Every patient image tells a story, and radiologists play a critical role in unlocking insights from the pixels to inform downstream care. By delivering timely, accurate, and complete reports, radiology teams help bridge the gap between diagnosis and action, accelerating time to treatment and supporting better outcomes. Microsoft is deepening its commitment to healthcare by working closely with radiologists to deliver a unified AI experience for their reporting workflow. As radiologists face increasing demands for speed, accuracy, and efficiency in reporting, this is a pivotal moment for helping them unlock new levels of productivity and efficiency through generative, multimodal, and agentic AI.

At the 2025 Radiological Society of North America Conference and Annual Meeting (RSNA 2025), Microsoft is extending the value of its flagship AI clinical assistant, Microsoft Dragon Copilot, specifically for radiologists. Now in preview, Dragon Copilot integrates directly into familiar workflows to help radiology teams focus on their interpretations.*

Serving as a companion for PowerScribe One, Microsoft’s leading reporting solution and trusted by thousands of radiologists, it delivers a unified workflow that streamlines reporting, surfaces information, and automates tasks.

Delivering generative, multimodal, and agentic AI without disrupting existing workflows

Every day, radiologists face a relentless tide of images, data, and documentation—each with varying degrees of complexity and urgency. And every moment a radiologist spends wrestling with fragmented technology is a missed opportunity to make a difference when it matters most.

This challenge extends into the AI landscape where fragmentation occurs when tools address narrow problems but create extra steps and poor integration into broader clinical workflows. Yet, hope is on the horizon. With many radiologists relying on the proven capabilities of PowerScribe One, like speech recognition to accurately dictate their report content and generative AI for generating draft impressions, organizations are looking for ways to integrate AI without altering the entire reporting experience.

For radiologists, Dragon Copilot works with PowerScribe One to deliver generative, multimodal, and agentic AI in a secure, scalable, and extensible way. It brings cloud-native features and AI directly into the radiologist’s workflow. By integrating with PowerScribe One, Dragon Copilot can further streamline report creation without interrupting the radiologist’s interpretation.

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

AI capabilities tailored for radiologists

Prior report summarization: Radiologists often rely on prior reports to provide essential context for interpreting current studies. Prior report summarization in Dragon Copilot distills relevant prior reports and associated metadata into concise bullets, helping improve speed and accuracy in diagnostics. It assists the radiologists in interpretation of the current exam by clearly highlighting findings from prior reports requiring follow-up or ongoing attention.

Chat with credible sources: During an interpretation, radiologists may have questions or need to do additional research on a specific topic. A chat experience in Dragon Copilot routes questions to the appropriate agent or plugin to deliver relevant, reliable responses backed by credible sources with patient context—helping radiologists work more efficiently and intelligently without having to toggle between windows and other applications.

Report optimization for billing and beyond: Dragon Copilot can use third-party AI insights from partners to check the report content to help radiologists improve accuracy and quality, helping to prevent downstream issues like claim denials. By surfacing important details and helpful reminders directly inside the reporting workflow, radiology teams can optimize their reports for billing and beyond.

AI draft report content: With Dragon Copilot, organizations can accelerate the path to intelligent, draft-first reporting by integrating self-developed and third-party multimodal AI models. Radiologists can receive AI-generated draft report content from image analysis, which they can then review, test, and validate.

Accelerating innovation with new models and a rich partner ecosystem

Many organizations are experimenting with testing, fine-tuning, and building AI models tailored to their specific needs. With the rise of multimodal AI models that can analyze medical imaging, genomics, clinical records, and more, customers and partners are leading the next wave of innovation and exploring new use cases.

Collaborating on this work allows us to assess models like CXRReportGen that support grounded report generation based on image analysis from chest X-rays. With these new capabilities comes the challenge of how to surface model output into clinical workflows in ways that can add value. This has given us the opportunity to collaborate on AI interoperability with Microsoft in concert with other partners like Epic and Sectra to test how multimodal AI can work across systems to optimize clinical workflows and improve patient care.

—Dr. Richard Bruce, Professor and Vice Chair of Informatics, Department of Radiology at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health

Microsoft Foundry offers a growing catalog of more than 50 first- and third-party healthcare AI models across modalities like radiology, pathology, dermatology, and protein analysis. Key models include MedImageInsight for image embedding, MedImageParse for segmentation, and CXRReportGen for drafting imaging reports.

Building on this foundation, Microsoft now provides premium versions of two proprietary AI models—CXRReportGen Premium and MedImageInsight Premium—trained on high-value datasets for superior accuracy and task-specific performance. These models allow developers and ISVs to create advanced imaging solutions without starting from scratch, supporting use cases such as image quality checks, image-to-image search, exam parameter classification, and metadata analysis.

Most importantly, our partners are also pushing the boundaries of what’s possible and offering radiology-specific AI apps and agents that can surface directly in Dragon Copilot.

• Lunit, a global leader in AI-powered cancer screening and diagnostics, brings advanced AI-powered image analysis for mammography exams to Dragon Copilot, allowing radiologists to receive real-time insights directly within their reporting workflow. Lunit’s comprehensive breast screening data assists radiologists in classifying and correlating abnormalities. By integrating Lunit’s algorithms, Dragon Copilot helps surface critical findings and optimize report accuracy without disrupting clinical interpretation—supporting diagnostic efficiency and better patient care.
• Zotec extends the value of Dragon Copilot by integrating revenue cycle management and billing intelligence directly into the radiologist’s workflow, helping ensure reports are complete, compliant, and satisfy quality measures before final sign-off. This seamless connection reduces the risk of missed billing information and the need for addenda, saving time and improving reimbursement accuracy. By making Zotec’s expertise available, Dragon Copilot empowers radiology teams to focus on clinical care while automating complex administrative tasks.

