Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare

Deliver meaningful outcomes across the healthcare journey

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At Microsoft, we are committed to helping our customers and partners overcome these challenges and harness the power of AI in healthcare. We believe that bridging data, AI, and trust is required to accelerate the digital transformation in healthcare. We do this by providing trusted, secure, and scalable platforms and tools that help you manage, analyze, and share your data, as well as build, deploy, and monitor your AI solutions. Moreover, we collaborate with industry experts to ensure that our AI solutions are aligned with the best practices and standards of the healthcare domain.

At HIMSS24, we are excited to introduce new product and feature updates which are designed to help you harness the power of data and AI in healthcare.

Improving business and patient outcomes with unified data analytics

We recognize that data is the fuel that powers AI technology, and peak performance requires clean, integrated, accessible data. However, healthcare data is complex, heterogeneous, and often siloed, making it challenging to extract insights and drive value. Through continued investments in data management and analytics, we are empowering customers to achieve agility in new ways.

Our momentum continues with the public preview of healthcare data solutions in Microsoft Fabric. Now your organization can unify data and insights through one common architecture and experience. Healthcare data solutions in Fabric provide data models and transformation pipelines that help customers create a multi modal warehouse and provide a secure and governed way for organizations to access, analyze, and visualize data-driven insights across their organization.

• The multi modal warehouse leverages industry standards such as Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) and Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM) and complies with regulations, such as HIPAA and GDPR.
• Allows organizations to access and query your healthcare data using familiar tools, such as Azure Synapse Analytics, Azure Machine Learning, and Power BI.
• Leverage Fabric data engineering and data science capabilities to conduct data analysis and operationalize machine learning pipelines at scale using Python notebooks powered by Spark’s distributed computing capabilities. 

We’re excited to see how our customers can accelerate time-to-value using healthcare data solutions in Fabric to unify their data at every layer—one copy of data in the lake, one product experience for collaboration, governance, and unification of the business model to ensure resources are cost-optimized. Learn more about healthcare data solutions in Fabric.

With imaging data playing a crucial role in assisting diagnosis and predictive care, it is imperative that medical images and the metadata associated with them can also be easily stored alongside clinical data. The DICOM service in Azure Health Data Services now integrated with Azure Data Lake Storage in general availability, enables organizations to store, manage and query medical images in the cloud, allowing organizations to operationalize imaging data in AI and machine learning development, for secondary use scenarios as well as for clinical research purposes. To learn more, read our documentation.

With the FHIRlink connector for Power Platform in general availability, organizations now have an easy way to build low-code, no-code applications that interact directly with FHIR compliant REST application programming interfaces (APIs). The connector reduces the complexity in authenticating to FHIR services, constructing FHIR based API calls, and working with resulting FHIR JSON data, removing the need for custom, single-use integration solutions. This enables developers to build apps directly against the FHIR services, removing the complexity and cost of mapping, transforming, and synchronizing data between systems. To learn more, read our documentation.

Our partners are already seeing success working on these new technologies to help their customers achieve their goals. Quisitive shared more about their experience working with healthcare data solutions in Microsoft Fabric:

“Through our tight collaboration with Microsoft and Fabric’s groundbreaking ability to transform unstructured data, we’re revolutionizing healthcare delivery. Microsoft’s dedication to speed, security, and innovation enables us to deploy solutions for our clients in record time and set the stage for AI and copilot advancements. Together, we’re closing care gaps, improving patient experiences, and enhancing operational efficiencies, delivering impactful results in real-time.”

—Syed Fahad, VP of Industry Solutions, Quisitive

Maximize the power of AI to improve patient and clinician experiences

One of the big challenges AI can help solve is helping clinicians provide personalized care tailored to their unique needs while also empowering clinicians with the right set of information from various sources to generate insights. With Azure AI Services for Health, we’re excited to share some recent feature and service updates that aim to help improve insights for clinicians while empowering patients with better outcomes.

Azure AI Health Insights provides a suite of AI models and services that can help healthcare organizations improve clinical and operational outcomes by providing pre-built models that perform analysis and provide inferences that can be reviewed and used by clinicians and researchers to facilitate patient care during important healthcare scenarios. Azure AI Health Insights will be generally available in May 2024, and includes models for patient timeline, clinical trial matching, and oncophenotyping. The Radiology insights model, also planned for general availability in May 2024, provides quality checks through feedback on errors and inconsistencies. The model also identifies follow-up recommendations and clinical findings within clinical documentation with measurements (sizes) documented by the radiologist.

We’re excited to share new private preview capabilities to Azure AI Health Bot services to help support organizations who want to build healthcare specific copilot experiences infused with generative AI and built in safeguards. The new private preview capabilities in Azure AI Health Bot provide pre-built templates, connectors, and out-of-box healthcare intelligence that can be customized and connected into existing workflows and content sources. Customers can then build their own copilots supported by protocol-based workflows side by side with generative AI answers which are responsibly adapted to healthcare with specific compliance controls and healthcare safeguards. Learn more about the private preview of Azure AI Health Bot with generative AI.

Georg Isbary, Head of Portfolio and Customer Excellence and Elias Zimmer, Manager Digital Customer Excellence from Roche Pharma Germany, shared more about how they are using the Azure AI Health Bot to power their copilot experience:

“As we move forward into the Age of Copilots, our collaboration with Microsoft and Crayon has enabled us to explore new ways how clinicians can interact with our Healthcare Professional (HCP) portals. By leveraging Azure AI Health Bot to build copilot experiences for doctors, we are developing an intuitive, conversational interface that lets clinicians access and explore Roche’s clinical documentations in a more natural way and to cope with the complexity and flood of information. The pilot for this new user experience, powered by generative AI features and compliant with the necessary security standards, has been integrated into our systems and will be further tailored to regional market needs. We’re excited to see how this revolutionary AI experience will transform healthcare making knowledge more accessible and actionable for clinicians around the world.”

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.

We look forward to seeing you at HIMSS24, visit us at Booth #3161 and with Nuance in booth #2741.

• Read more in our HIMSS announcement blog.
• Learn more about healthcare data solutions in Microsoft Fabric.
• Explore more about Azure Health Data Services.
• Learn more about Azure AI Health Insights.
• Read more about Azure AI Health Bot.

The post Harness the power of data and AI in healthcare with new Microsoft solutions appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs.

There’s an urgent need to deliver proven, scalable solutions that increase radiology efficiencies, reduce the cognitive burden on radiologists while maintaining the highest standards of reporting quality. That’s why Microsoft and Nuance are committed to creating outcomes-focused AI solutions that streamline radiology workflows.

In our interactive AI Theater at RSNA 2023, we explored the power and potential of advanced AI copilot capabilities. And during our AI Theater presentation, participants experienced how copilots can transform medical imaging by helping automate what radiologists can’t stand, surface what they can’t see, and identify what they can’t miss.

Reducing the cognitive burden and enhancing patient care with AI copilots

With AI-powered automation, radiologists can spend far less time on the tedious, time-consuming tasks that currently take up so much of their day. Instead, as presented in our AI Theater experience, a copilot can amalgamate information from prior reports, AI findings, and natural language captured in the reading room to generate draft reports automatically. As the copilot collects, extracts, and synthesizes relevant data in the background, radiologists can keep their eyes on the image and focus on the quality of their interpretation.

As well as taking on mundane tasks, copilots can support radiologists by enhancing reporting quality and downstream care. AI can monitor images for details that may not be visible or clear to the human eye, helping capture findings that might otherwise go unnoticed. An AI copilot can also assist radiologists by searching the Picture Archiving and Communications System (PACS) or Vendor Neutral Archiving (VNA) for similar images to provide rapid clinical insights.

By providing a vital second pair of eyes, AI can help ensure no findings fall through the cracks. Copilots can catch incidental or subtle findings that could have been easily missed, helping reduce the time to intervention and enhance patient safety.

These copilot experiences can even extend the value of radiology beyond the reading room to support more effective downstream care and patient experience. For example, an AI copilot could act as a companion to patients, providing “patient-friendly” versions of reports and other tools to help people more actively engage with their care.

