘misremembered’ information and increases patient awareness of—and ability to adhere to—your care recommendations.  

Summarize encounter—get a quick refresher on a patient before finalizing the notes

2,500 average patient panel size over 12 to 18 months⁷

DAX Copilot displays a synopsis of the encounter that includes key facts and details in the mobile and desktop app instantly—streamlining workflow and reducing cognitive load.  

You can’t be expected to retain every detail of an encounter. To help remember key points before finalizing the note, DAX Copilot provides concise clinical summaries of information on demand. Now it’s easier to review an encounter quickly and efficiently before moving on to your next patient. 

Coaching—identifies areas where you can include more information verbally for more complete clinical notes

86% of denials could be avoided⁸

Using each encounter recording, DAX Copilot evaluates your patient notes to help you capture more appropriate details. Whether including family history or specific metrics, like body temperature or body mass index (BMI), it suggests areas where you can verbalize more information to create more complete notes.​  

Omitting pertinent information may affect your ability—and that of subsequent providers—to properly diagnose and treat patients or it could result in a claim denial or improper reimbursement for care delivered. Copilot combs through encounter transcripts to check that important details—such as information necessary to identify the patient, relevant history, social and lifestyle factors, physical exam findings as well as your assessment and treatment plan—are included. It also analyzes observations, findings, and diagnosis to help evaluate if there are sufficient details to support medical coding. These suggestions help promote more complete and accurate documentation which benefits patient health as well as the financial health of healthcare organizations.

Why DAX Copilot? 

More than just AI notes, DAX Copilot offers a more capable and comprehensive experience

Our technological leadership, scale, and world-class infrastructure and support allows you to meet today’s demands while providing extensibility for the future. Better than typing, scribes, or other ambient solutions, DAX Copilot harnesses the power of AI to automate workflows that extend beyond clinical documentation. 

Backed by a proven track record and decades of clinical expertise, DAX Copilot is part of the Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare and extensive copilot ecosystem. With a seamless integration with Dragon Medical One, users have access to hundreds of advanced features that increase productivity and efficiency pre, during, and post visit. Built on a secure, responsible AI framework and foundation of trust, these collective capabilities offer exceptional value and efficiencies across the entire clinical workflow.   

DAX Copilot

Your clinical documentation and workflow copilot

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¹ Microsoft survey of 879 clinicians across 340 healthcare organizations using DAX Copilot; July 2024 

² Survey of 413 patients conducted by multiple healthcare organizations whose clinicians use DAX Copilot; June 2024.

³ Nuance, Assessing the burden of clinical documentation.

⁴ Advisory Board, Doctors spend 27% of the workday with patients, study finds. What do they do for the rest of it?

⁵ Statista, Number of patients that physicians in the U.S. saw per day from 2012 to 2018, November 30, 2023.

⁶ JRSM, Patients’ memory for medical information, May 2003

⁷ Delaware Journal of Public Health, Considerations for Patient Panel Size, December 2022.

⁸ Becker’s Healthcare, 86% of denials are potentially avoidable: Strategies to better prevent, manage denials, November 2020.

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The Department of Veterans Affairs DEAN’s (Discovery, Education, and Affiliate Networks) Office in partnership with the National Artificial Intelligence Institute (NAII), SimLEARN, and the Office of Primary Care, conducted a 120-Day AI Tech Sprint competition that began in January 2024. More than 150 companies participated. At the awards ceremony held in Washington D.C on May 21, 2024, DAX Copilot, the latest AI technology from Microsoft, was chosen as the top solution in the ambient clinical encounter category.

We are honored and thrilled to be chosen as the winner of this Tech Sprint. DAX Copilot, already in use across hundreds of healthcare organizations, builds on the years of proven success delivering ambient documentation and workflow capabilities to improve clinician-patient experiences and reduce administrative burdens.

DAX Copilot

AI assistant for automated clinical documentation

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Reducing administrative burden and associated burnout

Supporting our frontline healthcare workers by providing cutting edge AI technology to reduce administrative burden and associated burnout was the theme of the Tech Sprint, which consisted of three phases. More than 150 companies entered the Tech Sprint, which was whittled down over the three-phase competition to a final five. DAX Copilot was selected as the winning solution. Microsoft will donate the monetary prize to the National Veterans Legal Services Program (NVLSP), a national non-profit organization that works to ensure that veterans and active-duty personnel receive the benefits they are entitled to due to disabilities resulting from their military service.

Automating clinical documentation and workflows

The primary objective of Track One of the Tech Sprint was to showcase an AI-enabled solution that can securely capture patient-clinician conversations ambiently and extract key information to create clinical documentation automatically. It also needed to have a high degree of security, compliant with Veterans Affairs (VA) privacy and security standards, to protect patient data.