Lunit and Zotec are part of a broader ecosystem of partners bringing new AI innovations to Dragon Copilot customers. The collaborative innovation between Microsoft and its partners keeps solutions adaptable, secure, and tailored to the evolving needs of healthcare professionals.

Expanding what cloud, data, and AI can do for radiology

The power of our ecosystem extends beyond Dragon Copilot. At RSNA 2025, we’re extending that innovation across the broader Microsoft Azure ecosystem, showcasing partners who are transforming imaging workflows and data management in the cloud.

• Merge by Merative, from first click to final read, accelerates imaging workflows in the cloud.
• CitiusTech helps organizations consolidate their medical imaging on Azure with their digital imaging and communications in medicine (DICOM) migration suite.
• Qumulo allows for intelligent retention and lifecycle management of imaging data in one unified file system on Azure.
• Milvue delivers both automated X-ray measurements and pathology detection for chest and appendicular skeleton imaging, supporting both pediatric and adult patients.

PowerScribe One

Harness AI to achieve new levels of reporting accuracy and quality.

Learn more

Learn more about AI adoption in radiology

• See Dragon Copilot and our radiology solutions, including partner innovations, live at RSNA booth #1311.
• Not attending RSNA 2025? Contact your account executive to schedule a demo.
• For advice on how you can accelerate AI adoption in your organization, explore the 2025 AI in Healthcare Decision Brief.

*Dragon Copilot for radiology is currently in preview for PowerScribe One customers. 

The post Driving a unified AI experience at RSNA 2025: Microsoft Dragon Copilot expands to radiologists, transforming the reporting workflow appeared first on The Microsoft Cloud Blog.

Because of the immense preparation and specialization required, less than 1% of these patients have access to these personalized treatment plans, which have demonstrably improved patient outcomes.  

A recent American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) study highlighted that clinicians spend between 1.5 to 2.5 hours per patient, meticulously reviewing imaging, pathology slides, clinical notes, and genomic data.² And cancer care is just one example of the complex data analysis healthcare requires. Agentic AI holds the potential to reduce administrative friction and further transform care delivery.

The healthcare agent orchestrator is available now in the Azure AI Foundry Agent Catalog. It features pre-configured agents with multi-agent orchestration and open-source customization options that allow developers and researchers to build agents that coordinate multi-disciplinary multimodal healthcare data workflows, such as tumor boards, and streamline deployment into healthcare enterprise productivity tools (such as Microsoft Teams and Word). Modular, general reasoners as well as specialized, multimodal AI agents work together to address tasks that would take hours, with the goal to effectively augment clinician specialists with customized cutting-edge agentic AI.  

By integrating the latest capabilities from across Microsoft, the healthcare agent orchestrator can manage analysis and reasoning over diverse healthcare data types—ranging from imaging (DICOM files) and pathology (whole-slide images) to genomics data and clinical notes from electronic health records (EHRs). Each agent is equipped with advanced AI models from Azure AI Foundry, combining general-purpose reasoning capabilities with healthcare-specific modality models to drive actionable insights grounded in multimodal clinical data.

Key capabilities of healthcare agent orchestrator

• Orchestrating agentic capabilities that can reason over complex EHR data and augment time-consuming tasks like building a chronological patient timeline, determining cancer stage, using specific reference guidelines, reviewing radiology and pathology images, synthesizing current medical literature, referencing treatment guidelines, surfacing relevant clinical trials, and generating customized reports. 

• Providing tools that connect enterprise healthcare data through Microsoft Fabric and the fast healthcare interoperability resources (FHIR) data service.  

• Allowing developers to create, customize, and fine-tune each agent with their own models, tools, instructions, and data sources; test performance in a guided playground experience; and extend agents by setting up using Microsoft Copilot Studio to integrate a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server with sample implementation provided.  

• Ensuring interoperability and integration into existing workflows, including distribution to familiar tools the majority of healthcare organizations already use—Teams, Word, PowerPoint, and Microsoft 365 Copilot—where users can interact with AI agents. 

• Providing robust explainability capabilities in agentic AI-generated outputs, such as grounding responses to the source EHR data—critical for validation, trust, and adoption in high-stakes healthcare environments. 

Researchers and developers at leading cancer care institutions—including Stanford University, Johns Hopkins, Providence Genomics, Mass General Brigham, and the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health—are currently exploring the healthcare agent orchestrator to study how agentic AI could deliver value to complex clinical tasks such as cancer care. 

“Stanford Medicine sees 4,000 tumor board patients a year, and our clinicians are already using foundation model generated summaries in tumor board meetings today (via a PHI safe instance of GPT on Azure). The new healthcare agent orchestrator has the power to streamline this existing workflow by reducing fragmentation (saving time by avoiding copy-pasting) and enables surfacing new insights from data elements that were challenging to search, such as trial eligibility criteria, treatment guidelines, and real-world evidence. Stanford Health Care is excited further research the potential of using the healthcare agent orchestrator to build the first generative AI agent solution used in a production setting for real-world care for our cancer patients.”

