This evolution reflects a broader shift in how healthcare approaches security. Rather than responding to risk after the fact, organizations are embedding security across identity, data, infrastructure, and applications—building resilience as a foundational capability that supports innovation at scale.

For some organizations, AI is being adopted faster than traditional governance structures can keep pace. According to Microsoft’s 2026 Data Security Index, only 47% of organizations across industries report implementing specific generative AI security controls, underscoring a need for clearer security visibility to support safe AI adoption. A multinational survey of more than 1,700 data security professionals commissioned by Microsoft from Hypothesis Group found that 29% of employees have already turned to unsanctioned AI agents for work tasks.¹ 

Together, these trends are creating new challenges around data handling, security visibility, and compliance, especially as AI tools interact with sensitive or unstructured data. As AI moves into autonomous agents embedded in workflows, these gaps in governance and visibility become exponentially harder to manage.

At the same time, healthcare leaders are responding. Healthcare organizations are accelerating investment in technical and operational safeguards and implementing more specialized controls to govern AI responsibly. The message is clear: governance and security foundations play an important role in responsible AI adoption.

Operating security at a global scale gives Microsoft a unique perspective on how threats evolve and how defenses must adapt. Microsoft processes more than 100 trillion security signals every day,² applying insights from a global network of security engineers and partners to develop protections that support the unique regulatory requirements of environments like healthcare.

What real-world impact looks like in healthcare security

Across healthcare, organizations are facing expanding digital environments, rising threat volumes, and teams under constant pressure to protect patient data. The following examples illustrate how some organizations are approaching these challenges as they modernize their security operations.

St. Luke’s University Health Network: Scaling security operations without slowing care delivery

With 15 campuses, 300 outpatient sites, and more than 2.5 petabytes of data in motion, St. Luke’s University Health Network manages a highly complex digital environment. Protecting that environment while maintaining operational continuity requires security operations that can scale efficiently and respond quickly to potential threats.

Like many large health systems, St. Luke’s faced fragmented visibility across multiple security platforms. Analysts were overwhelmed by user‑reported suspicious emails and false positives, slowing response times and increasing the risk that real threats could be missed.

To modernize its Security Operations Center, St. Luke’s adopted Microsoft Security Copilot, giving analysts unified, real‑time visibility and AI‑assisted investigation. By consolidating information across security tools and using AI‑assisted analysis, the organization reduced manual effort for analysts and improved consistency in how potential threats are reviewed and prioritized.

The impact:

• Nearly 200 hours saved per month.
• Thousands of false positives automatically resolved.
• Faster, more consistent threat response at scale.

Providence Care: Unifying security to improve visibility and response

Serving more than 15,000 patients across over 14 sites, Providence Care faced a challenge around complexity. A patchwork of disconnected security tools created visibility gaps and operational strain for a small IT team responsible for thousands of users and devices.

This fragmented approach made it harder to detect issues early and respond quickly, keeping the team stuck in reactive mode. Providence Care needed to simplify its environment while strengthening protection across identities, devices, and data.

By consolidating on Microsoft 365 E5 and unified Microsoft security capabilities, including Microsoft Defender and Microsoft Purview, Providence Care established a modern, cloud‑native security foundation. Consolidation reduced complexity and gave the IT team time back to focus on higher‑value work.

The impact:

• Reduced tool sprawl and improved visibility.
• Faster detection and response.
• IT teams shifted from reactive work to analytics, automation, and AI readiness.

Mitsubishi Tanabe Pharma: Modernizing security to scale innovation

As life sciences organizations expand digital transformation efforts, the volume and value of sensitive research and clinical data continue to grow, along with the cyber threats targeting it. Advancing its long‑term vision for data‑driven innovation and precision medicine, Mitsubishi Tanabe Pharma faced increasing security alert volumes across cloud environments and rising pressure on specialized teams responsible for protecting critical systems and data.

Fragmented security visibility limited context for rapid analysis, slowing response times and making it harder to securely scale digital initiatives across the organization. To address these challenges, Mitsubishi Tanabe Pharma modernized its security operations by unifying cloud visibility and security monitoring, strengthening threat detection and incident analysis, and improving security literacy across teams. This approach established a more resilient, cloud‑ready security foundation aligned to its broader digital strategy.

The impact:

• Reduced manual effort through automation and consolidation.
• Improved focus for security and IT teams.
• A shift from reactive investigation to proactive risk management.

Across providers and life sciences, the same fundamentals show up again and again: simplify, unify visibility, and reduce the noise that slows response. AI-powered, end-to-end security helps healthcare organizations run security operations across complex IT environments.

Building secure AI foundations with a phased approach

Strengthening healthcare security is a journey. A phased approach helps organizations address the most critical risks first while building long-term resilience. Microsoft’s Cloud Adoption Framework outlines three phases: Govern AI, Manage AI, and Secure AI. This approach helps healthcare organizations establish responsible AI practices and reduce risk as innovations like AI agents reshape how data is accessed and used. Grounding this work in Zero Trust principles, “never trust, always verify,” helps ensure interactions are authenticated, authorized, and continuously monitored as part of a broader security strategy.

Healthcare leaders are navigating AI adoption in one of the most regulated and trust‑sensitive industries in the world. Microsoft brings a distinct advantage to this moment: decades of experience supporting healthcare organizations, combined with security operations at global scale.

Through its Secure Future Initiative, Microsoft applies lessons learned from operating one of the world’s largest security platforms and translates them into practical patterns and practices designed for highly regulated environments like healthcare. When security is embedded as a foundation, not an afterthought, organizations are better positioned to govern AI responsibly, protect patient trust, and move forward with confidence.

From real‑world impact to practical next steps

Across these examples, the common thread is not technology alone, but disciplined progress, building security foundations that can support increasingly autonomous AI scenarios over time. For healthcare leaders navigating similar pressures, progress often starts with a phased, intentional approach rather than a single, all-at-once transformation.

As healthcare organizations introduce new AI innovations like agents, establishing a strong security foundation rooted in Zero Trust principles helps leaders move forward with confidence and control. While achieving Zero Trust takes time, adopting a phased strategy allows for steady progress and builds confidence in securely integrating AI. 

Extending the conversation

Security is a shared responsibility, and progress depends on collaboration across the healthcare ecosystem—including customers, technologists, and partners. Through open dialogue and shared learning, healthcare leaders can continue strengthening resilience as technologies and threats evolve.

Explore guidance on building a more resilient healthcare security posture, covering cloud security, compliance, and governance in an AI‑enabled world.

• Stay ahead with our Healthcare Security Brief podcast, offering practical insights from Microsoft security partners on AI‑era security, privacy, and compliance. Listen to the podcast on Spotify, Amazon Music, and Apple Podcasts.
• Read the e-book: Strengthen cybersecurity and compliance in the era of AI.
• Download the infographic: How AI can help fortify security and compliance.
• Deep dive into the Microsoft Data Governance and Security Guide.

¹ July 2025 multi-national survey of more than 1,700 data security professionals commissioned by Microsoft from Hypothesis Group.

² Microsoft Digital Defense Report 2025: Safeguarding Trust in the AI Era, Microsoft Security, 2025.

The post Building secure foundations for responsible AI in healthcare with Microsoft appeared first on The Microsoft Cloud Blog.

Research we conducted with senior healthcare executives in the United States, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, revealed a growing readiness divide. As some systems build governance, security, and workforce models to scale AI safely, others are still in proof-of-concept mode. The result? Diverging outcomes in productivity, workforce strain, cost-to-serve, and resilience.

The question is no longer whether AI belongs in healthcare. It’s how quickly organizations can operationalize it—safely, responsibly, and at scale.