New AI capabilities and collaborations

As we’ve seen at RSNA 2023, it’s an exciting time to be part of the medical imaging community. We’re thrilled to be playing our part in empowering radiologists by developing new AI capabilities and collaborating with other pioneers in this field. Here’s a recap of the major new developments we announced during the event:

• PowerScribe Smart Impression accelerates the adoption of AI in radiology. Nuance shared its progress helping radiologists harness the growing potential of generative AI capabilities for radiology reporting with PowerScribe Smart Impression. Built on the PowerScribe platform used by more than 80% of all radiologists, PowerScribe Smart Impression streamlines radiology workflows and accelerates reporting by automatically creating draft impressions and recommendations using advanced generative AI. Users have noted the natural, accurate wording of draft impressions and how the solution enhances reporting quality by identifying possible omissions, misspellings, or other errors. They also report saving up to a minute per read, which adds up to significant time savings over the course of a busy working day.
• Flywheel collaborates with Microsoft and NVIDIA to accelerate AI development of medical imaging applications. Flywheel, a medical imaging data management platform, launched an AI development solution on Microsoft Azure, integrated with NVIDIA MONAI, to expedite advances in medical imaging AI model development. Flywheel users will also be able to utilize radiology reports with mPower Clinical Analytics, powered by Nuance.
• Paige and Nuance transform collaboration among the United States pathologists. Paige, a provider of digital pathology solutions and clinical AI applications, is harnessing the scale and capabilities of Nuance’s PowerShare image-sharing network to create a digital consultation network for pathologists. The network will connect over 14,000 sites, allowing pathologists to collaborate with peers to streamline healthcare operations and reduce the time and costs of diagnosis.

Creating intelligence-infused radiology workflows

The use of AI in radiology isn’t new—but what comes next will be revolutionary, as we create copilot experiences that infuse intelligence into every aspect of the workflow. In this AI-powered future, radiologists will be able to handle growing imaging volumes without compromising quality.

Despite the reports of rising levels of burnout in the profession, it’s been heartening to see the innovation and optimism on display at the RSNA 2023 conference. At Microsoft and Nuance, we’re helping to shape a future where radiologists can work more efficiently and effectively without adding to their cognitive load—all thanks to their AI copilots.

Next steps

• Connect with an expert to learn more about AI copilots for healthcare.
• Explore Nuance diagnostic solutions.
• Discover how you can connect your customers, your people, and your data with Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare.

Intelligent radiology solutions

Experience how AI in medical imaging empowers radiologists

Explore solutions

¹Medscape 2023 Physician Burnout & Depression Report.

²Following 2023 Trends in the Radiologic Technologist Staffing Shortage, AHEConline Blog.

The post How Microsoft and Nuance empower radiologists with AI-powered solutions appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs.

The Microsoft Industry Clouds deliver the most comprehensive development platform, tools, and solutions to enable our customers and partners to take advantage of AI, driving high-value scenarios for their businesses. Over the last six months, we have delivered Microsoft Copilot across GitHub, Azure Security, Microsoft Dynamics 365, Microsoft Power Platform, and Microsoft 365 for each business role in an organization that people can use today. At Microsoft Ignite 2023, from November 15 to 16, 2023, you’ll hear from many of our partners who are building copilots and other solutions on Azure AI to drive innovation across industries and help our customers achieve more.

Our global partner ecosystem plays an invaluable role in bringing this AI potential to life for our customers. Independent software vendors and system integrator partners bring deep domain expertise to build unique, industry-specific AI solutions on the Microsoft Cloud that add tremendous value to customers, while meeting the security, compliance, and regulatory needs of each industry.

Here is a small sample of the hundreds of partners accelerating innovation with AI in financial services, healthcare, agriculture, manufacturing, retail, sustainability, public sector, education, telecommunications (telco), nonprofit, energy, and line of business partners.

Financial services

LSEG’s (London Stock Exchange Group) leading financial markets data intelligence and analytics ecosystem is being integrated with Microsoft Fabric, enabling customers to discover and analyze trusted data faster than ever before to create differentiated insights. This ecosystem will offer a joined-up data experience for customers through seamless interoperability with LSEG Workspace, simplifying and automating workflows enabled by Copilot and Python-based analytics within Microsoft Teams and Excel.

At Microsoft Ignite, Microsoft is showcasing Meeting Prep for financial services, an example of the kind of work we are doing with partners such as LSEG to create value from their data using large language models and generative AI. This solution will automatically generate meeting preparation summaries combining insights from LSEG’s financial data with news, documents, emails, chats, and other relevant content from Microsoft Graph in Microsoft 365. 

Video 1. Meeting Prep for financial services: Application Concept for Microsoft Teams.

Healthcare

Teladoc Health is offering improved care management leveraging the Azure data platform and building a copilot on Microsoft Teams with Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service. Teladoc is using Azure OpenAI to personalize the “recommended for you” section of its Chronic Care Management weekly newsletter for three specific segments based on acuity and activity. This is to increase the engagement of the program and improve member health outcomes. They are exploring the option of a co-pilot for member engagement through counselors.

Epic and Microsoft have an ongoing strategic collaboration to develop and integrate generative AI into healthcare that can enhance patient care, increase clinician efficiency, and improve the financial integrity of health systems globally. DAX Copilot and Azure OpenAI integrations address many current issues affecting clinicians, including drafting message responses automatically, enabling natural language queries and interactive data analysis, producing clinical summarization, and providing ambient clinical documentation.   

Embedding DAX Copilot directly into existing Epic workflows can reduce the cognitive burden on clinicians, helping them focus on the patient as summarization notes are drafted for them through ambient listening. There are more than 50 Epic customers and thousands of clinicians signed up to use DAX Copilot in their workflows, and this integration will be widely available for increased adoption early next year. 

By using Azure OpenAI, Epic can also deliver generative AI exploration for users through Epic SlicerDicer to fill gaps in clinical evidence using real-world data and to study rare disease and more. Revenue cycle management is another area where generative AI will drive meaningful improved efficiency, providing coding staff with suggestions based on clinical documentation in Epic’s electronic health record (EHR) software. Additionally, Epic is working to aid campaign generation by incorporating generative AI into the Epic Cheers application. This will assist organizations on producing outreach programs to create a personalized experience for patients, nurture current relationships, and reach a wider patient population in a more efficient manner.  

Agriculture

Bayer’s vision, “Health for All, Hunger for None,” drives its commitment to using cutting-edge technologies that can bring new value to customers. In its early stages, Bayer is presenting an agriculture copilot and testing multiple scenarios with internal teams to discover where large language model capabilities can add value through the ability to interact with agronomic data using natural language. These capabilities are powered by Microsoft’s generative AI and Microsoft Azure Data Manager for Agriculture.

Video 2. Bayer leverages Azure Data Manager for Agriculture large language model APIs to bring actionable insights to farm data.

Learn about the latest updates to Azure Data Manager for Agriculture and how Microsoft is expanding support for Bayer’s Climate FieldView as a built-in data source, providing users with tools to leverage autosync planting, application, and harvest activity files from FieldView accounts.

Manufacturing

Siemens introduced Industrial Copilot, an AI-powered assistant that will enable users to rapidly generate, optimize, and debug complex automation code, and significantly shorten simulation times. Siemens is putting the power of product lifecycle management software into the palm of every employee’s hand with the release later this year of the Teamcenter application for Microsoft Teams. With this application, problem reports can be created in Teamcenter using a smartphone to take pictures and interpret spoken descriptions. That helps to close feedback loops and solve problems faster, all without sacrificing quality or reliability.

Sight Machine has introduced Factory CoPilot, that integrates Sight Machine’s Manufacturing Data Platform with Azure OpenAI. Using a natural language user interface similar to ChatGPT, Factory CoPilot offers an intuitive, “ask the expert” experience for all manufacturing stakeholders, regardless of data proficiency. In response to a single question, Factory CoPilot can automatically summarize all relevant data and information about production in real-time (such as for daily meetings) and generate user-friendly reports, emails, charts, and other content (in any language) about the performance of any machine, line, or plant across the manufacturing enterprise, based on contextualized data in the Sight Machine platform.

Retail

Sitecore OrderCloud powers custom ecommerce experiences and order management for some of the world’s most well-known brands. Sitecore OrderCloud is redefining the data hosting and online shopping experience by structuring their solution on the Microsoft platform. The Sitecore solution enables faster time to market with enhanced solutions layers providing ready-to-access capabilities utilizing Azure OpenAI.