Advanced desired capabilities included those that follow a responsible AI framework and automate and assist clinical workflows such as populating existing heterogenous note templates, generating an after-visit patient summary, and referral letters.

Exceeding expectations

Not only can DAX Copilot securely record encounters ambiently and automatically convert them into clinical documentation in seconds, but it also has a robust set of AI-powered capabilities to assist clinicians with their everyday tasks beyond note creation. It’s based on the Dragon Medical platform, an award-winning, Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) authorized speech recognition solution with hundreds of features relied on by more than 20,000 clinicians across the VA network and 600,000 users worldwide. And it’s all built on Microsoft Azure, the most trusted and comprehensive cloud, governed by a responsible AI framework, and core set of principles.

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During this wave, we’ve invested heavily in the development of copilot templates to enhance capabilities and integration across various industries. These customizable templates offer improved operational efficiency, enhanced customer engagement, and seamless integration with existing technology, all while supporting a diverse, global customer base. Copilots are valuable assets for Microsoft Industry Clouds customers, helping to drive customer and partner success. Microsoft’s partner ecosystem extends our offerings, with systems integrators and independent software vendors enabling factory data ingestion from different systems and building custom UI experiences for the copilot templates on Microsoft Azure AI.

Here’s a look at what’s been delivered since the release plans announcement in January 2024.

Microsoft Cloud for Manufacturing

Microsoft Cloud for Manufacturing is introducing new solutions in preview to optimize factory operations. These include manufacturing data solutions in Microsoft Fabric and a copilot template for factory operations on Azure AI. These solutions enable manufacturers to ingest and unify data from diverse sources, standardize and enrich data for seamless interoperability, and utilize custom copilots for querying data through conversational interfaces. Fabric allows users to maximize the value of factory data and uncover operational insights for production optimization by unifying information and operation technology data into an open and secure data platform. The copilot template for factory operations on Azure AI enhances responsiveness and streamlines communication across teams and roles.

Azure Data Manager for Agriculture

This release of Azure Data Manager for Agriculture includes new copilot templates that can empower organizations to build agriculture copilots with Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service. These templates provide a powerful tool for organizations to use generative AI and data to optimize their operations and engage better with their customers. Customers are bringing generative AI to life for farmers. ITC, a multi-industry enterprise, has created, Krishi Mitra, an AI copilot, developed using Microsoft copilot templates. With this application, ITC seeks to empower farmers by providing them with timely and relevant information that can boost productivity, increase profitability, and enhance climate resilience.

Copilot templates can support use cases based on tillage, planting, crop protection, harvesting, and other types of farm operations. Users can submit queries such as “show me active fields” or “what is the average yield for my field?”. These use cases can help input providers to plan equipment, seeds, applications, and related services and engage better with the farmer.

Using data from Azure Data Manager for Agriculture and other sources, copilots can provide insights on topics like disease risks, yield forecasts, labor needs, crop protection, weather impacts, and harvest windows. Enabling seamless retrieval of data and allowing for plugins, embedded data structures, and subprocesses to be selected as part of the query flow allows organizations to extend their copilot use cases to many roles and scenarios along the agriculture value chain.

Microsoft Cloud for Sovereignty

Microsoft Cloud for Sovereignty is a solution that helps public sector organizations use the public cloud and advanced technologies while helping meet security, sovereignty, and regulatory requirements. The latest release of Microsoft Cloud for Sovereignty introduces updates and new features to streamline the configuration and deployment of sovereign environments. Guardrails and codified architectures reduce complexity and make the process of building sovereign environments more predictable and repeatable. New preview tools include assessment, policy compiler, and drift detection analysis tools, as well as a new Azure service that allow users to create and deploy Sovereign Landing Zones (SLZs) within the Microsoft Azure Portal. Guidance includes sample reference architectures for using large language models (LLMs) and Azure OpenAI Service with SLZ, as well as guidance on workload migrations and Microsoft Power Platform and Microsoft Dataverse configurations.

Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability

In February 2024, Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability announced new data solutions and generative AI advancements in Fabric, providing new levels of speed and efficiency in processing data to help drive faster progress toward sustainability goals. These new features include sustainability data solutions in Fabric and natural language queries with Microsoft Copilot in Microsoft Sustainability Manager, among other AI-powered features now available in preview.

In March 2024, new features were added to Sustainability Manager, including the ability to create calculation models with Copilot using natural language input, a dedicated energy data model to help track energy usage, activity to emissions traceability to link underlying source activity data to emissions records, and the ability to create a Microsoft Power Query template to streamline and accelerate data import.