—Dr. Mike Pfeffer, Chief Information Officer, Stanford Health Care and Stanford School of Medicine

“The vision of the healthcare agent orchestrator is to rapidly surface, summarize, and take action on relevant multimodal medical information for each complex cancer case, so hours of review can become minutes. Collaborating with Microsoft allows us to explore the value of these models for tumor boards and beyond.”

—Dr. Joshua Warner, Radiologist at UW Health and Assistant Professor of Radiology, UW School of Medicine and Public Health

Early development collaborations featured the integration of this multi-agent workflow into Teams chats, where, for example, group chats enabled conversations between multiple human experts and specialized healthcare AI agents connected to specific healthcare data. It demonstrated the promise to significantly enhance efficiency and collaboration among clinical providers. This capability is already bringing clinicians and developers together to build the agentic healthcare applications of the future: the catalyst is the powerful combination of healthcare-specific agents using general reasoning models and multimodal healthcare foundation models alongside the ability to interact directly with custom agents using Teams.  

For example, Johns Hopkins oncologists Dr. Vasan Yegnasubramanian, Dr. Elsa Anagnostou, and Dr. Taxiarchis Botsis and their developer teams in the Johns Hopkins inHealth Precision Medicine program and Molecular Tumor Board are providing their expertise to refine and test the system to ensure it would have high utility if used in their clinical and precision medicine applications.  

Coordinating collaboration of specialized agents

The healthcare agent orchestrator builds upon recent research and releases from Microsoft Research and our collaborators. It coordinates collaboration of specialized agents designed explicitly for complex multidisciplinary clinical workflows like cancer care.  

• The orchestrator leverages Semantic Kernel and Magentic-One to coordinate agents, maintain shared memory, and interact with the human in the loop.  

• The patient history agent leverages Universal Medical Abstraction to organize patient data chronologically.³ Manual work that can take experts over three hours happens in minutes.   

• The radiology agent leverages customer fine-tuned models like CXRRepotGen/MAIRA-2 to analyze radiology images for a second read.⁴  

• The pathology agent demonstrates how to connect to external agents like Paige.ai’s “Alba” pathology agent to address complex queries related to pathology images (available in preview).⁵  

• The cancer staging agent refers to the American Joint Committee on Cancer (AJCC) clinical guidelines to support accurate cancer staging. 

• The clinical guidelines agent refers to the National Comprehensive Cancer Network (NCCN) clinical guidelines to suggest recommended treatment plans.  

• The clinical trials agent identifies eligible clinical trials by matching patient profiles against databases such as ClinicalTrials.gov. This can result in more than double the recall improvement compared to the publicly available Critera2Query baseline.⁶  

• The medical research agent delivers actionable, evidence-based guidance grounded on graph-based knowledge from trusted medical journals.

• The report creation agent automates comprehensive, integrated, richly formatted reporting that serves as a trusted reference during multidisciplinary meetings. 

“As we progress towards the routine use of multi-agent systems, the healthcare agent orchestrator demonstrates the power to simplify the integration of various models and agents with productivity tools that clinicians are already using. The flexible orchestration framework will make it easy for us at Paige to continue to focus on our pathology agents while enabling their integration into the larger cancer care workflow and leverage access to multi-modal data.”

—Razik Yousfi, Chief Executive Officer of Paige.ai

The orchestrator is intentionally open-ended: any approved agent—including third-party—that exposes an API, tool wrapper, or MCP endpoint can be pulled into a Teams conversational thread. Paige.ai is shipping their Alba agent in preview, the first example of an external agent that can be connected to healthcare agent orchestrator. Built on Paige’s foundation-scale vision models and coupled with a conversational large language model (LLM) front-end, Alba delivers real-time conversational digital pathology insights such as tumor grade, morphology, and biomarker status directly from whole-slide images.  

“Providence clinical researchers have begun leveraging advanced AI capabilities provided by the healthcare agent orchestrator to quickly and efficiently parse through large sets of publications, clinical trials and electronic health records. We are excited about its potential to enhance our ability to interpret genomics and match clinical trials in the molecular tumor boards, ultimately benefiting patient care by providing more precise and timely treatment options. Its integration into our workflows also will help streamline communication and collaboration among clinical providers, ensuring that critical clinical information is shared promptly and accurately. As we continue to explore new ways to understand the biology of cancer, its capabilities will be instrumental in driving medical discoveries and advancing cancer treatment.”

—Carlo Bifulco, MD, Chief Medical Officer of Providence Genomics and research faculty at the Earle A. Chiles Research Institute

Empowering developers to accelerate innovations for care teams

As clinical care complexity escalates, the healthcare agent orchestrator empowers developers to confidently navigate the accelerating era of agentic AI, collaborate with clinicians, and democratize precision medicine tools by surfacing these capabilities into existing workflows. The initial framework is designed to study the opportunity of assisting tumor boards. The ultimate vision is to empower healthcare and life science developers to research how agentic AI capabilities could impact clinicians and patients more widely by providing real-time support to multidisciplinary care teams across the healthcare ecosystem. 

Healthcare developers and clinical organizations are invited to explore healthcare agent orchestrator, available through the Azure AI Foundry Agent Catalog. Engage with the next generation of AI-powered healthcare agents today.  