AiFi, the largest provider of autonomous shopping solutions, is built on Microsoft Cloud technologies and works seamlessly with Microsoft Cloud for Retail. Their solution is enabling retailers like Żabka Group and Choice Market, among others, to offer consumers an autonomous shopping experience with frictionless check-out. The companion Microsoft smart store analytics app is helping retailers gain detailed insights into customer behavior and patterns, allowing them to be more informed and data-driven about store operations and merchandizing decisions. Together, AiFi and Microsoft, through AI technology deployed at the edge and cloud respectively, are helping retailers bridge the gap with ecommerce when it comes to a frictionless shopping experience and optimizing it using actionable analytics.

Video 3. Choice Market illustrates the next wave of convenience using smart store analytics.

Sustainability

Ekimetrics has developed a solution based on Azure OpenAI to automate the data collection process and enhance supplier experience. Typically, enterprises are requiring their supplier to complete lengthy questionnaires to capture environmental, social, and governance (ESG) data. Due to the high administrative efforts, they are struggling to get these completed and thus the ability to reduce ESG impact. The solution from Ekimetrics automates the creation of a supplier-relevant questionnaire and the extraction of the relevant answers from common documents. The output is a summary of suppliers’ response and prefill of a regulatory report, including comparisons with previous years.

Video 4. Ekimetrics’ future solution for accurate sustainability data collection is more efficient for companies.

Public sector

Axon is a technology leader in global public safety with a mission to protect life, preserve the truth, and accelerate justice. Since 2017, Axon has been pioneering the design and development of generative AI technology into their products built on top of Microsoft Cloud infrastructure. A few of Axon’s AI innovations include Redaction Assistant, which automates the process of sharing video footage while safeguarding privacy, and Auto-Transcribe, which extracts the audio from body camera to accelerate the process of report writing and evidence search. Axon has also introduced Automated License Plate Recognition in their Fleet3 in-car camera systems, ensuring swift and accurate detection. These initiatives are geared towards streamlining and enhancing the efficiency of public safety operations, allowing responders to focus on the primary task at hand. They persist in advancing their innovation pipeline by developing new AI-enabled applications that not only save time for their customers but also uphold the principles of ethics and fairness.

Education

PowerSchool is using Azure OpenAI to inform and deliver personalized learning pathways for individual students based on their learning goals within a secure platform. Educators are able to quickly create assessment items and formative assessments aligned to a desired grade level, subject, and learning objective or standard. They can then use intuitive reporting to track student progress thanks to the results of these standards-aligned assessment items created by generative AI.

Anthology is empowering instructors to spend more time with students and less time managing content with the AI Design Assistant in their flagship learning management system, Blackboard Learn. They’ve leveraged Azure OpenAI to streamline the course building process and give instructors a head start on creating engaging courses with recommended titles and descriptions, rubrics, questions, and images.

Telecommunications

Amdocs has launched its amAIz Platform to enable communication service providers to accelerate their journey into the generative AI era. Using amAIz, cloud solution providers can benefit from a growing set of out-of-the-box generative AI use cases integrated across different Amdocs applications such as Billing, Catalog, and CPQ (configure, price, quote) to save costs and streamline operations, as well as develop their own use cases on top of the platform. Aligned with the Amdocs and Microsoft collaboration, amAIz provides telco verticalization of the Microsoft capabilities in the Customer Engagement Platform, advancing generative AI use cases across the industry.

Nokia is transforming network security operations by leveraging AI to analyze large volumes of data in real-time to recognize subtle patterns and anomalies that are often missed, improving accuracy, and speeding up detection. Nokia’s flexible software as a service-based, telco-centric extended detection and response solution, NetGuard Cybersecurity Dome, uses AI and machine learning algorithms to analyze and identify potential security threats, enabling real-time detection and response.

Nonprofit

threshold.world has created b.world, the world’s first AI-powered impact measurement and storytelling app for nonprofit and social impact program teams. By unifying program design, impact measurement, project management, and digital storytelling in a single, easy-to-use app, b.world increases capacity to engage communities and drive stakeholders to action. It is based on industry best practice program design and impact measurement, and provides a common data model for nonprofit program operations at scale. See it in action by signing up for a free trial at b.world.

Submittable, powered by Microsoft Azure and Azure OpenAI, will release a new-to-market set of tools to further the mission of AI for good and improve the application process for grant givers and seekers. These tools include: an AI-powered service that will autofill grant applications based on an applicant’s own prior answers, saving valuable time to focus on critical work; an AI bot that can both create grant application forms and translate them into multiple languages, ensuring best practice adherence for funders while also extending opportunities across language barriers; and an AI-supported tool that extracts information from official documents into Submittable, creating a simpler experience for applicants and reviewers as well as reducing the potential for human error and fraud.

Energy

KADME has enabled a turnkey large language model workflow for ingesting and extracting insights from domain-specific energy documents. With Fabriq, the large language model orchestration platform, domain experts in upstream energy operations can ask domain-specific questions and retrieve multilingual tailored responses powered by these insights. Links to trusted source documents are provided with each response, with support for private repositories such as SharePoint or Microsoft Azure Data Manager for Energy.  

Line of business partners

In addition to industry solutions, our partners are also building line of business solutions leveraging AI to transform horizontal business processes to further support vertical solutions.

Seismic is the launch partner with Microsoft Sales Copilot and provides content recommendations, collaboration, task automation, and engagement intelligence for Microsoft Sales Copilot users across the meeting experience to help drive deals and relationships forward and making sellers more productive. As the first step in this journey, Seismic for Microsoft Sales Copilot will add AI-powered recommendations and summaries for virtual meetings, the key vehicle for modern sales teams to engage with prospects and customers.

Icertis is leveraging advanced Azure capabilities, including Azure OpenAI, to transform contracts into structured data that companies can analyze and leverage at scale. For example, the newly released Icertis Contract Intelligence Copilots allow companies to harness the power of generative AI to conversationally query contract language about risks and opportunities hidden in commercial agreements. The copilots offer users pre-defined prompts, which can be tailored to a company and its industry, to quickly surface insights relevant to their vertical.

ServiceNow recently introduced the Generative AI Controller that allows organizations to easily connect ServiceNow to Azure OpenAI. It includes built‑in actions so customers can quickly and easily integrate popular generative AI capabilities—like answering questions, summarizing content, and content generation—into custom apps and workflows. 

Typeface.ai has launched a new Typeface app for Microsoft Teams that uses the powerful combination of Microsoft Azure Machine Learning, Azure OpenAI, and Typeface’s brand-personalized AI to create content significantly faster than ever before. This enables companies to scale marketing efforts and produce a range of assets such as creative briefs, email campaigns, multimedia online ads, and more.

The investment continues at Microsoft Ignite

These examples highlight how partners are building copilots and developing custom solutions with Azure AI for every industry.

These solutions also showcase how the key AI patterns like natural language Q&A, summarization, and search are driving this unique moment of transformation for our customers, enabling them to improve employee productivity, enhance customer experience, and increase operational efficiency. You can learn more about these partner solutions and others at Azure Marketplace and Microsoft AppSource.

We’re excited to have you join us at Microsoft Ignite 2023 from November 15 to 16, 2023. Here are some key sessions that will give you an even deeper view into the innovations we are delivering with our partners and the latest updates to our Industry Cloud solutions.

Breakout sessions

• The AI-era of Industrial Transformation, Wednesday, November 15, 2023, 2:45 PM—3:30 PM PT

Learn how organizations are investing to optimize operations by extracting insights from information technology, operational technology, and engineering technology data with cloud-to-edge technologies, democratizing data access for better decision-making with copilots, and empowering frontline workers with enhanced mixed reality applications.

• Get ready for ESG Regulation with Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability, Wednesday, November 15, 2023, 5:15 PM—6:00 PM PT

Learn how expanded functionality in Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability, including AI, water, and waste data capabilities, can help address new and emerging reporting regulations like the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive—enabling organizations to provide transparency into their ESG sustainability progress.

• Enabling Sovereignty with Microsoft Azure, Friday, November 17, 2023, 9:00 AM—9:45 AM PT

Learn how Microsoft Cloud for Sovereignty can help customers meet their digital sovereignty and compliance requirements and still gain the benefits of the public cloud.