Microsoft works with more than 170,000 healthcare customers globally to move from pilot to production with enterprise-grade security, privacy, and compliance.

So what does Frontier Transformation actually look like? The following examples show how healthcare organizations are embedding AI into core workflows—moving beyond pilots to deliver real, scalable impact with the governance and trust required in clinical environments.

Accelerating discovery and clinical development with AI

Frontier organizations are reinventing discovery by treating AI as an always-on research partner. It compresses the time it takes to find, synthesize, and act on evidence across functions. The result isn’t just faster tasks; it’s faster decisions and a more scalable path from insight to impact. As these capabilities become table stakes, organizations that can’t industrialize knowledge of work will fall behind in speed-to-trial, speed-to-market, and ultimately speed-to-patient.

UCB: Scaling agent-based AI with a secure internal platform

UCB built SKAI, a secure internal platform on Microsoft Azure for generative and agent-based AI, helping teams apply knowledge faster and operationalize AI with governance built in.

Syneos Health: Streamlining complex data to bring therapies to patients faster

Syneos Health is using AI to help teams analyze large, complex data sets across the clinical development lifecycle. With faster, more consistent synthesis of study inputs and operational signals, biopharma customers can make decisions with greater speed and confidence. Syneos Health reported reducing time for clinical trial site activation by about 10%, helping remove friction from a critical step in getting lifesaving therapies to patients. Enhanced predictive modeling and forecasting tools also allow teams to identify risks earlier, model scenarios, and engage customers and clinical partners more effectively.

Advancing care delivery with AI in the flow of clinical work

In care delivery, transformation happens when AI shows up in the flow of work. It reduces cognitive and documentation load and gives time back to clinicians. Frontier organizations use AI to shift capacity toward patients, not screens, while improving consistency and quality. As patient expectations rise and workforce shortages persist, the ability to deliver more care with the same (or fewer) resources is quickly becoming a differentiator.

Intermountain Health: Rehumanizing care by reducing documentation burden

Intermountain Health adopted Microsoft Dragon Copilot to reduce the administrative load that can pull clinicians away from patients. By supporting clinical documentation and automating routine tasks, clinicians at Intermountain Health reported experiencing a 27% reduction in time spent on notes per appointment, reducing cognitive burden and enabling more meaningful patient engagement by incorporating AI as a core part of their clinical workflow.

Cooper University Health Care: Giving clinicians time back in the flow of care 

Cooper University Health Care is using AI-powered clinical documentation to reduce the administrative burden that pulls clinicians away from patients. By embedding AI directly into clinical workflows, clinicians at Cooper reported saving more than four minutes per patient visit on documentation, experiencing less burnout, and engaging more meaningfully with patients—demonstrating how AI optimized workflows can rehumanize care at scale.

Mercy: Bringing ambient AI to nursing workflows

Nurses are at the center of care delivery and often at the center of documentation burden. Mercy has been using AI capabilities to transform nursing care. By capturing and structuring information in the flow of work, Mercy reported 8 to 24 minutes saved per shift for high-use nurses, a 21% reduction in documentation latency and a 4.5% increase in patient satisfaction from their initial rollout.

Streamlining operations and experiences across the healthcare organization

Frontier Transformation requires more than point solutions. It takes an AI-ready operating foundation that connects people, processes, and data across the organization. Frontier organizations use copilots and agents to standardize work, automate routine interactions, and deliver more consistent experiences at scale. Those that treat AI as isolated experiments often find themselves outpaced by peers who can improve service levels while bending the cost curve.

Bupa APAC: Building an AI-ready foundation to improve customer experiences

Bupa APAC is streamlining operations, automating routine processes, and making customer experiences more seamless thanks to AI. With an emphasis on AI readiness—skills, governance, and secure access to information—Bupa APAC upskilled its workforce with Microsoft 365 Copilot and GitHub Copilot, generating more than 410,000 lines of AI-assisted code, initiating more than 30,000 Copilot chats, and accelerating more than 100 AI use cases to improve care.

CareSource: Scaling compassionate service with cloud and AI

CareSource is applying AI to support operational scale while keeping a human touch. By modernizing platforms and automating processes that can slow service delivery, CareSource reduced documentation time by 75%, saved over USD125,000 on automation, and boosted developer productivity by up to 30%, helping their teams focus on the needs of members, providers, and communities.

Strengthening cyber resilience with AI

Cyber resilience is a transformation prerequisite. As care becomes more digital, AI must help defenders move at machine speed while maintaining trust and compliance. Frontier organizations use AI to triage, investigate, and report faster—reducing risk and freeing experts for the threats that matter most. In a sector where disruption can compromise patient safety, lagging security maturity can erase hard-won gains in digital transformation.

St. Luke’s University Health Network: Saving nearly 200 hours per month with AI-powered security agents

As healthcare expands its digital footprint, cyber defense becomes inseparable from patient safety and trust. St. Luke’s University Health Network is using Microsoft Security Copilot agents to accelerate phishing alert triage and to generate incident reports in minutes instead of hours. The organization reported saving nearly 200 hours per month, freeing security teams to focus on higher-value investigations and improving speed to response across its environment.

Act now to lead the future

If you’re looking at these examples and wondering where to start, focus on a few moves that help you learn quickly and scale safely.

• Start with workflows, not technology: Identify the highest-friction moments (such as documentation, imaging backlogs, complex data synthesis, member service, and security triage) and design AI interventions that measurably reduce time, effort, and risk.
• Get your foundation right, early: Prioritize secure access, identity, and data governance so copilots and agents have the right context, without compromising privacy or compliance.
• Make it real, and make it stick: Operationalize responsible AI (like oversight, evaluation, and human-in-the-loop), measure quality and safety, and invest in change management so adoption scales beyond early enthusiasts.

Start your Frontier Transformation today

These organizations show what Frontier Transformation looks like in practice—embedding intelligence across clinical, operational, and administrative work to deliver faster insights, reduced burden, strengthen security, and create better experiences at scale. The competitive bar is moving quickly. Waiting to act can mean higher costs, slower throughput, and greater strain on already-stretched teams. With deep healthcare experience and a global customer base, Microsoft can help organizations scale AI responsibly from the first workflow to redesign to enterprise-wide adoption.

The post What Frontier healthcare leaders are doing differently with AI appeared first on The Microsoft Cloud Blog.

New capabilities include the ability to surface relevant work-related information alongside patient data for customers using Microsoft 365 Copilot; partner-built AI apps and agents available through Microsoft Marketplace that extend intelligence across revenue cycle, clinical insights, and decision support; and expanded role-based experiences for physicians, nurses, and radiologists designed to scale securely across settings and geographies.

Today, more than 100,000 clinicians rely on Dragon Copilot as part of their daily practice—supporting care for millions of patients every month. That kind of adoption doesn’t happen by accident; it happens when technology earns trust, fits naturally into clinical workflows, and proves its value day after day. As healthcare continues to accelerate, the question facing organizations is no longer if AI will be part of care delivery, but how quickly they can equip their teams with tools that scale safely, work across roles, and keep clinicians focused on patients. The new Dragon Copilot capabilities we’re introducing at HIMSS 2026 build on this proven foundation—extending trusted clinical support beyond documentation to meet the growing demands of modern care.

Clinicians need more than access to data—they need an AI assistant that works alongside them, understands context, and supports action across systems and settings. Built on Microsoft Azure, Dragon Copilot delivers this capability with enterprise‑grade security, responsible AI, and cloud scale—giving organizations the confidence to deploy broadly and grow with care teams wherever they work.

“We ultimately went with Microsoft because of the security, the compliance, the scalability, and the fact that they’ve delivered reliable solutions for years.”