¹ Global cancer statistics 2022: GLOBOCAN estimates of incidence and mortality worldwide for 36 cancers in 185 countries, CA: A Cancer Journal for Clinicians, April 4, 2024.

² Using an Adapted Tumor Board Evaluation Tool for Quality Assessment of a Thoracic Multidisciplinary Cancer Conference: A Pilot Study, JCO Clinical Cancer Informatics, October 5, 2023.

³ Universal Abstraction: Harnessing Frontier Models to Structure Real-World Data at Scale, February 2, 2025

⁴ MAIRA-2: Grounded Radiology Report Generation, June 6, 2024

⁵ Nature Medicine, A foundation model for clinical-grade computational pathology and rare cancers detection, July 22, 2024

⁶ Scaling Clinical Trial Matching Using Large Language Models: A Case Study in Oncology, August 4, 2023

Disclaimer

Healthcare agent orchestrator is intended for research and development use. It is not designed or intended to be deployed in clinical settings as-is nor is it intended for use in the diagnosis or treatment of any health or medical condition, and its performance for such purposes has not been established. You bear sole responsibility and liability for any use of healthcare agent orchestrator, including verification of outputs and incorporation into any product or service intended for a medical purpose or to inform clinical decision-making, compliance with applicable healthcare laws and regulations, and obtaining any necessary clearances or approvals. 

The post Developing next-generation cancer care management with multi-agent orchestration appeared first on The Microsoft Cloud Blog.

It’s remarkable to think how far we’ve come since Microsoft was founded 50 years ago. But what’s truly astonishing is the pace of progress we’re now seeing, as rapid advancements in AI create opportunities to solve industry problems that once seemed intractable. 

Microsoft has been at the frontier of AI research and development for decades, and we’re committed to sharing our learnings and insights with stakeholders throughout healthcare and life sciences. That’s why we’ve created the 2025 AI in Healthcare Decision Brief. This in-depth industry analysis is split into two parts: Part 1: Insights on navigating the AI platform shift, and Part 2: Perspectives on the role of AI in shaping the future of healthcare.  

Each part features expert perspectives from Microsoft leaders, inspirational examples of AI successes in healthcare and life sciences, and practical advice for accelerating AI adoption in your organization. 

Here’s an overview of what you’ll find in the report. 

The current state of AI in healthcare and life sciences  

Over half (57%) of life sciences organizations and 45% of healthcare organizations see generative AI as the most important technology to adopt, and 79% are currently using some form of AI.¹ While early use cases for generative AI typically focus on boosting productivity, as trust and adoption continue to grow, new use cases will emerge that have a transformational impact on the entire sector—and on patients’ health. 

Realizing this AI-powered future of health will require organizations to:  

• Create trustworthy AI.
  Trustworthy AI is essential for systems that have a direct impact on drug development and patient care—the stakes are too high to compromise on security, privacy, and safety. That’s why the work of collaborative industry bodies like the Coalition for Health AI (CHAI) and the Trustworthy and Responsible AI Network (TRAIN) is so vital to build confidence that AI solutions are safe for use in medical research and clinical practice. 

• Overcome adoption challenges.
  While all organizations must overcome concerns around skills, security, compliance, and change management, healthcare-specific AI solutions must also prove their worth in existing workflows. 

• Understand how to succeed.
  Successful adoption depends on having a clear understanding of organizational readiness and the drivers of AI value. The report offers a wealth of best-practice guidance and expert advice on key considerations and practical actions for achieving your desired outcomes with AI. 

• Learn from the industry’s AI pioneers.
  The report also features success stories from Microsoft customers in healthcare and life sciences, showing how they’re overcoming common hurdles and accomplishing ambitious goals. 

Today’s AI innovations—and tomorrow’s possibilities 

AI innovators are already delivering meaningful impact in healthcare and life sciences—from creating synthetic data to accelerate drug development to supporting physicians with real-time clinical insights at the point of care. New technology advances will allow innovators to create solutions that will have an even greater, industry-wide impact, dramatically improving health equity and care outcomes for patients worldwide. 

• Organizations leading the innovation charge.
  Part two of our report explores examples of how startups, established technology companies, and research organizations are innovating and collaborating to advance AI capabilities in healthcare and life sciences. 

• Technology advancements supporting the next wave of innovation.
  Significant advances in underlying infrastructure, data platforms, and foundational models are creating the conditions for a “Cambrian explosion” of AI innovations that will propel scientific progress and support a new age of precision medicine and predictive health. 

Advice from Microsoft leaders for accelerating AI success  

As we celebrate the accomplishments of Microsoft employees, alumni, partners, and customers over the last half-century, we’re also looking ahead to what the next 50 years could bring, as we continue our mission to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. 

Wherever your organization is on its AI journey, we’re here to make the path smoother and help you achieve the right outcomes. 