On demand sessions

• The future of financial services in the era of AI
• Empowering retail in the era of AI
• The future of data and AI across the entire healthcare journey
• Empowering impact with Cloud for Nonprofit and AI

There’s a lot to take in at Microsoft Ignite 2023! Be sure to also check out the on-demand discussion sessions or go to Microsoft Industry Clouds to learn more.

The post How AI helps Microsoft partners innovate across industries appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs.

As part of Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare today, we are announcing the preview of healthcare data solutions in Microsoft Fabric. This tailored offering enables healthcare organizations to break down data silos and harmonize their disparate healthcare data in a single unified store where analytics and AI workloads can operate at scale. Leveraging the native capabilities of the platform, health organizations can create connected experiences at each point of care, empower their workforce, and unlock value from clinical and operational data.  

With Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare, your organization can accelerate time-to-value using healthcare data solutions in Microsoft Fabric to unify your data at every layer—one copy of data in the lake, one product experience for collaboration, governance, and unification of the business model to ensure resources are cost-optimized.  

Get more value from your data 

This preview delivers data solutions that leverage Microsoft Fabric Lakehouse architecture to support the ingestion, unification, harmonization, and transformation of multi-modal healthcare data from disparate sources. Combining data from previously siloed sources across their organization, such as electronic health records (EHRs), Picture Archiving and Communication Systems (PACS), labs systems, claims systems, and medical devices enables organizations to bring structured, unstructured, imaging, and medical device data into one common architecture.

The functionality in this preview consists of lakehouse foundations, with data ingestion mechanisms and analytical capabilities. Lakehouse architecture in Microsoft Fabric combines both data lakes and data warehouses, storing data in open delta-parquet format. This enables customers to run large-scale analytical scenarios in a cost-effective manner.

These healthcare data solutions provide full support for industry standards like Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR)®R4 and Observational Medical Outcomes Partnership (OMOP) analytics in the lakehouse. This unified data foundation in the Microsoft Fabric data lake will allow healthcare organizations to: 

• Process, store, manage, and govern structured and unstructured data in a single, unified repository preserving complete data fidelity. With the ability to do delta-time travel, it ensures data consistency by way of providing data lineage and auditing. 
• Structured query language (SQL) endpoints attached to each lakehouse simplify the ability to explore and interact with the data in bronze, silver, and gold lakehouses using SQL. 
• Leverage Microsoft Fabric data engineering and data science capabilities to conduct data analysis and operationalize machine learning pipelines at scale using Python notebooks powered by Spark’s distributed computing capabilities. 
• Preserve and analyze historical data to create longitudinal patient health records to conduct patient and population-level proactive and retrospective research studies. 
• Build patient cohorts to proactively initiate patient outreach or conduct clinical research studies based on disease cohorts to guide clinical care pathways for patients. 

Here are some of the capabilities being released in preview: 

Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) data ingestion. Enables easy ingestion of FHIR data from Azure Health Data Services in Microsoft Fabric Onelake environment and stores it in the bronze lakehouse as raw newline-delimited JavaScript object notation (NDJSON) files.

Relational FHIR data foundation enables the transformation of FHIR data in bronze to relational FHIR and tabular structure in open data format (delta-parquet) in Silver Lakehouse using highly scalable purpose-built pipelines. This creates a standard-based unified healthcare data model in Silver Data Lake. With support for all FHIR R4 resources, this now enables multiple downstream analytics support for scenarios leveraging the rich clinical, financial (claims and explanation of benefits), and administration data. Healthcare companies and partners can now build analytical scenarios such as quality reporting, population health management, clinical research studies, and operational reporting. It also allows a traditional SQL engine to run on top of the data for a data analyst to conduct ad-hoc exploratory analysis of the healthcare data. 

Enrich unstructured clinical notes enables conversion of unstructured clinical notes to structured clinical data through purpose-built data pipelines leveraging the natural language processing (NLP) capabilities of Microsoft Azure Text Analytics for Health. It enriches a patient’s clinical profile with additional insights coming from handwritten physician’s notes in their interactions with a patient and captured in clinical notes. This data can then be analyzed to produce insights, analytics, prediction, or quality measures to improve patient health outcomes. 

De-identifying clinical data for research and secondary uses enables health organizations to de-identify clinical data such that the resulting data retains its clinical relevance and distribution while also adhering to the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) privacy rule. The service currently supports unstructured text and will soon cover various other data types (structured and imaging). The service uses state-of-the-art machine learning models to automatically extract, redact, or surrogate over 30 entities—including HIPAA’s 18 personal health identifiers (PHI)—from unstructured text such as clinical notes, messages, or clinical trial studies. The service also offers best practices for PHI protection in the form of surrogate replacement, where PHI elements are replaced with plausible-looking surrogates; resulting in data that is most representative of the source data.

Observational Medical Outcomes Partnership (OMOP) analytics enables clinical researchers to perform research and analysis using the standard OMOP v5.4 Common Data Model. Hydrate OMOP schema transforming the relational FHIR data in silver to OMOP datasets using purpose-built pipelines.  

Once hydrated, users can use notebooks to build statistical models, population distribution studies and Power BI reports to visually compare different interventions and their effects on patient outcomes. Researchers can now quickly do ad-hoc analysis, using SQL or notebooks. Examples include tracking disease state progress over time, comparing procedures and drug exposures, or comparing drug exposures and condition occurrences. 

Patient Outreach analytics enables segmentation in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights with ease by ingestion of healthcare data in Silver Lake without requiring any custom transformation of heavily nested FHIR data. Now it is even easier for care providers to understand patients, create comprehensive segments, and enhance outreach communications, thus fostering the expansion of patient base and revenue streams at a swifter pace. Plans are also in the works to support bringing data from Dynamics 365 Customer Insights and Patient Outreach journey application templates to Microsoft Fabric, enabling unified marketing and clinical reporting. 

Data governance with Microsoft Purview. Within our new healthcare data solutions (preview) in Microsoft Purview, healthcare organizations can better govern, protect, and manage their entire data estate by leveraging features like: 

• Healthcare classification templates to categorize and classify data, based on predefined rules and patterns, to put for HIPAA-specified identifiers.  
• Data glossary of FHIR entities provides a common data glossary across the organization reducing the potential for data misunderstanding and errors.  

Explore possibilities with AI

Analytics-ready data available in a single data estate makes it easier to leverage the power of AI and machine learning. Today, we also announced new capabilities across Microsoft Azure to help healthcare organizations use AI and machine learning to derive insights to improve clinicians’ experiences and patient outcomes. Key to healthcare organizations:  

• General availability of multi-language support in Text Analytics for Health, a Microsoft Azure AI Language service, allowing organizations to derive insights from unstructured text in seven languages. 
• Expansion of our Microsoft Azure AI Health Bot in preview to allow healthcare organizations to build copilots for their healthcare professionals to further manage administrative and clinical workloads. 
• Adding three new built-in models to Azure AI Health Insights to provide insights and inferences to clinicians for better decision-making.  

Read the latest from the Microsoft Azure team to learn about new data and AI services in Microsoft Azure. 

What’s next

If you are interested in healthcare data solutions in Microsoft Fabric and Purview, please reach out to your Microsoft account team or Partner Development Manager for more information and eligibility criteria. 

• Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare
• Introducing Microsoft Fabric and Copilot in Microsoft Power BI
• The Microsoft commitment to responsible AI

Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare

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However, despite more than USD2.7 billion invested in companies designing AI for medical imaging in the past decade, the technology has not yet gained widespread adoption in clinical practice. Bringing medical imaging AI models directly into clinical settings at scale is a complex task. This requires addressing several challenges, such as a lack of standardized healthcare systems and technical integration with existing clinical workflows, making it difficult to share patient data and coordinate care between providers. 

But that’s about to change.     

Microsoft + Nuance and NVIDIA are working together to equip more clinicians with medical imaging AI 

Our partnership with NVIDIA combines two powerful solutions in the healthcare and technology markets: 

1. Nuance Precision Imaging Network (PIN): A cloud platform, powered by Microsoft Azure, that provides a secure and scalable infrastructure for deploying and managing AI models in clinical settings. The platform is designed to handle large volumes of medical imaging data, making it an ideal solution for healthcare providers who need to process large volumes of medical imaging data quickly and efficiently. 
2. MONAI: An open-source framework for developing AI models for medical imaging, co-founded and accelerated by NVIDIA. The framework is designed to be modular and flexible, making it easy to integrate with other tools and technologies.  