—Snehal Gandhi, MD, Vice President and Chief Medical Information Officer, Cooper University Health Care

See what Dragon Copilot has to offer:

Unifying the disparate—so care teams can move faster, with confidence

By unifying information from across systems and sources, Dragon Copilot reduces fragmentation and unnecessary searching—bringing patient data, trusted clinical content, and partner powered AI insights into a single, contextual experience within the clinical workflow.

What makes this approach different is not just access to information, but how intelligence is delivered and applied. Clinicians can naturally query, summarize, create, and act using voice or text—without toggling between tools. Insights are surfaced instantly in one place, enabling care teams to move fluidly from understanding to action while spending less time navigating systems and more time with patients.

That intelligence is grounded in a broad set of trusted sources, including:

• Prebuilt trusted clinical content with citations
• Patient data like diagnoses, labs, medications, and allergies
• Organizational content such as policies, procedures, schedules, and communications

When needed, reliable web information can also be accessed through a safety‑first pathway—ensuring responses remain appropriate for clinical use.

Care delivery depends on more than clinical facts—it also depends on fast access to the work context around care. With Microsoft 365 Copilot, powered by Work IQ and accessible inside Dragon Copilot, clinicians can pull in relevant work-related information from connected apps and enterprise data, right where they’re already working. Work IQ is the intelligence layer that helps Copilot understand how people collaborate across emails, files, meetings, and chats—so responses are grounded in the right context. The result is a more unified experience that reduces time spent searching across tools and keeps momentum inside the clinical workflow.

Dragon Copilot extends clinical intelligence beyond any single system or screen. Instead of being locked into one interface, clinicians can invoke powerful AI capabilities wherever they’re already working—across applications, EHRs, and web pages. By simply clicking or highlighting text, Dragon Copilot can read, understand, and apply its intelligence directly in context, without forcing clinicians to switch tools or reenter information.

For example, a clinician reviewing a note can place their cursor over a sentence and say, “Add more detail about what the patient shared regarding their cardiac history.” Dragon Copilot immediately expands the documentation using the surrounding clinical context—no copying, no pasting, and no workflow disruption—helping clinicians move faster while keeping their focus on the patient, not the screen.

Building on this foundation, Dragon Copilot further unifies innovation through AI apps and agents available in Microsoft Marketplace. Developed by partners such as Canary Speech, Humata Health, Optum, and Regard, these solutions deliver capabilities across clinical insights, revenue cycle management, prior authorization, and clinical decision support. Organizations can easily purchase, deploy, and scale partner innovation—while clinicians experience those insights directly within their existing workflows.

“Sentara Health is integrating Regard’s diagnosis and documentation technology within Dragon Copilot to save time, improve revenue integrity, and most importantly improve care.

By combining Dragon’s ambient conversation capture with Regard’s ability to surface key insights from data, we expect to help our clinicians identify comorbidities and relevant diagnoses in real time without adding steps to their workflow. Our goal is straightforward: strengthen the clinical picture, reduce documentation burden, and support more informed decision-making at the point of care.”

—Dr. Joseph Evans, Vice President, Chief Health Information Officer at Sentara Health

Simplifying the complex—so care teams can be present with patients

Dragon Copilot streamlines clinical documentation and routine tasks, so clinicians spend less time navigating systems and more time focused on patient care. By simplifying physician and nursing charting, notes, flowsheets, and radiology reporting, it reduces rework and cognitive burden—helping care teams work more efficiently and confidently across the day.

This simplification is powered by healthcare-grade AI models built for clinical accuracy, with clinical note quality evaluated using the Provider Document Summarization Quality Instrument (PDSQI9)—an industry standard developed with leading academic and healthcare institutions to ensure clear, consistent, and clinically appropriate outputs.

Beyond documentation, Dragon Copilot automates high friction tasks across the workflow. Persona specific note types, automated referral letters and after‑visit summaries, summaries of prior radiology reports, and proactive coding guidance reduce manual effort and unnecessary toggling—allowing care teams to focus on decisions, not data entry.

New and expanded capabilities include:

• Proactive ICD‑10 specificity suggestions, delivered during note review to support timely, accurate reimbursement.
• Reusable custom clinical documents, created from prompts or examples and managed as templates, allowing clinicians to get additional unique content created automatically, such as custom letters.
• Pull-forward workflow support to jump-start new documentation from prior notes.
• Multilingual conversation capture, connecting with patients in their language. Captures the conversation in 58 languages and automatically converts the encounter into a note written in the primary language used in each country.
• Seamless migration from Dragon Medical One, preserving existing commands, vocabularies, profiles, templates, and AutoTexts.

Scaling across roles, geographies, and devices

Dragon Copilot is designed with role-based experiences that deliver the right capabilities to each clinician, when and where they’re needed. Physicians, nurses, radiologists, and other care team members benefit from workflows tailored to their unique responsibilities—from documentation and care coordination to image interpretation—while organizations maintain consistency, security, and compliance at scale. With a single solution spanning multiple roles, including the only experience built for radiologists and demonstrated outcomes for nurses, healthcare organizations can simplify their technology footprint and drive greater return on investment.

Physicians

Dragon Copilot supports physicians across care settings through EHR‑integrated workflows and a dedicated app available on mobile (iOS and Android), web, and desktop. Physicians can document more efficiently, access timely clinical information, and reduce cognitive load—whether at the point of care or on the go.

Together with partners, Dragon Copilot continues to scale globally and is now available in U.S., Canada, the UK, Ireland, France, Germany, Austria, Belgium, and the Netherlands.

Nurses

Dragon Copilot enhances nursing workflows by ambiently capturing documentation at the point of care and transforming conversations into structured flowsheet entries. With expanded support for all med-surg flowsheet templates and lines, drains, and airways (LDAWs) additions and removals—nurses can document more completely without disrupting care.

Through a dedicated app available on mobile (such as iOS and Android), web, and desktop, nurses can also access information from trusted medical sources, query transcripts to surface key patient details, and create concise summaries—without leaving their workflow—reducing clicks, and keeping focus on patient care.

“Dragon Copilot gives power back to nurses to spend time at the bedside with face-to-face interactions.”

—Stephanie Whitaker, MSN, Registered Nurse, Chief Nursing Officer, Mercy

Nurses using Dragon Copilot have reported reduced cognitive load, faster documentation, and improved patient experience, reinforcing the value of role‑specific AI designed for frontline care. The Dragon Copilot nursing experience is available in the United States.

“I can say that without a doubt, using Dragon Copilot has significantly reduced the time that I’m focused and worrying about sitting down and getting my charting done behind the computer.”

—Christine Dupire, Registered Nurse, Mercy

Radiologists

Paired with PowerScribe One, Dragon Copilot helps minimize repetitive tasks such as reviewing prior reports and automates routine steps in report creation. It surfaces relevant clinical context, integrates customizable AI experiences, and provides intelligent access to credible information—helping radiologists stay focused and deliver high‑quality reports with confidence. The Dragon Copilot radiology experience is currently in preview in the United States.

“As we embrace the next frontier of AI, we know that having cloud-based solutions that work seamlessly with our existing products and systems is paramount. Having Dragon Copilot as a companion for PowerScribe One gives me confidence that I can test and benefit from the latest AI advancements with minimal disruptions and distractions.”

—Sean Cleary, MD, Vice Chair of Informatics for Imaging Sciences University of Rochester Medical Center

Restoring humanity to healthcare through AI

AI will only transform healthcare if it truly serves the people delivering care. Dragon Copilot is built for that purpose—bringing role‑based experiences, hands‑free workflows, and proactive clinical intelligence together in a way that fits naturally into how clinicians work. By unifying information, reducing friction, and extending trusted intelligence across the workflow, Dragon Copilot helps clinicians spend less time managing tasks and more time connecting with patients—restoring focus, confidence, and humanity to the practice of medicine.