Get The 2025 AI in Healthcare Decision Brief, Part 1: Insights on navigating the AI platform shift now for Microsoft AI leadership perspectives on:  

• Generative AI’s impact in healthcare—Joe Petro, Corporate Vice President, Healthcare and Life Sciences Solutions and Platforms 

• Staying ahead of emerging challenges and threats with AI and security for AI—Ann Johnson, Microsoft Corporate Vice President and Deputy CISO 

• Navigating the future of healthcare together—Kees Hertogh, Vice President, Healthcare and Life Sciences Marketing 

• The role of partners and startups to advance innovation—Sally Frank, Worldwide Lead, Healthcare and Life Sciences, Microsoft for Startups 

• Building trust to operationalize responsible AI in healthcare—Dr. David Rhew, Chief Medical Officer and Vice President for Healthcare 

Read The 2025 AI in Healthcare Decision Brief, Part 2: Perspectives on the role of AI in shaping the future of healthcare for more leadership perspectives on: 

• Empowering people to deliver and receive better health—responsibly and purposefully—Dr. Peter Lee, President, Microsoft Research 

• The real-world impact of AI in healthcare—Matthew Lungren, MD MPH, Chief Scientific Officer, Healthcare and Life Sciences 

• Microsoft’s commitment to supporting customers to succeed with AI—Patty Carrolo, Corporate Vice President, US Healthcare and Life Sciences 

• Building the AI-powered future of health—Kathleen Mitford, Corporate Vice President, Global Industry Marketing 

Explore the 2025 AI in Healthcare Decision Brief 

• For insights on how to navigate the AI platform shift, read Part 1.
• For perspectives on the role AI plays in shaping the future of healthcare, read Part 2. 

¹McKinsey, Market perspective: AI and GenAI in Life Sciences 

The post The AI-powered future of health: Insights from Microsoft leaders appeared first on The Microsoft Cloud Blog.

Hospitals and medical facilities have long relied on traditional virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) solutions to provide staff access to critical information and tools across facilities and locations, as well as safeguard patient, employee, and corporate data. VDI can help healthcare organizations to better manage their IT infrastructure, securely expand access to digital tools and data, and reduce costs. Organizations seeking VDI solutions can turn to Azure Virtual Desktop to help manage and maintain their IT needs.  

For healthcare organizations looking for simplicity and to move beyond traditional VDI, Windows 365 is a cloud-based service that organizations can use to create Cloud PCs for your employees, contractors, or other users. Windows 365 allows IT admins to quickly and easily deploy Cloud PCs and to manage Cloud PCs alongside physical PCs within Microsoft Intune. Windows 365 provides the productivity, security, and collaboration benefits of Microsoft 365. 

As healthcare providers, pharmaceutical companies, life sciences organizations, and more look to the future, Windows Cloud solutions from Microsoft provide virtualization solutions with the flexibility, scalability, and security of Azure Virtual Desktop and Windows 365.  

Supporting healthcare and clinical workloads with Azure Virtual Desktop   

Organizations looking for virtualization options have flexibility and control with Azure Virtual Desktop. It provides a secure, cost-effective way to support remote desktops and experiences from anywhere, across a variety of endpoints. Organizations throughout the healthcare industry use Azure Virtual Desktop to access clinical and productivity applications and hosted desktops when they need them. Azure Virtual Desktop is managed via the Microsoft Azure portal, allowing IT admins to create and manage a custom desktop virtualization environment to meet their organizations’ needs.  

Among the core business applications for healthcare providers are electronic health records (EHR). One of the top EHR solutions used by healthcare providers worldwide is Epic. Microsoft and Epic are working closely with healthcare organizations that are interested in being early adopters of running Epic Hyperdrive on Azure Virtual Desktop. We are using feedback from these early production pilots to prioritize our product development roadmap and have assembled the emerging best practices into a draft reference architecture. For more info and to follow future progress, please see the Azure Virtual Desktop Exploratory Platform Summary on Epic’s UserWeb (login required). 

Microsoft partner Imprivata also announced support for Azure Virtual Desktop on Windows endpoints in Virtual Kiosk and Shared Kiosk modes in November 2024, expanding its support beyond Azure Virtual Desktop on Linux devices. Imprivata solutions are often used by healthcare organizations to support “Tap and Go” badging capabilities with Azure Virtual Desktop virtual machines (VMs), so this expansion to Windows endpoints gives customers more options to configure their IT infrastructure to meet the needs of the healthcare workplace. 

Azure Virtual Desktop is designed with flexibility and security in mind, with a number of components for customers to configure and implement in a way that meets their IT requirements. Additional recent updates include:  

• Microsoft Intune Remote Help is expanding support beyond single session to also include the Azure Virtual Desktop multi-session capability, a significant milestone for IT admins managing shared virtual environments. 
• Organizations have additional configuration options with Azure Virtual Desktop for Azure Local (formerly Azure Stack HCI). Azure Local helps organizations meet performance or data locality needs, or support areas with poor connectivity to the Azure public cloud, by providing session hosts closer to their location or by extending deployment options to on-premises infrastructure. See Advanced Micro Devices’ (AMD’s) recent publishing of results of its Azure Virtual Desktop for Azure Local performance testing.  
• Other updates include session host configuration and update, dynamic autoscaling, and Mobile Application Management (MAM) support 

We continue to innovate and build Azure Virtual Desktop to meet the needs of organizations in healthcare. Visit the “What’s new in Azure Virtual Desktop?” page to learn more. 

Desktops in the cloud with Windows 365 

Some healthcare organizations may be looking for desktop virtualization options designed for easy deployment and management without significant VDI expertise or investment needed. Windows 365 is the Microsoft software as a service (SaaS) solution that provides end users with a familiar, personalized experience of Windows from anywhere, on any device. It becomes employees’ dedicated computer in the cloud, retaining their data, applications, and settings. Windows 365 Cloud PCs can be deployed and managed by the end user computing team alongside physical PCs using Intune.  