These solutions help healthcare organizations simplify the translation of imaging AI models into existing and trusted clinical applications that can deliver genuine benefits for everyday patient care without requiring providers to change their workflows or their underlying IT systems. Together, Nuance + Microsoft and NVIDIA are helping solve the problem of getting innovations from the “bench to the bedside” in a much more accelerated manner. 

These two integrated solutions are designed to help developers focus on their innovative applications—in key areas such as radiology—without the burden of deployment challenges. And for health systems, the solutions enable teams to develop, deploy, and fine-tune AI models and applications suited to their specific needs and patient populations.   

Ultimately, the value of Nuance PIN and MONAI will be in the improvements that help drive patient outcomes and business performance, and for many healthcare organizations, this value is being delivered today. 

How Mass General Brigham is using MONAI and PIN 

One of the healthcare organizations that is bridging the gap between research and clinical practice is Mass General Brigham (MGB), a Boston-based non-profit hospital and physician network. 

MGB uses MONAI and PIN to define a unique workflow that links medical imaging AI model development, application packaging, deployment, and clinical feedback for model refinement. The workflow means there’s a much more streamlined connection between the research teams developing AI models and the clinical teams using them. And it’s enabled MGB to start utilizing AI models in everyday patient care. 

One of the models used at MGB is its AI model for breast density analysis. Using this model, MGB has accelerated turnaround times for mammography readings—reducing the waiting period for results from several days to just 15 minutes.¹ It means time saved for clinicians and less wait time for patients. The patients can talk to their clinicians about the results of their scan in the same appointment and discuss their next steps before they leave the facility.   

Fast deployment of AI models has also been particularly useful for MGB as it’s managing the aftermath of COVID-19. Using an AI model that analyzes lung function, MGB’s clinicians can easily spot indicators of whether a COVID-19 patient’s condition is declining or whether they’re safe to be sent home.   

Bridging the gap between research and clinical adoption  

MGB is an example of what’s possible when there’s a closer link between the research and developer communities and clinical practice. As more healthcare organizations begin to accelerate the translation of trained AI models into deployable applications, we’re excited to see how it’s going to benefit patient care delivery far into the future. 

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• Download the white paper to discover how you can bridge the gap between medical imaging AI development and clinical adoption in your organization—and explore some of the impressive results you can achieve. 
• Learn more about AI solutions with Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare.

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¹ Nuance, Nuance and NVIDIA: Simplifying the translation of trained AI models into deployable clinical applications at scale, 2022.

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Delphine: Our research has shown that there is large untapped potential for digital solutions along the life sciences value chain. How can the tech industry play a larger role in driving patient outcomes and realize the full potential of innovative therapies?

Elena: The pharma industry is exploring many exciting frontiers with healthcare providers, data scientists, and other ecosystem partners. Top of mind for me is helping the pharma industry improve upon the success rate for new therapy development, with only around 12 percent of drugs in clinical trials making it through to regulatory approval today.²

Industry leaders are increasingly using advanced analytics to accelerate drug discovery and development—for example, use of large biomedical datasets and real-world evidence (RWE) for in-silico modeling of human biology—and we are now seeing emerging use cases in foundation models and generative AI.³ Some of these models, like PubMedBERT, could empower biologists in various scenarios of scientific discovery by helping them mine and generate biomedical text.⁴ Other foundational models encode molecule representations and have the potential to fundamentally change drug discovery not only by predicting which molecules (drug candidates) bind better to certain proteins (disease targets), but also now generating new molecules that can then be tested in the lab. There are many other advances in AI that can help across the care continuum too, such as Text Analytics for Health, which extracts and labels relevant medical information from unstructured texts such as doctor’s notes and electronic health records. This can then be fed back into the discovery and development process to improve treatments.

In addition to AI, the tech industry can help by ensuring all this data can be stored, matched, and available to be analyzed by as many researchers and companies as possible, and done in a way that upholds principles of privacy and security. Terra, a secure biomedical research platform co-developed by the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and Verily, provides this capability.

Tamara: Biopharma creates molecules that can save patient lives, but this is just one part of the journey. We need to find the right patients for therapy, monitor those patients while on therapy, and monitor post-therapy to watch for any recurrence. This calls for a continuous journey and not a point solution.

We still see too many non-adherent patients taking less than 80 percent of their prescribed medicine,⁵ or worse, patients who have delayed medical care all together. Remote patient monitoring technology can really help here. Devices like weight scales, pulse oximeters, blood glucose meters, blood pressure monitors, and wearables can offer clinical decision support by enabling providers with continuous data to better care for patients.  

There is also a significant amount of data being captured through medical images across the care continuum. At Nuance, we see AI increasingly being used to support healthcare clinicians with their clinical decision-making (for example with Precision Imaging Network). Research and development (R&D) researchers can use all of this data to improve therapeutic interventions—using AI for biomarker discovery and patient identification and monitoring in clinical trials—and ultimately accelerate time to market.

No company can do this alone. Working with partners who have the data, understand digital touchpoints, and can deploy AI models, we can help patients get what they need at every stage of the journey to achieve the best possible outcomes.

Delphine: This partnership and ecosystem theme is critical. How can biopharma companies rely more on ecosystem partners, create more flexible and resilient operating models, and overcome their preference for owning capabilities and capacity outright?

Elena: Many of the advances in science and technology go beyond the core capabilities of a pharmaceutical company. We’ll see transformational change as AI capabilities are embedded in solutions, which requires collaboration across the ecosystem. Tech players can provide secure and scalable infrastructure, such as cloud, AI, and machine learning toolboxes. Academic institutions, government bodies, and healthcare providers can provide large, curated datasets to supplement those of pharma companies.

McKinsey’s recent research¹ confirms my own experience that large talent gaps in data science and engineering can be barriers to innovation. Embedding these new technologies in core capabilities and collaboration tools across an organization will democratize the use of AI, widening the user base beyond data scientists and engineers and promoting innovation.  What we believe is going to be the real change is when these enhanced capabilities are embedded in the solutions of many, not in the hands of only a few.

At Microsoft, we value collaboration with our partners to provide the connecting glue so that pharma companies can focus on the science. For example, through our partnership with SOPHiA GENETICS, we are providing secure and scalable cloud infrastructure, coupled with the SOPHiA DDM™ Platform, enabling multimodal data-driven care across a network of more than 750 connected healthcare institutions. So far, the SOPHiA DDM™ Platform has supported the analysis of more than 1.2 million genomic profiles. With each incremental profile, SOPHiA GENETICS’ algorithms become more robust, benefiting patient outcomes.

All of the partners in our ecosystem are pushing the boundaries in different ways. The ability to collaborate and build on these capabilities will be a key driver of change in the years to come.

Tamara: To win in a modern ecosystem, pharma companies will need a different approach to capability building. Two century-old companies come to mind—one medtech that believed it needed to create its own digital capabilities to protect its intellectual property, contrasted to a pharma company that joined a partnership ecosystem to augment digital and AI tooling beyond its core capabilities. The better model is to co-create new solutions to ensure that patients achieve the right outcomes with the molecules biopharma has created and is continuing to create.

Tech players are investing more than pharma companies in tech-related healthcare deals. This underscores what Elena described—to drive innovation, there needs to be a symbiotic relationship between players in the ecosystem: tech players who provide the infrastructure and the intelligence toolkit, pharma companies who push the boundaries in developing innovative therapies, and providers and payors who engage with patients and provide the data to advance science across patient populations, care settings, and patient journeys.

Too often, real-world data is siloed in individual databases. It is often said that there are medicines waiting to be discovered in the rainforest. Well, many innovative therapies are waiting to be discovered in data that we can access today. By leveraging this real-world evidence along with the capabilities of our ecosystem partners—medication adherence players, AI developers, and data companies who are experts at “making the molecule”—allows biopharma to leverage the best of external expertise.

Figuring out what we can do together is relatively easy; deciding how to work together is harder. But we’re truly excited about the advances we’ll make together.