Join the more than 100,000 clinicians already using Dragon Copilot

• Visit us at the HIMSS 2026 Booth #2812.
• Get the playbook to learn how clinicians utilize AI to work smarter.
• Download the white paper to explore AI use cases transforming healthcare.

The post Unify. Simplify. Scale: Microsoft Dragon Copilot meets the moment at HIMSS 2026 appeared first on The Microsoft Cloud Blog.

After decades of digitization—and years of rapid advances in AI—the industry now stands at the threshold of a far more profound shift: the rise of agentic AI. 

Unlike earlier forms of automation, agentic AI goes beyond task assistance. Intelligent AI agents can plan, reason, and act autonomously collaborating alongside clinicians, care teams, researchers, developers, and all workers from the back office to the front lines. When embedded into everyday workflows, agents transform intelligence from something accessed on demand into something continuously at work—embedding subject matter expertise with human ambition to achieve our highest aspirations.  

But if pervasive agentic intelligence is the destination, how far along is healthcare on the journey?

Measuring healthcare’s readiness for agentic AI 

To answer that question, Microsoft, in collaboration with The Health Management Academy, conducted original research published in the January 2026 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine. Based on surveys and in-depth interviews with senior healthcare executives across provider organizations in the United States, the research offers a grounded, reality-based view of how health systems are progressing along the agentic AI maturity curve—from early experimentation to enterprise level optimization. 

What the research reveals 

1. Agentic AI remains early—but strategic interest is rising
   While enthusiasm is growing, adoption remains nascent. 43% of respondents report piloting or testing agentic AI, yet only 3% have deployed agents in live workflows. At the same time, one-third of respondents indicate no plans to explore agentic AI within the next one to two years—highlighting the gap between experimentation and operational readiness. 
2. Confidence in long-term impact is strong
   Despite limited deployment today, belief in agentic AI’s future impact is clear. 60% of respondents agree or strongly agree that agentic AI will meaningfully improve or disrupt the provider–patient experience, with similar optimism around productivity gains (57%). Nearly half anticipate deeper human–AI collaboration within the next three to five years—reinforcing the view that agents will augment, not replace, clinical and operational roles. 
3. A catalyst for workforce, productivity, and experience transformation
   More than three quarters (77%) expect AI agents to improve backend productivity, while 60% believe they will fundamentally reshape the patient–provider experience. Yet this transformation will require change: 60% cite reskilling and upskilling as a top challenge as ecosystems of AI models and agents expand. 
4. A clear gap between belief and deployment
   Qualitative interviews reveal that leaders increasingly view agentic AI as a strategic end state—one that depends heavily on progress in workforce readiness, governance, and data infrastructure. Moving from promise to sustained value will require deliberate, coordinated investment across all three. 

Why this moment matters: A leadership imperative

The publication of this research marks a shift in the future of work. The question is no longer if agentic AI will reshape healthcare—but how intentionally health systems choose to shape that transformation. 

Healthcare has a rare window to define the role of agentic AI before patterns harden, and expectations are set. Success will be determined not by technology alone, but by how effectively organizations prepare their foundations and empower their people to work alongside digital colleagues in a hybrid workforce. 

Building strong governance frameworks, establishing a trusted data foundation, and developing an AI ready workforce are no longer optional—they are prerequisites for leadership in the organizations on the frontier of the next era of transformation. 

• Read the New England Journal of Medicine article.
• Read the full report: Agentic AI and the Next Frontier of Transformation.
• Explore how other healthcare organizations are already using AI to make tangible impacts.

From Vision to Value: AI Use Cases Transforming Healthcare

Organizations are using AI to increase efficiency, accelerate innovation, derive insights from their data, and empower their workforce.

Get the whitepaper

The post Assessing healthcare’s agentic AI readiness: New research from Microsoft and The Health Management Academy appeared first on The Microsoft Cloud Blog.

Healthcare leaders today are navigating a landscape of escalating cyberthreats and increasing operational complexity. Cybersecurity is not just a technical requirement—it’s essential to building patient trust, ensuring care continuity, and enabling future innovation in healthcare.

At the 2025 Scottsdale Institute CISO Summit, top security leaders gathered to share real stories, big challenges, and practical solutions for keeping patient data safe in a rapidly changing world. As a follow-up, they released a report on the Future-Proofing Healthcare Cybersecurity: AI, Cloud Transformation, and Capabilities for Tomorrow.

Here are a few highlights:

Why cybersecurity matters more than ever

Healthcare is an often-targeted and heavily regulated industry with patient outcomes at stake.

• Cyber threats are evolving fast. AI and cloud transformation are opening new doors for care, but also new risks. Cybercriminals are getting smarter, and healthcare organizations must keep pace to protect sensitive information and help ensure patient safety.
• It’s personal. Healthcare leaders reminded us that every security decision impacts real people—patients, families, and staff. The goal is always to deliver the best care, safely.

What healthcare teams need to know about cybersecurity

1. Collaboration is critical

CEOs, CIOs, and CISOs must work together. Innovation and security go hand-in-hand, and strong partnerships help organizations stay ahead of threats.

2. AI opportunities and challenges

AI can make healthcare smarter and more efficient, but it also introduces new risks. Leaders must ask tough questions about how AI tools use data, how they’re trained, and how to keep them secure.

3. Training and upskilling

Investing in technology is only half of the battle. Staff need ongoing training to use new tools safely and effectively. Creative incentives—like paid training time or career pathways—help teams grow and adapt.

4. Breaking down silos

Legacy structures can slow progress. Integrated teams and cross-functional collaboration are key to finding and fixing vulnerabilities quickly.

5. Third-party risk management

Vendor relationships are more complex than ever. Organizations must raise the bar for vendor assessments, ensure business continuity, and educate users about risks.

6. Resilience and response

Prevention is important, but detection and rapid response are essential. AI-powered tools can help spot suspicious behavior, but human oversight remains crucial.

Patient safety, care continuity, and trust in healthcare depend on getting cybersecurity right

Healthcare organizations face a critical inflection point. Success will require:

• Embracing AI-powered defenses
• Building stronger networks among security professionals
• Accelerating vendor sophistication
• Developing agile incident response protocols

Security-first in action: St. Luke’s Health Network

For St. Luke’s University Health Network, protecting patient data is key to delivering great care. Serving people in Pennsylvania and New Jersey at 13 hospitals and 607 practices, including a number of specialties, it has a sizeable data estate to safeguard.

Succeeding at that vital mission got easier when St. Luke’s reduced its number of security tools and gained dramatically greater visibility into the data it needs to maintain security.

It replaced several third-party security solutions with Microsoft Sentinel, Microsoft Defender for Cloud, and Microsoft Defender for Office 365, adding to its Microsoft Security solution base for a unified security posture that helps security teams do what they do best: protect St. Luke’s from an ever-evolving threat landscape.

I believe that is likely the first company on the cusp of creating the predictive model that will take us past threat detection and enable threat prevention. That’s why we trust Microsoft.

–David Finkelstein, Chief Information Security Officer, St. Luke’s University Health Network

Let’s build a secure future for healthcare, together

At Microsoft, we’re focused on helping organizations consolidate fragmented security capabilities and apply intelligence to deliver better outcomes. Since launching the Secure Future Initiative (SFI) in November 2023, Microsoft has mobilized the equivalent of more than 34,000 engineers to mitigate risk and improve security for Microsoft and our customers.¹

Guided by three security principles—secure by design, by default, and in operations—we have made measurable progress in the areas of culture, governance, and our six engineering pillars. Still, there is more to do, and teams across the company are working to improve the security of every product, address learnings from every incident, and continuously improve our methods and practices.