For healthcare organizations, some of the most common use cases Cloud PCs are used for include healthcare administrators, pharmacy and life science workers, call-center employees, and more. Windows 365 also provides flexibility for IT teams to quickly deploy and scale up or down the virtual desktops as needed, making it a great option for part-time or seasonal workers, or short-term contractors. Windows 365 Enterprise provides dedicated and personalized Cloud PCs to employees, enabling them to access their desktop in the Microsoft Cloud from any device, 24/7.  

Recent releases in Windows 365 offer even more options for healthcare organizations looking to expand access and build resiliency for their organization:  

• For organizations looking to expand access to Cloud PCs across a greater number of employees, Windows 365 Frontline allows one license to be shared by multiple users, one at a time, based on how the Cloud PCs are configured. In dedicated mode, three users will each have access to a personalized Cloud PC to be used during their shifts or working hours. In the shared mode, now generally available, a Frontline Cloud PC can be shared among a group of users on an intermittent basis, with a non-personalized experience. To learn more about Frontline plans, visit the Learn page.  
• Some teams or individuals require additional backup, data resiliency, or disaster recovery options. In addition to the Windows 365 Cross-region Disaster Recovery add-on, Microsoft just released Windows 365 Disaster Recovery Plus. This new add-on will provide quick recovery times and fully reserved capacity, independent of availability, helping to ensure fast and reliable recovery in an alternate region. This can be particularly important for healthcare organizations with additional regulatory or business requirements, including needs for greater geographic diversity, restore time objectives, and pre-allocated capacity. To read more about Windows 365 Disaster Recovery Plus, please visit the blog announcement. 

To learn more about the features and capabilities within Windows 365, please visit What’s new in Windows 365.  

Windows 365 and Azure Virtual Desktop help organizations enhance productivity, stay secure, and reduce costs  

Organizations around the world are seeing the benefits of adopting Windows Cloud solutions. For many healthcare organizations, the focus is on how deploying these solutions can boost productivity, lower IT costs, and strengthen security in a scalable and balanced approach. 

The New Technology: The Projected Total Economic Impact™ of Windows 365 and Azure Virtual Desktop, a 2025 study conducted by Forrester Consulting and commissioned by Microsoft to assess the benefits organizations can achieve with Windows 365 and Azure Virtual Desktop, found a projected return on investment (ROI) ranging from 94% to 217%, with a net present value (NPV) between USD3.2 million and USD7.4 million over three years for a composite organization with 2,000 employees. The study also determined that employees and contractors using Windows 365 and Azure Virtual Desktop save 6 to 12 minutes per day from avoided outages and latency compared to their previous environments. This translates to significant productivity gains, allowing healthcare organizations to optimize the efficiency of their workforce. 

To explore more insights, read the Total Economic Impact™ study conducted by Forrester Consulting.

Learn more about empowering your healthcare teams with Windows Cloud solutions 

Microsoft is committed to listening to our customers in healthcare and innovating to meet their needs. Organizations like Baptist Health are seeing cost and time savings by moving their clinical workloads onto Azure Virtual Desktop. Get connected by joining the Azure Virtual Desktop,  Windows 365, or Microsoft Intune Tech Communities.

Interested in learning more about Windows 365 and Azure Virtual Desktop? Visit the Windows 365 and Azure Virtual Desktop pages. 

*Epic is a trademark of Epic Systems corporation. 

The post Enhancing healthcare productivity and security with Windows Cloud solutions   appeared first on The Microsoft Cloud Blog.

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

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

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

Microsoft Dragon Copilot

Discover more solutions

Listening to nurses’ voices

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

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

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

Lea Ann Arnold, Director of Nursing Informatics at Northwestern Medicine

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

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

AI in the nursing workflow

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

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

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

Creating a purpose-built solution with nurses at the table

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

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

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

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

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

Gretchen Brown, Chief Nursing Information Officer at Stanford Health Care

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

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

Explore the potential of AI for nursing

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

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

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

²Nursing and midwifery, World Health Organization, 2024.

The post Transforming the nursing workflow with ambient voice and AI appeared first on The Microsoft Cloud Blog.

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

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

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

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

Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare

Improve healthcare experiences with AI-powered solutions

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Microsoft at HIMSS24

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

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

Partners leveraging AI to fuel innovation in healthcare

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—Anna Griffin, Chief Marketing Officer, Commvault

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

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

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

Learn more about healthcare solutions from Microsoft

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

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

The post Beyond HIMSS24: Microsoft partners redefine healthcare with AI solutions appeared first on The Microsoft Cloud Blog.

As healthcare providers continue to face a complex mix of challenges, including severe financial strain, increasing competition, clinician burnout, and workforce shortages, the need to improve outcomes by using information and technology to enable quality care is stronger than ever.

Amidst rapid change, the healthcare sector is embracing adaptability and resilience. Facilities are rethinking their approaches and harnessing innovative technologies and digital tools to streamline processes and empower healthcare teams to provide exceptional care. Their ability to adapt in the face of adversity is nothing short of inspiring. It has enabled healthcare providers to maintain a high level of service despite the most demanding circumstances.

Providers must also capitalize on digital technologies to help improve operational efficiencies, quality of care, and patient satisfaction and retention, as well as optimize revenue cycle management.

Microsoft empowers the frontline workforce

We are committed to investing in innovative solutions with next-generation AI to help frontline workers thrive.