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You can always get the latest on Microsoft Life Sciences Solutions at our website, and stay informed about Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare by signing up for news and updates.

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Note: Microsoft and McKinsey & Company share ownership and publication rights of this blog post.

¹The Helix report: Is biopharma wired for future success? McKinsey & Company.

²Research and Development in the Pharmaceutical Industry, Congressional Budget Office.

³How Foundation Models Can Advance AI in Healthcare, Stanford University.

⁴Medication Adherence: Improve Patient Outcomes and Reduce Costs, AMA Ed Hub.

⁵BioGPT: generative pre-trained transformer for biomedical text generation and mining, Oxford Academic.

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The success of this evolution depended on the foresight of medical imaging leadership to make capital investments in powerful computing networks, which led to an unprecedented ability to share and ingest large imaging files across the healthcare enterprise to serve a growing digital-first clinical service. But while leading the digital transformation has led to tremendous advantages, newer challenges have emerged including ever-increasing imaging volumes with many different modalities, combinations, and sources of data, all of which challenge traditional health IT resources.

If history is any guide, we believe medical imaging will once again lead to another modern transformation, one that allows health systems to unlock the security, scalability, and elasticity of the cloud. As in other industries, migrating and integrating medical imaging workloads to the cloud, alongside clinical and other data, will achieve new levels of operational efficiency, break down data silos for advanced workflows and intelligent analytics, and finally, provide on-demand modern infrastructure to deliver AI and machine learning workloads that enable disease detection and improved precision care.¹

This year at RSNA 2022, Microsoft + Nuance are excited to engage in conversations around how cloud technology, AI, and machine learning will change the future of the medical imaging industry.

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Here are a few of the key highlights of Microsoft + Nuance at RSNA 2022:

1. Join us on the symposium stage

Join us on Monday, November 28, 2022, from 1:30 PM to 2:30 PM CT, in the South Building, Level 1, Room S101AB for a discussion on “From Discovery to Delivery: Integrating data with AI to bring precision therapies into practice” with Fredrick Gustavsson, Chief Technology Officer and VP of Product, Sectra; Dr. Matt Lungren, Chief Medical Information Officer, Nuance; Steven Borg, Senior Director, Health Data and AI, Microsoft Health and Life Sciences; and John Barto, Chief Digital Transformation Officer, Microsoft Health and Life Sciences. Hear their thoughts on how we are using AI to discover insights in patient specific data early in the care continuum and deliver those insights directly into the radiologist workflow for targeted diagnosis.

2. Build with us in hands-on workshops

We’re excited to host a series of hands-on workshops with subject matter experts throughout RSNA 2022, covering topics like advancing responsible AI, empowering analytics, and taking the first step to migrate to the cloud.

A journey of a thousand miles: Taking the first step to migrate to the cloud (without interrupting your current flow)

In this hands-on workshop, you’ll learn that moving your data to the cloud doesn’t have to be daunting. You can start with a few simple additions to your current infrastructure and start seamlessly moving your data to the cloud. Register to join one of our three sessions—on November 27, November 28, or November 29.

Advancing responsible AI: Model building and deployment

Participants will gain behind-the-scenes access to the synergy between Microsoft and Nuance AI solutions. We will take attendees on an end-to-end journey from dataset curation, AI model building, checking the model for fairness and bias, model deployment, and post-deployment model monitoring. Register to join one of our four sessions—on November 27, November 28, November 29, or November 30.

Empower your analytics: Harnessing the power of AI to unlock meaning and deliver insights

In this workshop, you will discover how Nuance mPower Clinical Analytics and Microsoft Azure capabilities make it easy to extract, analyze, and report on your data, enabling improved outcomes, quality, and performance. Register to join one of our two sessions—on November 28 or November 29.

3. Join us in the Imaging AI in Practice booth

Learn more about AI in practice at the Imaging AI in Practice booth every afternoon from 1:00 to 5:00 PM on the half hour for a demo walkthrough. The Imaging AI in Practice (IAIP) demonstration is an interoperability demonstration to showcase new technologies and communication standards needed to integrate AI into the diagnostic radiology workflow. The demonstration follows a fictional patient through a real-world clinical scenario involving both emergent and long-term care.

4. Meet us at the Microsoft+ Nuance booth

Join us in booth #3300, where we will highlight Microsoft + Nuance products and synergy. Come engage with us—we would love to share insights, discuss best practices, and answer all your questions. Learn more by requesting a meeting or demo in the booth.

Next Steps

We look forward to sharing more about how the Microsoft + Nuance vision comes to life to reimagine the medical imaging world and improve patient care. For more information and to register for workshops and sessions, please visit our registration page.

¹Harnessing the outcomes-focused AI in radiology reporting: It all starts with data, Nuance.

The post Building the future of medical imaging at RSNA 2022 appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs.

As part of this focus, we are announcing new previews and general availability updates to Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare. This release reflects customer and partner feedback and deepens our commitment to helping healthcare providers and patients:

• Better navigate data through enhancing patient engagement.
• Empower team collaboration.
• Improve clinical and operational insights.
• Enable further expansion of the global availability of our Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare solutions.

A holistic and connected view of your patients

Getting a 360-degree view of patients is essential for providing quality care. Our updated unified patient view is capable of displaying demographic and clinical data across our solutions. Healthcare teams can see relevant information faster through better visualizations. We aggregate data sources into actionable patient insights, allowing the provider to identify care gaps based on patient demographics and clinical data. Access to clinical and non-clinical form information can also be determined by security roles.

The new unified patient view standalone offering enables end-to-end scenarios leveraging low code solutions from Microsoft Power Apps, enabling providers and partners to create custom applications with consistent patient views. Learn how to build model-driven applications.

Solving the common issue of fragmented and multiple records for a single patient, we now offer better support for Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) record merge capabilities. The new, generally available patient links enables the ability to view “rolled-up” patient data. Administrators and patient data specialists can now maintain Health Level Seven (HL7) FHIR® patient links (merge patients).  

We are making it easy for clinicians to cut through the clutter of fragmented systems so they can focus on providing the best possible care using data from a variety of sources. Virtual Visit for Teams integration into Cerner Electric Health Records (EHR), now generally available, allows clinicians to easily launch a virtual patient visit directly from Cerner EHR. Embedded in the solution includes capabilities such as the ability to track if SMS notifications have been sent to the patient or to copy and re-send visit links.     

Bringing data together

The volume of data produced by the healthcare industry from disparate sources including legacy systems is often large, unstructured, and not universally accessible. How healthcare organizations capture, store, interact, and leverage data is critical for clinical and operational effectiveness—both to enable insights and experiences. As such, data is at the very core of Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare. To help healthcare organizations improve insights, regardless of where the data resides, Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare helps customers structure their data with the healthcare data model and the Azure Health data services.

Our newly released Azure Health Data Services  is technology for Protected Health Information (PHI) in the cloud. It is also one of the only generally available solutions of its kind to ingest, manage, and transform a combination of clinical, imaging, and MedTech data formats into other data standards like Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) and Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM). While other solutions exist for clinical and imaging data, Azure Health Data Services provides the most holistic view of the patient by unifying these three key types of health data. With Azure Health Data Services, you can bring together diverse datasets and streaming data from medical devices in the cloud.  

Making sure data can be shared securely for research and AI development is what will bring about truly powerful change. Azure Health Data Services creates a strong cloud foundation for big data, which makes deep AI and machine learning possible. Azure Health Data Services can connect to Microsoft Power BI and Azure Synapse Analytics for visualizations and analytics, use SMART on FHIR apps to build new applications, and apply machine learning to create new algorithms for diagnosis assistance and research. As we look to the future, we also are building strong strategic partnerships with key health technology start-ups such as Truveta to integrate lifesaving and democratizing capabilities. Our recent acquisition of Nuance further brings AI, machine learning, and other leading-edge capabilities to Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare.

Optimize data footprints with real-time data routing

When utilizing data to support business processes, such as a patient service center, organizations often ingest data from multiple systems. No single system hosts all the data—and controlling how much data is duplicated between systems is a priority to ensure efficient technology architecture. Today we are announcing the release of virtual health data tables. This capability optimizes the cloud storage spend, allowing organizations to virtualize their clinical reference data when using model-driven applications. Health data can remain where it is, or it can be transferred to Microsoft Dataverse, which allows organizations to securely store and manage data that can easily be used by business applications. This new feature takes advantage of Dataverse virtual tables combined with a health data routing concept, allowing dynamic switching of the underlying data source between native Dataverse storage and direct access to external Azure Health Data Services for select healthcare tables. For more details, read our FAQ. 