Microsoft has been a leader for years in developing AI technologies in accordance with responsible AI principles designed to meet compliance requirements, protect data and systems, and maintain customer trust.

Strengthen cybersecurity and compliance in the era of AI

Download e-book

Learn how AI can help fortify healthcare security and compliance

• Download the healthcare security e-book.
• Check out the healthcare security and compliance infographic.
• For insights on how to stay ahead of emerging challenges and threats with AI and security for AI, explore the 2025 AI in Healthcare Decision Brief.
• Explore Microsoft security solutions.
• Follow our cybersecurity updates on Microsoft Security LinkedIn and on X @MSFTSecurity.
• Read the full Scottsdale Institute CISO 2025 Summit report.

¹ November 2025 Secure Future Initiative progress report, Microsoft

The post Future-proofing healthcare cybersecurity: What every leader should know appeared first on The Microsoft Cloud Blog.

Achieving impact with premium AI models, practical tools, and real-world deployments

Healthcare leaders face unprecedented challenges: rising labor costs, clinician workforce shortages, and the pressure to deliver safer, faster, and more personalized care. Microsoft’s AI technologies represent a leap forward in how organizations can automate clinical workflows, extract actionable insights from multimodal data, and drive performance. As part of this effort, Microsoft is introducing proprietary healthcare AI models, now available in Microsoft Foundry, and healthcare AI model evaluator, a user-friendly tool available for download on GitHub that allows teams to compare and assess AI model performance.

Fueling innovation with a growing healthcare AI model catalog

In spring 2024, Microsoft introduced healthcare AI models in Foundry—a collection of cutting-edge open source multimodal medical imaging models specifically designed for testing, fine-tuning, and building AI solutions tailored to healthcare-specific tasks. Along with partner offerings, Microsoft introduced three foundation models—MedImageInsight, MedImageParse, and CXRReportGen—with the goal of minimizing the compute and data requirements typically needed to build multimodal models from scratch. A year and a half later, the catalog now features more than 50 first-party and third-party models for a range of modalities, including radiology, pathology, dermatology, protein, and more.

Now, Microsoft is introducing two new proprietary AI models, MedImageInsight Premium and CXRReportGen Premium that set new benchmarks for accuracy and sensitivity in clinical imaging.

MedImageInsight Premium supports imaging applications across X-rays, MRIs, dermatology, and pathology, delivering up to 7–15% higher accuracy and requiring less fine-tuning than its open-source counterpart. It allows for image quality assessment, classification, search, metadata analysis, outlier detection, and supports regulatory workflows such as institutional review board submissions for FDA compliance. CXRReportGen Premium, optimized for chest X-ray report generation, has been further trained with massive amounts of real-world data to help create higher quality reports more similar to those used in clinic.

Organizations across the healthcare ecosystem can use these proprietary models to help address real clinical needs across diverse healthcare environments.

Empowering confident model selection with a purpose-built evaluation tool for healthcare

To help ensure agentic AI delivers meaningful results in healthcare, organizations should select models that have demonstrated effectiveness for their specific tasks. Healthcare AI model evaluator, available now on GitHub, enables teams to test and validate model performance on relevant clinical tasks using their own data and in their own environment. Its intuitive and flexible interface allows organizations to create custom tests and designate human experts or AI models to evaluate the output. Purpose-built for healthcare needs, the evaluator supports evidence-based model selection to help reduce risk and build trust in AI.

Real-world use cases: Impact across diverse healthcare environments

Healthcare agent orchestrator, unveiled at Microsoft Build 2025 and available in the Microsoft Foundry Agent Catalog, features pre-configured agents with multi-agent orchestration and open-source customization options that aid in the creation of agents that coordinate complex workflows. Modular, general reasoners as well as specialized, multimodal AI agents work together to address tasks that could take hours.

Oxford University’s Department of Oncology, in collaboration with Microsoft, has built and deployed three TrustedMDT agents. The agents integrate with Microsoft Teams and summarize patient charts, determine cancer staging, and draft guideline-compliant treatment plans for review by tumor boards. An evaluation and pilot is due to begin at Oxford University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust in first quarter of 2026. If successful, Oxford hopes to expand into the live clinical pathway following the study’s conclusion, generating vital clinical evidence to support scaling across United Kingdom academic medical centers. Dr. Andrew Soltan MD PhD, National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) Academic Clinical Lecturer and Honorary Specialty Registrar in Medical Oncology at Oxford University Hospitals, shares his story at the Microsoft Ignite breakout session, From Code to Care: Empowering Healthcare with Agentic AI,​ on Thursday, November 20.

These achievements in agent development showcase the opportunity for impact and reach of agentic AI solutions in diverse healthcare environments—especially when task-specific agents are available for purchase and deployment by other healthcare organizations. In September 2025, Microsoft introduced Microsoft Marketplace, a single destination to find, try, buy, and deploy cloud solutions, AI apps, and agents. Organizations can publish, monetize, and distribute their healthcare agents and solutions through the Marketplace, turning their expertise into scalable business opportunities.

The Atropos Evidence Agent, announced in October 2025 by Atropos Health, answers clinical questions within a physician’s workflow—without the physician even needing to ask a question. Whether it’s for pre-visit planning or during the encounter, the Atropos Evidence Agent draws from patient-level data and surfaces real-world evidence for the provider. Using the healthcare agent orchestrator multi-agent framework, the Atropos Evidence Agent synthesizes real-world data and scientific literature to proactively deliver personalized evidence to clinicians and answer complex questions in minutes without leaving the electronic health record (EHR) workflow. Learn more at their session, Ambient Evidence Automation at the Point of Care, in the Industry Showcase in the Microsoft Ignite Hub on Tuesday, November 18.

UiPath Maestro™ orchestrates specialized Foundry and UiPath agents to synthesize historical records with incidental findings from imaging studies. It transforms raw data into actionable insights that can reduce clinician workload, speed care delivery, and drive measurable impact. Hear their story at the Industry Showcase session, From Insight to Impact: How UiPath Agentic Automation and Azure AI Foundry are Redefining Care Processes, on Thursday, November 20.

From tumor boards workflows to personalized evidence with automated follow-up, these deployments underscore the power of AI for helping to enhance diagnostic speed, accuracy, and efficiency, while supporting safer, more informed care decisions.

Take action to lead the future of healthcare

Microsoft for Healthcare AI is more than a technology upgrade, it’s a practical, high-impact solution for healthcare organizations ready to lead in clinical innovation. With AI models, benchmarking tools, and multi-agent frameworks, leaders can automate workflows, improve patient outcomes, and drive safer care at scale.

• Attend the Microsoft Ignite 2025 sessions mentioned above, or join one or all three 75-minute labs at Ignite 2025, and learn hands-on how to work with healthcare AI models, extend Dragon Copilot with partner-built AI solutions, or see multi-agent orchestration in action.
• Visit Foundry today to access the healthcare AI model catalog and healthcare agent orchestrator.
• Download healthcare AI model evaluator from GitHub.

The future of healthcare is agentic, data-driven, and collaborative. Take the next step—evaluate, deploy, and scale Microsoft’s AI solutions and work towards advancing care delivery today.

The post Agentic AI in action: Healthcare innovation at Microsoft Ignite 2025 appeared first on The Microsoft Cloud Blog.

Microsoft Dragon Copilot

See the AI assistant for clinical workflow in action

Watch the demo

Since its launch in spring 2025, Dragon Copilot has aimed to reduce clinicians’ cognitive burden and save time. Initially built for physicians, it’s evolving to empower a broader range of care team members while fostering a growing ecosystem of partner-driven AI solutions. 