Additional release updates to Cloud for Sustainability include enhancements to environmental, social and governance (ESG) insights with what-if analysis to help organizations build the relationship between forecasting and reduction goal planning. Users can link forecasts to existing goals to track actual progress alongside the projected ones. In addition, forecasts with the same historical data can be layered onto a single view, allowing for faster analysis of optimal reduction opportunities.

Another new feature is the ability to import and calculate with product carbon footprint data. This feature allows you to use product carbon footprint data to calculate and understand value chain emissions in Sustainability Manager more easily. Organizations can determine the greenhouse gas emissions that are associated with a product family and more easily import and manage this data within Sustainability Manager.

Azure Data Manager for Energy

Azure Data Manager for Energy is expanding geo availability, adding the Australia east region. This additional region is enabled for both the standard and developer tiers of Azure Data Manager for Energy. Users can now select “Australia east” as a preferred region when creating an Azure Data Manager for Energy resource using the Azure portal.

External data sources (EDS) (preview) allow data from external data sources aligned with the OSDU® Technical Standard to be shared with an Azure Data Manager for Energy resource. EDS is designed to pull specified data (metadata) from OSDU-compliant data sources through scheduled jobs while leaving associated dataset files (such as LAS and SEG-Y) stored at the external source for retrieval on demand.

Microsoft Cloud for Retail

Microsoft Cloud for Retail now includes new features in its retail data solutions architecture, an industry-specific workload for unifying, enriching, and modeling industry data on Fabric. Retailers can take advantage of the available list of connectors, application templates, and business intelligence capabilities, which can be easily configured. Retail data solutions offer application templates tailored for retail-specific scenarios, accelerating time to market. These templates serve as customizable and extendable starter kits, allowing retailers to adapt them to their unique requirements. Additionally, application templates and connectors from specialized partners are available. These capabilities enable the seamless use of data to produce unique insights that can’t be achieved in isolation.

One of the new features is the copilot capabilities in Fabric, which bring new ways to transform and analyze data, generate insights, and create visualizations and reports in Fabric and Microsoft Power BI. Another new feature is the Sitecore OrderCloud data connector, which can be used to bring commerce data from Sitecore OrderCloud (preview) into Fabric in real time. The connector performs transformation and orchestration on top of the data from Sitecore OrderCloud to map it to the retail industry data model, reducing engineering effort and accelerating time to insights.

Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare

The 2024 release wave 1 also brings new features and innovations to Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare. One of the new features is the ability to improve clinical and operational insights by ensuring health data is accessible across provider, payor, and pharma; and facilitating clinical, operational, and performance analytics using healthcare data solutions in Fabric (preview).

Some other new features in the 2024 release wave 1 for Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare include support for additional data storage needs, support for availability zones for Microsoft Azure Health Data Services, FHIRLink Power Platform connector, and the ability to use the digital imaging and communications in medicine (DICOM) service with Azure Data Lake integration.

Microsoft Cloud for Nonprofit

Microsoft Tech for Social Impact is proud to announce the April 2024 release for Fundraising and Engagement. This release brings significant enhancements, mainly to nonprofit gift processors, including valuable enhancements to Fundraising and Engagement Azure services and new Stripe API (payment intents) integration. Customers who rely on Stripe for their payment processing can now benefit from the latest Stripe APIs, addressing the requests of current customers and the requirements of future customers. It is highly recommended that customers upgrade and use the new Stripe API when creating a payment processor associated to a configuration profile. For more details, read more here.   

Learn more about Microsoft Industry Clouds

• Official Microsoft Cloud for Manufacturing documentation
• Azure Data Manager for Agriculture Preview
• Microsoft Azure Data Manager for Agriculture Preview
• Official Microsoft Cloud for Sovereignty documentation
• Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability documentation
• Microsoft Azure Data Manager for Energy
• Official Microsoft Cloud for Retail documentation
• Official Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare documentation
• Microsoft Cloud for Nonprofit documentation

Microsoft Industry Clouds

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The latest AI innovations from Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare, with our partners, empower patients, providers, payors, and life sciences organizations:

• Patients can access personalized care.
• Providers can deliver more efficient and effective care through advanced data analytics.
• Payors gain insights to improve operational efficiency and enhance patient outcomes.
• Life sciences organizations accelerate research and drug development processes.

Some specific examples of our investments include healthcare data solutions in Microsoft Fabric, which enables healthcare organizations to unify and centralize their data for scalable analytics and AI workloads. Additionally, we’ve invested in a new certified software designation for Solutions Partners in healthcare, and other industries, as part of the Microsoft Cloud for AI Cloud Partner Program. These designations certify that our partner solutions are optimally built on Microsoft Industry Clouds to deliver their solutions.

Together, we’re seizing the remarkable opportunity that AI presents in healthcare, propelling the industry towards a transformative future.

Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare

Improve healthcare experiences with AI-powered solutions

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Microsoft at HIMSS24

We were proud to showcase the remarkable work of our featured partners at HIMSS24. Teladoc Health shared how they are enabling connected care through virtual care solutions from inpatient to home—bridging virtual and in-patient care and at-home condition management. TCS showcased how they’re reducing the time it takes to respond to health authorities for regulatory submissions with AI, while providing an intelligent dashboard for real-time feedback to deepen patient understanding. Other partners we featured at the event throughout the week included Sectra, Hitachi Solutions, Accenture-Avanade, Quisitive, and HITRUST.

Additionally, 10 groundbreaking startups joined us, including BeekeeperAI, Mapped, and Pangaea Data. Partners such as CDW, Nordic, Kyndryl, BDO, and Vervint, demonstrated the significance of data and AI in the Electronic Health Record (EHR) on Microsoft Azure by guiding attendees on secure cloud migration, emphasizing high-quality care delivery that prioritizes patient needs. Each partner is reshaping the healthcare landscape by integrating enhanced solutions with Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service, Microsoft Copilot for Azure, and Microsoft Fabric. Our collaborations are deeply aligned to our focus of creating connected experiences, empowering the workforce, and unlocking the value of data across the healthcare landscape.

Partners leveraging AI to fuel innovation in healthcare

From revolutionizing patient engagement to streamlining clinical documentation and advancing drug discovery, partners are harnessing generative AI applications to help solve seemingly insurmountable challenges in healthcare.

To boost clinician productivity and provide better patient services, Accenture-Avanade are utilizing generative AI capabilities powered by Microsoft Copilot for patient medical history summarization, patient response drafting, and intelligent search. CitiusTech’s Smart Search leverages Azure OpenAI Service and Azure Cognitive Search to provide patients with round-the-clock query assistance and personalized responses, reducing the dependency on doctors—ultimately driving better patient satisfaction.

Additionally, Cognizant is infusing generative AI into healthcare administration to enhance productivity and efficiency for payers and providers, ensuring timely responses and improved patient care using Azure OpenAI Service and Semantic Kernel within the TriZetto® user interface.

“At Cognizant, we’re working closely with clients to understand and implement generative AI into their organizations, helping them unlock and expand value across the enterprise. Through this collaboration with Microsoft, we have infused generative AI capabilities into our TriZetto® platform, making it easier for healthcare organizations to realize the full potential of this groundbreaking technology.”

—Surya Gummadi, Executive Vice President and President, Cognizant Americas

In imaging and clinical documentation, Sectra’s Azure-optimized software as a service solution, Sectra OneCloud, revolutionizes enterprise imaging with scalability, security, and diagnostic capabilities to enhance care delivery and optimize clinical processes.

Several partners are also leveraging Fabric—an end-to-end, unified analytics platform that brings together data and AI—to modernize data estates and unlock powerful insights. For example, Hitachi Solutions is enhancing predictive care management, reducing operational costs, and strengthening data security and privacy with Lumada Empower Data Platform and Discern Health. Quisitive is uncovering actionable insights and driving greater efficiency with the development of MazikCare Copilot, which utilizes AI for care coordination, denial management, and gap assessments.

To better protect and govern data, HITRUST is establishing a foundation of privacy and security that enables the operationalization of responsible AI and establishes AI assurance and risk management. Commvault is providing powerful defense against threats by leveraging AI-driven automation and generative AI through their copilot, enabling seamless business continuity.

“At Commvault, our collaboration with Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare is at the forefront of providing robust defenses for the healthcare sector. By integrating AI and automation we’re not just improving the resilience of healthcare organizations, we’re transforming how they anticipate and neutralize threats.”

—Anna Griffin, Chief Marketing Officer, Commvault

Other powerful partnerships with organizations like GE Healthcare, Sophia Genetics, Andor Health, and Volpara are bringing innovations to customers and we’re proud to announce new advances alongside them.

And finally, we’ve recently announced a healthcare collaboration with NVIDIA that will harness the immense power of the cloud and cutting-edge AI to accelerate healthcare innovation. And we’ve partnered with Truveta to advance medical research with a groundbreaking solution that leverages AI to analyze patient data, helping to save lives.

We’re deeply committed to advancing together with our partner community, fueling new use cases and exploring impactful generative AI scenarios to deliver efficient care. Join us on this journey.

Learn more about healthcare solutions from Microsoft

To learn more about Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare and our work with key partners:

• Visit Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare.
• Read Microsoft at HIMSS24: Shaping a healthier future with data and AI.
• Read Harness the power of data and AI in healthcare with new Microsoft solutions.
• Learn more about the Solutions Partner learning path, which includes Microsoft Learn documentation, a playbook, and an FAQ.

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