Dataverse Health Data Exchange API, upcoming preview in May, is a new data interoperability method that allows organizations to move data between cloud for healthcare solutions and health information systems, that expose data as FHIR Bundles. These features work in environments with or without FHIR server implementations. With the Dataverse Health Data Exchange API, organizations get full control of the integration architecture, rules, and logic.

Work intuitively with natural language processing

Organizations can further leverage analytics through natural language processing to improve the delivery of clinical insights with our preview release of Text Analytics free text to FHIR feature. This enables healthcare organizations to find and label valuable information in unstructured clinical documents, transforming them into bundles of interconnected, hierarchical FHIR resources that adhere to core FHIR guidelines.

Empower your healthcare team with collaborative tools

Care managers often manage hundreds of patients with limited time; they need clear visibility into planned activities and tasks to better organize their day. The need for timely touchpoints with patients to support care plan adherence is part of our collaboration focus. We are delivering a more focused workplace for care coordinators to help organize their appointments and follow-ups with intuitive charts to understand progress, upcoming activities, and immediate next actions. We are releasing a new Care Plan Activities Dashboard, in preview, that provides care coordinator and care management views with filtering capabilities.

As part of our investment to help onboard new team members quickly and keep the whole workforce aligned, we are releasing guided tours. This feature is immediately available in the Care Management solution and will be available in other solutions in future updates. Organizations can onboard new users and highlight new features with ease—including in-app guides that describe frequently used features and scenarios. Users can continue to interact with the solution in the background as they are guided through the product. The homepage also provides how-to guides and resources to help the care coordination teams make the most of the care management solution and increase job satisfaction.

We enable organizations to build and deploy AI-powered, compliant, and white-labeled experiences at scale. Last month we announced new templates for Azure Health Bot, our intelligent and industry-relevant conversational service, to quickly build custom scenarios for popular healthcare use cases—saving teams valuable time and ensuring consistent quality of care. Azure Health Bot allows healthcare organizations to instantly build bot scenarios for collecting secure and compliant responses directly from patients for use cases like triage, flu vaccinations, and more. This release expands the catalog with new templates for self-reporting of quality-of-life measures and chronic condition management.

Healthcare organizations can accelerate their business processes by automating information extraction; applying AI and machine learning frameworks that utilize analytics data to assist in many different processes. With Azure Forms Recognizer, patients can take photos of their identifications and insurance cards and submit them before arriving at their appointments, reducing data capture errors and manual effort. Learn how customers like HCA Healthcare are using Azure Forms Recognizer to cut down on administrative time spent entering repetitive card data into their care system

Where we’re headed: A global commitment

Microsoft is committed to supporting customers around the globe. Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare previously available in eight countries is expanding our offering to include another nine countries—Switzerland, Brazil, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Belgium, Ireland, New Zealand, and the Philippines. Further, as part of our commitment to providing a complete product experience, healthcare solutions are now available in ten languages: English, French, Dutch, German, Danish, Italian, Swedish, Finnish, Spanish, and Brazilian Portuguese.

Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare is continually expanding its ability to provide a unified approach that enables healthcare organizations to compete and grow through greater efficiency and improved patient and workforce experiences—ultimately resulting in delivery of care faster, better, and at a lower cost. We are excited about how this series of updates builds on our strong foundation, and for our continued future investment in healthcare. You can learn more about Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare by signing up to stay informed and following us on social.

FHIR® is the registered trademark of HL7 and is used with the permission of HL7. 

The post Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare: Transforming patient care through data and insights appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs.

In this dynamic healthcare era, there’s no more “business as usual.” The way healthcare organizations will work, engage with patients and support community health will never be the same, and it may feel like there’s no roadmap for what’s ahead. Reimagining the next healthcare era, will take continued agility to respond rapidly and predict what’s next, and that requires a new approach to healthcare solutions—one that harnesses data as a resource, and turns its potential into power. Healthcare organizations need to learn how to build upon a strong digital foundation that will carry their organization well into the future.

It’s been over a year since we announced the general availability of Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare and our vision—to create a resilient patient-centered healthcare journey. Since then, I’ve had the opportunity to talk to healthcare organizations and partners across the globe about the trends in the future of healthcare and life sciences that organizations can capitalize on today. We discussed the need for solutions to elevate the patient experience, ease the administrative burden for frontline healthcare workers, and easily optimize Microsoft cloud technologies for their specific business scenarios. With recently announced enhanced features, Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare continues to produce capabilities built on top of the secure, compliant Microsoft cloud that offers healthcare organizations the scale and performance needed for managing their specific workflows, accelerating access to data insights and unifying data governance that helps their organization manage and govern their data, wherever it resides. Along with our partners, we continue to build on the foundation with tools and systems that make it easier for communities and healthcare organization to have access to data to make better informed decisions, gives health teams connected collaboration tools, and easily adopts the data standards that are important to healthcare.

During Microsoft Ignite 2021, Lisa Maki, VP Health Alliances, Microsoft, was able to connect with Tony Mestres, President, Truveta about our recent strategic partnership announcement and how they’re building an unprecedented data platform. Truveta is creating a learning community for health, bringing researchers together to easily build on each other’s work, readily share their data-driven questions and answers, and ultimately speed their time to insight. Its 17 health provider members care for tens of millions of people and operate thousands of care facilities in 40 states. Clinical data from its health provider members represents the full diversity of the U.S. across age, geography, race, ethnicity, and gender. The Truveta platform will leverage the power of Microsoft Azure and artificial intelligence (AI) to include insights from billions of de-identified datapoints, including medical records, images, and genomics. Importantly, data is refreshed daily and continuously flowing, providing researchers with an unprecedented opportunity to learn about our nation’s health every day. In the future, the Truveta platform will be integrated into Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare, unlocking new insights for precision medicine and clinical analytics from the world’s largest de-identified health dataset. Truveta’s data platform will empower clinicians and researchers to find new therapies and treatments. Together, our partnership will help advance global health outcomes for all.

AI and machine learning (ML) play an important role in our ability to understand big data and learn from it. Text Analytics for health in Azure Cognitive Services, allows developers to process and extract insights from unstructured biomedical text, including various types of clinical notes, medical publications, electronic health records, clinical trial protocols, and more, expediting the ability to learn from this data and leverage it for secondary use. Kepro makes quality of care and medical necessity decisions to ensure patients receive the right care they need, as they need it, and in the location of their choosing. To perform these activities, health care providers and clinical support teams are required to manually review large case histories to search for specific words and phrases that span a range of medical documents, like electronic health records, medication lists, and discharge summaries. With Text Analytics for health, they were able to find key indicators in clinical documents instantly and then abstract and display all pertinent information to improve the speed and quality of our reviews. Kepro has improved both the speed, efficiency, and quality of its healthcare reviews. Using Text Analytics for health helps it continue to meet service level agreements and give clinical staff more time to conduct thorough healthcare quality analysis.

During our Microsoft Ignite session, I was also excited to hear about the great work at Carl Zeiss Meditec, Inc. who partnered with Microsoft to use Azure Healthcare APIs to help power the Zeiss medical ecosystem and allow for data to be standardized and exchanged between their centers across the world while leveraging Microsoft’s geo-support for data residency requirements. The ability to securely and quickly exchange medical imaging data in context with clinical data will help providers using Zeiss products give more personalized care to their patients. Combining Zeiss’s expertise in ocular technology with the power of Azure Healthcare APIs enables Zeiss to also develop new solutions and use AI-powered applications and tools.

The need for connected data and supporting our customer’s privacy, security and compliance journeys will continue to be at the forefront of importance of our engineered systems and tools. As an industry, healthcare has been under enormous pressure during the pandemic to keep their people, communities and patient’s data safe.  At Microsoft Ignite, we were excited to introduce another part of that commitment with Microsoft 365 Insider Risk Management and a new healthcare policy template that leverages data from Epic and other EMR solutions—using our Data Connectors—to help healthcare companies identify potential insider risks related to patient data misuse. You can learn more at Microsoft Ignite session BRK241: Manage risk and compliance with end-to-end security solutions and our Insider Risk Management blog.