Accelerating point-of-care clinical intelligence through partner-driven AI solutions 

Healthcare leaders today face the dual challenge of fostering innovation while simplifying operations. Dragon Copilot is designed to meet this need with flexibility and scale, helping deliver AI-powered partner applications and agents that integrate seamlessly into end-to-end clinical workflows. Dragon Copilot surfaces these third-party solutions directly within the product experience, expanding reach and engagement. 

Opening Dragon Copilot empowers healthcare organizations and developers to build and deploy purpose-built third-party solutions—examples ranging from automated prior authorization and revenue cycle management to clinical decision support. By enabling partner AI solutions for specific tasks and specialties, clinicians can further streamline workflows, automatically capture relevant patient data, reduce administrative burden, and boost productivity.  

Microsoft is working closely with an early cohort of partners including Artisight, Atropos Health, Canary Speech, Cohere Health, Elsevier ClinicalKey AI, Ensemble, Hellocare, Humata Health, Lightbeam Health Solutions, OpenEvidence, Optum, Pangaea Data, Press Ganey, Regard, Rhyme, Rhythmx AI, and Wolters Kluwer UpToDate. This collaborative approach brings advanced capabilities straight to clinicians, turning innovative ideas into real clinical impact. 

“At Baptist Health, we’re piloting Canary Speech through Dragon Copilot to advance diagnostics in a way that’s ambient, scalable, and seamlessly embedded into existing workflows. This technology democratizes screening—every patient interaction becomes an opportunity for early detection, without requiring the clinician to initiate or even think about the test. It’s a powerful example of how AI can elevate care without adding burden.”

—Brett Oliver, MD, Chief Medical Information Officer, Baptist Health 

Empowering partners with safeguarded AI innovation 

To help our partners accelerate innovation while maintaining the highest standards of safety and compliance, we’re excited to announce the general availability of healthcare agent service in Microsoft Copilot Studio. It provides a robust, compliant foundation for partners to build and deploy AI solutions that integrate into Dragon Copilot. With built-in knowledge sources and clinical safeguards, the service promotes generative AI outputs that are accurate and reliable—supporting informed decision-making at the point of care. By leveraging these capabilities, partners can confidently innovate, extend the value of Dragon Copilot, and deliver purpose-built solutions that streamline workflows. 

For healthcare executives, the benefits are clear: gain real-time access to advanced tools, maximize technology investments, and enable informed clinical decisions through a secure, scalable ecosystem of AI apps and agents. By connecting systems and clinical touchpoints, organizations can boost continuity, efficiency, and documentation quality to support better outcomes.

Empowering nurses with Dragon Copilot 

Nurses are the heartbeat of healthcare—steadfast, compassionate, and deeply committed to their patients. Yet every day, they face mounting pressures: staffing shortages, overwhelming documentation demands, fragmented tools, and constant context switching. The promise of AI in nursing isn’t about adding another screen—it’s about lifting burdens. It’s about meeting nurses where they are, easing the path from observation to documentation, and helping teams stay connected without losing precious time. 

A multi-year collaboration with frontline nurses across leading healthcare organizations has helped shape the experience for nurses in Dragon Copilot with real-world feedback. Their voices have kept us grounded in what truly matters: fewer clicks, better care team collaboration, and more time for the moments that matter most—direct patient care. 

“Considering the complexity of nursing documentation workflows today, we need to be asking if there is a different way to document into the electronic health record. Hospitals ecosystems are complex, and adding Dragon Copilot as an additional tool for nurses to help their daily documentation practices has shown value in both time and efficiency. The tool stands to provide greater value as more users come onboard, and we’ve seen commitment from our partners at Microsoft to continually improve the product, so it works optimally for nurses.”

—Darren Batara, MS, BSN, RN, CPHIMS, Manager of Nursing Innovation and Informatics, Stanford Health Care

Introducing an AI experience tailored to the needs of nurses 

• Ambient flowsheet capture: Dragon Copilot integrates directly into Epic Rover, the mobile app nurses already use at the bedside, freeing them from being tethered to a workstation. As they care for patients, they simply speak aloud—and Dragon Copilot listens, capturing and converting their observations into flowsheet entries. These entries are then transferred to the EHR after nurse review and approval. To support thorough charting, nurses can pause during recording to preview what’s been captured already, and access organization-provided documentation ‘cheat sheets’—all without disrupting their workflow. 
• Access to trusted clinical resources: Nurses can quickly access medical information from organization-approved sources like the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Medline Plus, Merck manuals, and UpToDate, reducing the need to search or toggle between screens. Nurses get answers without disruption—helping them stay focused and feel supported in every moment of care.
• Automate routine tasks: Dragon Copilot transforms nurse-patient conversations into actionable outputs—automating tasks like drafting nurse notes and summarizing a prior interaction, enabling better care team collaboration, and more complete documentation with greater efficiency. By offloading routine tasks to AI, nurses can experience less overtime and mental fatigue—giving them more time and energy for the moments that matter most with their patients. 
• AI customization and user management: For administrators and informatics leads, the Dragon Copilot admin center provides a centralized platform to onboard users, tailor AI outputs to match nursing expectations, and guide informaticists through the journey this solution inevitably sparks—rethinking flowsheet design to better reflect how nurses actually care. 
• Analytics and insights: Analytics are designed to support organizations in driving transformation within their nursing workforce with AI.  

As AI continues to evolve, nurses will gain even greater support for documentation, decision-making, and collaboration. The future of nursing is one where technology fades into the background, and human connections take center stage—where every nurse is empowered to lead with insight, compassion, and confidence. 

Embracing the future of healthcare innovation 

As healthcare continues its rapid transformation, the expansion of Dragon Copilot stands as a testament to the power of AI to drive meaningful change across care teams, organizations, and geographies. By embedding intelligent tools directly into clinical workflows, Dragon Copilot is helping clinicians reclaim valuable time, reduce administrative burdens, and focus on what matters most: delivering exceptional patient care. The collaborative innovation between Microsoft and its partners keeps solutions adaptable, secure, and tailored to the evolving needs of healthcare professionals. With ongoing geographic expansion—now available in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Austria, France, Germany, and Ireland—and a growing ecosystem of AI apps and agents, Dragon Copilot is poised to empower more clinicians worldwide, fostering a future where technology amplifies human connection and clinical excellence. Now is the time to embrace this new era of healthcare innovation—one where every member of the care team is supported, and every patient journey is elevated. 

Ready to take the next steps? 

• Visit us at HLTH booth #3860.
• Not attending HLTH 2025? Schedule a demo.
• Learn more about Dragon Copilot partners.

*General availability for nurses in the United States beginning December 2025. 

The post Extending AI impact at HLTH 2025: Dragon Copilot scales across care teams, partners, and geographies appeared first on The Microsoft Cloud Blog.

To keep the momentum around innovation, AI leaders, innovators, startups, researchers, scientists, and policymakers are coming together at HLTH Europe 2025 to stand up their latest AI use cases. Microsoft will showcase our commitment to advancing AI for better health by focusing on accelerating life-saving breakthroughs, transforming the healthcare experience, and enabling global health equity. These areas are central to our mission to help shape a future for every person on the planet to live healthier.  

Accelerating life-saving breakthroughs

Advancements in AI are also playing a pivotal role in accelerating life-saving breakthroughs and transforming healthcare into a more precise and efficient domain. Microsoft and the Mayo Clinic are leveraging multimodal data imaging models for chest X-rays lines and tubes to drive innovations in disease detection, and treatment while advancing the state of precision medicine. Jonathan Carlson, Vice President Managing Director at Microsoft Health Futures, and Dr. Matthew Callstrom, Vice President Chair of Radiology at Mayo Clinic, will spotlight the collaboration and the ways in which unified data, intelligence, and generative AI are adding value to clinician workflows and patient care. 