Read the blog

Tools like Microsoft Teams play a pivotal role in the transformative journey in healthcare. For example, healthcare workers are using Teams as their communications and collaboration hub, facilitating virtual video visits and keeping care teams connected. We’ve seen strong and consistent double-digit growth in frontline workers’ monthly active users of Microsoft Teams in the healthcare industry this year. This highlights the crucial role digital tools play in shaping the future of healthcare, fostering seamless operations, collaboration, and the exchange of vital health information.

Enhancing operational efficiency in healthcare with AI and digital tools

Between fluctuating team schedules and staying up to date with their often large and dispersed healthcare teams—from physicians to phlebotomists—maintaining end-to-end visibility on operations can get time-consuming for managers. But today’s digital tools, including AI, are reshaping the healthcare teams and support staff work.

Lightening the load for frontline healthcare managers

It’s often a complex task for care team managers to quickly identify open items to address throughout the week such as open shifts and ad hoc, time-specific work. Using chat history, shifts data, and more, Microsoft 365 Copilot helps managers improve operational and healthcare outcomes by quickly getting an AI-powered list of important action items specific to their care team and location.

Managers can identify open items such as open shifts that need to be covered with a new Shifts plugin for Microsoft 365 Copilot. Soon, Microsoft 365 Copilot can ground prompts and retrieve insights for frontline healthcare managers leveraging data from the Shifts app in addition to user and company data it has access to such as Teams chat history, SharePoint, emails, and more.  

Enhancing care team coordination and collaboration

Communication within the healthcare chain is evolving, transcending isolated pockets, and embracing a connected ecosystem. Real-time information exchange has become the norm, showcasing the industry’s determination to remain cohesive and collaborative. This connectedness empowers healthcare professionals to make informed decisions swiftly, and enhances patient outcomes and overall care delivery.

Ease of communication

When using the hotline feature on Teams certified phone devices, care teams can simplify and help secure contact management to always reach the right colleague or patient over calling. Devices can now be programmed to directly dial pre-configured hotline phone numbers or contacts, such as a provider’s emergency services, help deck, or security desk.

Leveraging modern communications to connect providers across health systems

Effective organization-wide communication from health providers main headquarters is essential to the success of its care teams, yet getting the right message to the right people can be challenging. Now, Announcements in Viva Connections lets corporate teams deliver communications and create notifications for clinicians and care teams within the home experience of Teams.

To reduce communication overload and help healthcare workers focus on what’s most relevant to them and their patients, organizational leaders can now target important communications like urgent announcements, role-specific updates, and safety policy changes to care teams and other frontline workers with Announcements in Viva Connections. With these new features, important messages are now delivered through push notifications and communications that surface in the home experience within Teams, where healthcare workers often start their day. Announcements are coming to tablet and mobile experiences in September 2023, with desktop experiences coming later this year.

To enhance the home experience in Teams for healthcare with frontline workers who span multiple sites or locations, we are excited to announce that a provider can now have multiple experiences. This new feature allows organizations to provide a tailored experience that reflects each location’s look and feel and customize the dashboard for each location’s unique needs. Multiple home experiences are now available through the Viva Connections app in Teams. Learn more about the recent enhancements to home experiences in Teams.

Drive engagement with campaign targeting

It’s important for providers to be able to target frontline care teams and drive engagement around their organization’s mission and core priorities. With new Targeted Campaigns in Viva Engage, you can now select specific audiences to reach with targeted communication campaigns and initiatives—perfect for scenarios like safety campaigns, policy changes, and other initiatives where you want to get the word out to employees and get people involved.

Personalize workplace communication with generative AI

Copilot in Microsoft Viva Engage helps healthcare leaders create compelling and inspiring posts from simple prompts or trending topics within workplace communities and storyline conversations. Corporate communicators can receive suggestions to further personalize messages, adjust tone and length, and even suggest relevant images to help drive great engagement on the frontline. Leaders can also utilize Copilot to analyze engagement metrics, assess sentiment, and recommend responses. Learn more about Copilot in Viva, coming later this year.

Providing trusted experiences to support health teams

Healthcare providers are committed to improving the work experience of their frontline workforce. They are investing in creating secure, user-friendly environments, reflecting their forward-thinking mindset and dedication to supporting their staff. They recognize that adaptability and progress are intrinsically tied to the people who make healthcare possible, ensuring a sustainable and fulfilling future.

Simplifying digital identity and personal workspaces

You can now provide your healthcare workers with a digital identity and personalized workspace that allows them to seamlessly access what they need to do their work without context switching, no matter the device or ecosystem. With personalized device experiences, care teams can spend less time logging in and out with intuitive experiences that make it easy to be more secure. Frontline healthcare workers can simply and quickly sign in and out of shared devices.

With Windows 365 Frontline, shift and part-time workers can unlock the power of Cloud PCs, allowing them to securely access their personalized Windows experience on any device. Instead of the common hassles that come with sharing physical PCs, Windows 365 Frontline provides personalized Cloud PCs, enabling your frontline employees to work from anywhere, ultimately helping to boost their productivity and job satisfaction. 

When workers log on, they have immediate access to their personalized apps, desktops, data, and settings, so they can pick up where they left off, regardless of their device or location. Integration with Microsoft Entra ID (formerly Azure Active Directory) and Microsoft Intune makes it easy to configure, deploy, manage, and secure your Cloud PCs, enabling you to maximize existing technology resources to meet the needs of all your employees. Windows 365 Frontline is now generally available. Read the announcement blog or contact sales to learn more.