We also can’t forget how COVID-19 has impacted the future of the healthcare industry in an unprecedented way. In many ways, it has raised the bar on what we need to collectively deliver as an industry in the next era of healthcare. I want to thank the frontline healthcare workers, researchers, technologists, Microsoft partners, and other industry leaders who helped provide guidance on how we can best help the industry on its digital path forward. We believe to reimagine a new era of healthcare organizations need the agility to respond rapidly and predict what’s next, and that requires a new collective approach to providing better experiences, insights, and care for today and well into the future.

You can learn more about Microsoft and healthcare during these Microsoft Ignite sessions:

BK230: Get long-term benefit from health data with Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare

Ask the Experts: Get long-term benefits from health data with Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare

Customer Tech Talks: St. Luke’s University Healthcare Network

The post Reimagine a new era of healthcare at Microsoft Ignite 2021 and beyond appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs.

According to a recent Frost & Sullivan report, “Digital Investments in Healthcare Through COVID-19 and Beyond,” most healthcare organizations are in some stage of digital transformation, either on their accord or spurred by the immense changes in healthcare delivery during the pandemic. Additionally, Rock Health notes that at the end of June 2021, funding for health tech startups surpassed all of 2020. Putting these two mega trends together generates significant opportunities for innovators and early-stage companies to respond with new and sometimes, groundbreaking solutions. As an innovator, learn more about how we help B2B startups grow and scale through the Microsoft for Startups program.

Increasingly, health tech startups are aligning themselves with Microsoft, bringing innovation, diverse perspectives, and digital transformation to the healthcare industry. These early-stage companies are eager to solve problems, fill existing gaps and improve access and quality of healthcare. Healthcare startups are choosing to build their solutions on Azure for a variety of reasons, including being able to accelerate development of their solutions by leveraging Microsoft’s investments throughout the healthcare ecosystem—payor, provider, and life sciences. From the launch of the Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare to the planned acquisition of Nuance, to the continued commitment to interoperability, startups are taking note. More and more they are selecting Microsoft as their platform and Microsoft for Startups program as their path to accelerated growth and scale. Additionally, startups and their enterprise customers value Microsoft cloud services and the security framework that encompasses industry best practices and standards, including the ISO 27000 family of standards, NIST 800, HIPSS, HITRUST, and others. Innovators value our comprehensive compliance offerings, and regular independent audits that are performed by qualified third-party accredited assessors.

Innovating with Microsoft for Startups 

Oncospace, a Baltimore-based startup combining radiation oncology with the power of big data, is helping doctors personalize each patient’s radiation treatment. Their AI-based platform enables personalization of each patient’s treatment, with the goal of minimizing side effects and maintaining a high quality of life. “We deploy products on the Azure Cloud to securely and efficiently distribute our software to cancer treatment centers worldwide,” noted Praveen Sinha, co-founder and CEO of Oncospace. Additionally, Praveen’s team also has Microsoft’s InnerEye SDK, an open source medical imaging deep learning library developed by Microsoft Research, on their product roadmap, where it will train and deploy models on Azure Machine Learning and Azure Stack.

Using Microsoft Computer Vision cognitive services and AI, Vastmindz is changing how vital signs are taken. Currently in use for health and wellness triage, this UK-based company has developed an app that uses your cell phone camera or webcam to take biometrics such as heart rate, respiratory rate, blood oxygenation, blood pressure and stress level, without contact. The technology analyzes subtle color changes in an individual’s skin to extract a rich physiological signal using proprietary software. The team at Vastmindz has built an easy-to-use SDK that enable businesses to integrate this feature within existing applications seamlessly and they plan to blaze a trail that will include distributing their technology with other health technology and medical devices. 

Diverse perspectives 

Hyro, an early-stage company based in the U.S. and Israel, as well as a Microsoft Partner of the Year for Business Excellence for 2021, is automating key interactions for enterprises with their Adaptive Communications Platform. Beyond traditional conversational AI, Hyro uses natural language and computational linguistics to turn complex content into simple dialogue. Developed as a plug and play platform, Hyro automatically stands up voice assistants, chat solutions, and virtual agents that help companies, including Weill Cornell Medicine, Carroll Property Management and Mercy Health, create stellar customer and patient journeys, grow bottom-line revenue, and reduce support costs by simplifying digital interactions. But innovation isn’t always just about the technology. “It’s mind blowing to me how such a huge player like Microsoft can partner, collaborate and advance startups in such a meaningful way, especially in a domain like healthcare,” commented, Israel Krush, CEO and co-founder of Hyro. 

Liz O’Day, PhD, founded Olaris, a Boston-based startup shortly after completing her PhD at Harvard. Building on the research that she conducted during her studies, she and her team are building a platform that uses metabolomics and machine learning to identify “biomarkers of response,” and change how diseases are diagnosed and treated. The algorithms are designed to differentiate drug responders (R) from non-responders (NR). Dr. O’Day’s company are tackling cancer, neurodegenerative disease, immune response and more. While she builds her company, tapping into the Microsoft for Startups program for both technical and business development support, she noted, “I’m a first time, female scientist and youngish CEO, having the Microsoft stamp of approval has been invaluable.” 

Warrior Centric Health (WCH) provides US veterans with better and more equitable care. This startup, based in the Baltimore, MD area and established by Ronald Steptoe and Dr. Evelyn Lewis, ensures that providers understand the unique experiences and health histories of military veterans and can more effectively deliver care to former and current service members and their families. While many seek care through the established US Veteran’s Administration and Department of Defense healthcare systems, a vast majority of the Warrior Community use traditional, commercial providers. This is where WCH comes in. Through learning management systems, analytics and other technologies, Ron and his team are deeply invested in improving the responsiveness of health systems to those that have served the US. Ron is an 8th generation military veteran whose family legacy of service to the US dates back to the Revolutionary and Civil Wars. As a high-tech founder who is a former innovations leader at Pfizer, a soldier, a graduate of West Point, and a person of color, Ron has drawn upon his diverse life experience and family legacy to envision WCH having a lasting impact on the nation. 

Digital transformation 

Lunit, based in South Korea, gets its name from an abbreviation of, “learning unit.” With AI, Lunit is devoted to developing advanced medical image analytics and novel imaging biomarkers using deep learning technology. The company’s goal is to solve some of the most critical issues in cancer care, reduce medical costs and improve patient outcomes. Using the cloud computing power of Microsoft Azure, Lunit’s technology generates location information of detected lesions in the form of heatmaps. It also makes abnormality scores that reflect the probability that the detected lesion is abnormal and needs further investigation by a radiologist. When COVID-19 spanned across the globe, the Lunit team went to work. Because their algorithms had been trained to read x-rays and originally could detect 10 major chest diseases including pneumonia with 97-99 percent accuracy, the Lunit team quickly adapted those algorithms to scan for signs of COVID-19. 

Another organization that is transforming imaging technology in healthcare is, Ultromics. Building on a decade of imaging research conducted at Oxford University and in partnership with the NHS, this company specializes in using AI to analyze echocardiograms. Their solution, called EchoGo, provides cloud-based artificial intelligence services to support cardiac imaging diagnosis without variability or need to touch software. Earlier this year, EchoGo Pro, was cleared by the FDA and is now available to clinicians across the U.S. EchoGo Pro was trialed and validated with the Mayo Clinic, improving the diagnostic accuracy of clinicians for Coronary Artery Disease (CAD), the most common form of heart disease and a leading cause of death in the US. More recently, Ultromics has CE Marked EchoGo Core. The clearance came shortly after the company’s endorsement by the NHSx, who recently awarded Ultromics with a grant to fast track its technology across the UK, to improve care delivery of services.

Ready to innovate 

Now more than ever, the healthcare industry needs innovative, diverse, and transformative solutions to democratize high-quality healthcare delivery, provide better patient outcomes, and extend both with global scale and cost effectiveness. We are honored that so many of the new generation of innovators trust Microsoft to be their platform partner.

Are you an innovator ready to continue the transformation of health and life sciences? Learn more about the Microsoft for Startups program and how we help B2B startups grow and scale. Delve into learning resources to power your startup with Microsoft and visit Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare to explore the capabilities and learn more. 

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