Transforming the healthcare experience  

At the heart of every clinical consultation is a human moment. But in an era of increasing clinical demands, empathy is at risk of becoming a casualty of efficiency. Our recent global survey, featuring insights from over 13,500 patients across 10 European countries and Australia, revealed a growing disconnect in the clinician-patient interaction but more importantly, an opportunity to rebuild that connection with the help of AI.  

Earlier this year, we announced Microsoft Dragon Copilot, a new groundbreaking AI solution that transforms the way clinicians work. At HLTH Europe 2025 we are bringing Dragon Copilot to life with Dr. Markus Vogel, Chief Medical Information Officer, Microsoft DACH, Dr. Simon Wallace, Chief Medical Information Officer, Microsoft United Kingdom, and Dr. Joost Juiskens, Chief Medical Information Officer, Microsoft Netherlands, who will demonstrate how Dragon Copilot combines proven technologies with advanced generative AI and healthcare-focused safeguards to revolutionize clinical workflows and enhance patient care across Europe. 

Dragon Copilot represents a significant step forward in scalable, AI-powered clinical productivity and will be generally available to European markets later this year. Ambient AI, when responsibly implemented, is transforming clinical documentation, lightening administrative burdens, and making healthcare more human-centered. Healthcare leaders should feel empowered to harness AI to restore what matters most—meaningful and empathetic connections between patients and clinicians. 

Enabling global health equity, responsibly  

Demonstrating a steadfast commitment to bringing AI technologies to life, we are dedicated to enabling global health equity through responsible innovation. By prioritizing health literacy, fostering trust, and aligning with Microsoft’s responsible AI practices, Microsoft is tackling real-world challenges in healthcare. We are focused on inclusive and equitable solutions that help ensure advancements in AI are accessible and impactful for every community. Through ongoing efforts to promote understanding and confidence in AI-powered healthcare, we are shaping a future where transformative technology benefits patients, clinicians, and populations worldwide. 

The future of healthcare starts now  

At Microsoft, we’re not just imagining meaningful change—we’re making it happen. Through strategic collaborations, responsible innovation, and deep commitment to the human side of healthcare, we are realizing the mission of AI for better health for every patient, provider, and population on the planet. 

Learn more about Microsoft Healthcare solutions  

• Visit us at HLTH Europe 2025, Booth D70, to see how we’re turning vision into action.
• Learn more about Microsoft Dragon Copilot.
• Discover insights from our latest clinician and patient experience survey. 

Microsoft Dragon Copilot

An extensible AI workspace that scales across specialties, care settings, and devices

Learn more

¹ World Health Organization, Health workforce.

² World Health Organization, Billions left behind on the path to universal health coverage, September 18, 2023.

³ NHS England, AWS NHS migration case studies.

The post Advancing AI for better health at HLTH Europe 2025 appeared first on The Microsoft Cloud Blog.

For over two decades, we have consistently delivered front-end speech capabilities that have helped clinicians document billions of patient records and that have become a cornerstone of clinical documentation. Five years ago, we took a significant leap forward by pioneering the ambient AI category in healthcare. Today, we announce the integration of these proven technologies with fine-tuned generative AI, healthcare-adapted safeguards, and new capabilities on a scalable platform. This powerful combination brings unprecedented levels of efficiency and care, offering wide-reaching benefits for all.

Our robust voice solutions have consistently delivered outcomes for clinicians, patients, and healthcare organizations. Outcomes like 5 minutes of time-savings per encounter on average that have enabled 13 additional appointment slots per provider, per month.¹ A 70% improvement in clinician work-life balance and reduction of feelings of burnout and fatigue.¹ And the delivery of better patient experiences, where 93% of patients say their physician is more personable and conversational due to our technology.²

Dragon Copilot builds on this evolution to streamline documentation, surface information, and automate tasks across care settings. It’s an AI extensible workspace that offers a unified experience, integrates with electronic health records (EHRs) such as Epic, and supports clinicians across all stages of their workflow. Part of Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare, it’s built on a secure, modern architecture and can take clinical productivity to new heights while helping boost clinician wellbeing and the patient experience, increasing efficiency, and improving financial impact.

Streamline documentation with new levels of customization

Dragon Copilot uses the latest AI models to help produce accurate documentation efficiently and consistently.

• Create clinical documentation automatically: Captures multiparty, multilingual patient-clinician conversations and orders ambiently during the visit and converts them into high quality, comprehensive, specialty-specific notes allowing clinicians to connect with patients rather than screens.
• No internet? No problem: Recordings are captured and processed once users are reconnected. 
• Produce high quality, customizable documentation: Allows clinicians to customize documentation, save templates, AI prompts, and frequently used text.
• Talk naturally: Provides natural language speech capabilities, dictation at the cursor, custom vocabularies, and intuitive voice correction capabilities across devices.

Surface information without leaving your workflow

From querying notes and getting medical information to receiving encounter recording suggestions, Dragon Copilot gives users access to pertinent information when they need it.

• Query notes: Provides details and answers questions like whether a patient is taking a certain medication, has a relevant family history, or mentioned something specific during the conversation. Copilot uses conversation transcripts and notes to address your requests.
• Get credible medical information: Clinicians can access a broad range of medical information and clinical topics, allowing them to check the latest protocols for managing a condition or check drug interactions, for example. Dragon Copilot uses grounded AI with citations to ensure trust in its responses.
• Receive suggestions: Create more complete notes. Dragon Copilot analyzes the transcript and makes suggestions to help clinicians capture specific information, such as temperature, BMI, and family history.
• Put conversational data to good use: Get insights at scale with Microsoft Fabric and Dragon Copilot. Tap into point-of-care data to better analyze usage and adoption and help improve research, patient care, engagement, outreach, and more.

“Using all these tools together is going to be a great in-room, in-office assistant for taking care of the patient. It’s just remarkable.”

Dr. Lance Owens, Chief Medical Information Officer, University of Michigan Health-West

Automate tasks with a single click

Dragon Copilot helps clinicians automate clinical and non-clinical tasks. From summarizing notes and evidence, to prepping orders and drafting referral letters and after visit summaries, it saves time and increases clinician productivity and efficiency.

• Make orders easy: Automatically capture over a dozen order types during clinician-patient conversations. With supported EHRs, orders are directly entered into the EHR order module. 
• Summarize notes: Get an instant synopsis of each encounter, including key facts and details, streamlining workflow and reducing cognitive load. Dragon Copilot makes it easy to get a quick refresher on the patient before finalizing a note.
• Summarize evidence: Receive more than just linked notes to transcripts. Dragon Copilot curates diagnosis evidence from subjective elements such as symptoms, objective elements such as labs and imaging, and other relevant information shared during the encounter.
• Create referral letters: Have Dragon Copilot quickly draft a referral letter from clinical notes by using the information gathered during an encounter. It automatically extracts key details—including medical history, requested services, and pertinent test or imaging results—and repurposes them for the letter.
• Generate after visit summaries: Dragon 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.

“This is a complete transformation… it’s going to make it easier, more efficient, and help us take better quality care of patients.”

Dr. Anthony Mazzarelli, Co-President and Chief Executive Officer, Cooper University Health Care

True anywhere access

From a full-featured web app with no client installation, to dedicated mobile and desktop apps with added functionality, Dragon Copilot goes wherever you go. And for even greater workflow efficiency, Dragon Copilot is natively embedded in supported EHRs.

Access in-app training and support—whenever and wherever it’s most convenient

Dragon Copilot offers some of the best product support and insights to help healthcare organizations get the most out of their AI investment.

• On-demand training: In-app training videos and on-demand content provide access to training content.
• Integrated live chat and virtual support room: Need help? Dragon Copilot comes with immediate support without leaving the app and a virtual support room staffed by experts.
• Product and AI feedback: In-app feedback and dedicated channels enables clinicians to rate Dragon Copilot and provide feedback that helps improve the product experience, note quality and AI responses.

Our expansive partner ecosystem

Dragon Copilot is bolstered by our collaboration with healthcare industry experts across our global ecosystem of trusted partners. We work with leading independent software vendors (ISVs), system integrators (SIs), and cloud service providers (CSPs) so our customers in every region can access the healthcare solutions and offerings they need.

Dragon Copilot is coming to you

Dragon Copilot is generally available in the United States and will be generally available June 1, 2025 in Canada, except for the province of Quebec. General availability in the Canadian province of Quebec, will follow later this year with international market expansion to the United Kingdom, Germany, France, and the Netherlands.

Built on a foundation of trust

We are dedicated to helping customers use and build AI that is trustworthy, secure, safe, and private. By using the Microsoft Secure Future Initiative, we support the highest standards of security, privacy, and compliance. Our AI aligns with Microsoft’s responsible AI practices and incorporates healthcare-specific clinical, chat, and compliance safeguards to ensure accurate and safe outputs. Additionally, our data is grounded in privacy principles, backed by transparent policies, and protected by rigorous safeguards.

“Microsoft has invested a lot in security. It gives me peace of mind that Dragon Copilot is part of the whole Microsoft suite.”

Novlet Mattis, Senior Vice President, Chief Digital and Information Officer, Orlando Health

Ready to take the next step?

• Visit us at HIMSS Booth #2221.
• Not attending HIMSS 2025? Join us for our livestream event.
• Learn more on Dragon Copilot.
• Explore the latest with our new healthcare AI models.

Dragon Copilot

A new groundbreaking solution that transforms the way clinicians work

Discover more

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.

The post Meet Microsoft Dragon Copilot: Your new AI assistant for clinical workflow appeared first on The Microsoft Cloud Blog.

Epic® on Azure

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Azure for mission-critical workloads

Migrating EHR systems to Microsoft Azure provides healthcare organizations with a robust platform for mission-critical workloads, ensuring optimized performance, fast data access, built-in disaster recovery, and enhanced security features, such as AI-powered threat detection and automated compliance monitoring. On top of that, Azure maximizes cloud investments, offering new possibilities to harness data to springboard AI innovations.

Data is at the heart of healthcare. Hospitals produce more than 50 petabytes of data across more than 10 siloed systems every year. As the healthcare industry faces the dual challenges of managing vast amounts of unstructured data and a shortage of workforce, up to 97% of healthcare data goes unused, highlighting a significant missed opportunity for operational excellence and better patient insights.¹ One of the biggest benefits for healthcare customers on Azure is the ability to unify their multi-modal healthcare data for analytics and AI with healthcare data solutions in Microsoft Fabric that lets them ingest, store, and analyze data from various sources and modalities. While Fabric unifies your data, Microsoft Purview delivers the data governance service that helps you classify the data across your data estate, including identification for sensitive data. Integrating Microsoft Purview with healthcare data solutions in Fabric not only strengthens security but also help you ensure compliance, enabling healthcare organizations to govern their data with confidence. We are acutely aware of the industry expectations in which our technology is utilized, and this is one of the many reasons why our healthcare customers trust Azure for mission-critical workloads.

As we continue to deliver data innovations, we see our customers use their connected data on a wide spectrum of AI capabilities. With Azure AI, healthcare organizations can accelerate innovation through predictive analytics, automate clinical tasks, and improve patient interactions with the help of ambient AI solutions like DAX Copilot (directly embedded in EHR systems), as well as take advantage of Microsoft healthcare AI models in Azure AI Foundry and GitHub, a collection of cutting-edge multi-modal generative AI models that benefit imaging and radiology workflows.

Enhanced support for mission-critical

Mission-critical workloads demand comprehensive support. In 2024, Microsoft Unified enhanced its support for mission-critical workloads in healthcare through its Mission Critical Offerings. This initiative provides proactive support to improve the health, resiliency, and performance of healthcare systems via regular assessments, guidance, and optimization recommendations, ensuring business continuity and addressing unique healthcare challenges.

Collaborating for technology excellence: A strategic partnership that stands out

Our commitment to mission-critical is reflected in our collaborations with leading EHR providers such as Epic®. This long-standing relationship of more than 20 years has yielded an optimized solution for Epic® on Azure, offering a robust, purpose-built platform backed by joint-reference architecture. Recently, Microsoft announced expanded scalability on Azure for healthcare organizations, specifically for running Epic®’s Chronicles* Operational Database (ODB), increasing its capacity to 65 million global references per second (GRefs/s), a 171% enhancement from 2023 on the new Mbv3 VM series.

The collaboration with Epic® extends well beyond the cloud infrastructure—to several products and capabilities part of Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare. Epic® and Microsoft have expanded their collaboration to integrate advanced AI technologies such as Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service and the DAX Copilot into Epic®’s EHR system. The integration helps provide AI-powered clinical insights, streamline administrative processes, and improve clinician productivity through features like note summarization and automated coding suggestions.

Delivering value beyond infrastructure: The Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare promise

Microsoft’s well-rounded partnership with Epic® is one of the many reasons why Azure is the cloud of choice for many of our healthcare customers.

The decision to move mission-critical workloads to the cloud is often not just about infrastructure. Customers like Mercy chose Azure to not only modernize their infrastructure but also extract value from sizeable data archives. Mercy’s digital transformation on Azure enabled it to connect previously siloed data and use several Microsoft services such as Azure Data Lake to result in positive business outcomes. For example, by empowering care teams with smart dashboards and insights into factors that determine patient discharge, Mercy has been able to reduce patient stay durations significantly. Mercy employs Azure AI Document Intelligence to scan and recognize information on patient’s insurance cards which then gets updated on their EHR records automatically.

We recognize our customer’s desire to have a complete digital transformation in the cloud that transcends every layer of the stack, and Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare lets us deliver to that promise. It encapsulates a broad spectrum of innovative data and AI innovations from Microsoft, purpose-built for the healthcare industry, enabling our customers to achieve their cloud-first goals faster and easier. Recently, Microsoft announced several innovations as part of the portfolio, including new healthcare AI models in Azure AI Foundry, capabilities for healthcare data solutions in Microsoft Fabric, the healthcare agent service in Copilot Studio, and an AI-powered nursing workflow solution.

As customers realize the value of consolidating their IT investments around a single vendor, Azure is increasingly being adopted for mission-critical workloads. By seamlessly connecting and delivering value across all layers of the stack, Azure for mission-critical extends a customer’s return on cloud investments. Customers like St. Luke’s University Health System are reaping the benefits of their Epic® on Azure migration by taking advantage of several synergies in the Microsoft portfolio, like the interoperability of Microsoft Teams with Epic®. Security is of paramount importance when dealing with patient records, and customers like Jefferson Health migrate their Epic® environments to Azure with high confidence with Microsoft Defender for end-point detection and response.

Next steps

As we continue to transform mission-critical workloads in the cloud, 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, all with uncompromised privacy and security. Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare is supporting healthcare organizations on every step of their journey toward shaping a healthier future.

• Explore Epic® on Azure.
• Learn more about the Mbv3 VM series.
• Learn more about Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare.

*Epic® and Chronicles are trademarks of Epic Systems Corporation.

¹ World Economic Forum, 4 ways data is improving healthcare, December 2019.

The post Azure for mission-critical workloads in healthcare: EHR and beyond appeared first on The Microsoft Cloud Blog.