Equip the healthcare industry with Microsoft solutions

In the delicate balance between adaptability and perseverance, the healthcare industry forges a path towards a promising future. Embracing new operational efficiencies, leveraging enhanced communications and connectivity, and fostering a secure work experience are pivotal elements of this journey. The unwavering spirit and commitment of healthcare workers drive these transformative shifts, enabling the industry to provide exceptional care while navigating the complexities of a changing landscape.

Whether it’s improving communication between care team members or enhancing provider operations with AI, Microsoft has solutions to equip frontline healthcare workers to meet new and evolving industry demands.  

• Connect with an expert to learn more about Microsoft frontline solutions.
• Discover how you can connect your customers, your people, and your data with Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare.
• Explore additional Microsoft Teams frontline solutions for healthcare.
• Learn more about Microsoft’s next-generation AI set to transform the frontline.

The post How next-generation AI and digital tools are transforming healthcare appeared first on The Microsoft Cloud Blog.

Introducing Unified member view for payors 

In this release, we continue to expand our investment across a new vertical with Unified member view (preview), our first solution for health payors. Similar to Unified patient view, Unified member view provides a single place to aggregate access and utilize different types of data instead of toggling between multiple screens and systems. Using Microsoft Power Apps, Unified member view enables payors to view complete records that combine data from various sources throughout the healthcare system.   

Built on a common data model derived from Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) that make it easier for payors to securely exchange data with their providers and other FHIR-supported systems. Unified member view is a highly customizable and extendable solution that enables customers and partners to create innovative solutions targeting different payor scenarios.  

Using Unified member view, users can access all the aspects of member data and health insights in one solution in a single view. As part of a seamless experience, users can view information from various sources, including claims and lab reports. Member events such as admissions, discharge, and appointment history can also be visualized. Actionable information, such as gaps in care, suggested next best actions, and pending immunizations, can be computed in custom services and surfaced in this solution. Using this, data health organizations can derive insights to drive better member engagement, coordinate care, and manage population health. Unified member view is designed to help payors proactively reduce costs while also managing care.

Empowering Patient journeys 

Improving patient experience and satisfaction begins with understanding the patient journey. The series of experiences and interactions that a patient has with a healthcare organization—from initial contact to post-treatment follow-up—makes up the patient journey. By identifying various touchpoints, health organizations can pinpoint areas for improvement and ensure that patients have a seamless experience at every stage of their journey. By understanding the patient journey, healthcare organizations can optimize their services and tailor their efforts to attract and retain patients and members. 

Patient outreach is a patient campaign management application that helps organize and automate marketing and outreach to patients. Extending the customer journey orchestration engine from Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing to support diverse users, the Patient outreach application enables health organizations to engage patients in patient care decisions with personalized patient engagement solutions. Updates to Patient outreach include the addition of the Patient journey (preview)—empowering health organizations to effectively map and analyze Patient journeys. 

Optimizing each touchpoint in a patient’s experience can help providers improve patient satisfaction, retention, and loyalty, while payors can address efficiencies and the return on investment of their health plans. This application enables health organizations to orchestrate trigger-based workflows across patient touchpoints to automate repetitive tasks and allow patients to get personalized care faster. We see this as an opportunity not only to improve communication with the patient but to make it more efficient for healthcare workers.  

Device data support for Care Management 

As healthcare expands beyond the clinician’s office to include wearable devices and in-home patient care, Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare has developed solutions and data integration capabilities for health organizations to make it easier for them to provide care anywhere. Our aim is to make it easier for caregivers to access and track patients’ vitals and to gain early insights into patient conditions. Device data support for Care Management (preview) leverages the MedTech service in Azure Health Data Services to normalize data from diverse medical devices and convert it into the FHIR format in a secure way. The MedTech service enables data coming from the Internet of Things (IoT) devices to be integrated with other clinical data across health systems. 

By integrating the device data support capability inside Care Management, care managers can access the patient’s vital data, assess trends, and determine the next best actions for their patient. This enables clinical users to stay on top of a patient’s long-term health. Health organizations can add new health devices when required as well as maintain an inventory of these devices. Care managers can also assign, modify, and track data on devices, and Microsoft Power BI charts offer visualization of tracked data for easier evaluation. With readings analytics through Care Management, organizations can deliver personalized care by understanding the needs of the individual patient as well as the needs of the broader patient population.  

Life365, a leading remote patient monitoring solution provider is building solutions on top of Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare—empowering payors and providers to connect and scale to large patient populations. The Life365 Virtual Care Platform will offer the ability to provide a virtual first approach to connecting with patients and access to more than 400 medical devices intended for home care. This integration will allow remote patient monitoring data to be accessed through the cloud and enable health organizations to scale to large patient populations, mitigating the high utilization of resources and associated costs. 

“Life365 integrated to the Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare platform allows health organizations to shift from a reactive to proactive approach to care. By receiving insights into patient conditions, clinicians can intervene proactively and determine the appropriate course for care, ideally, helping reduce the risk of emergency room visits.”—Kent Dicks, CEO, Life365.

Easily build applications for health with Power Platform

Health organizations are considering low-code development to improve productivity, gain faster time-to-market, experiment more easily, and overall, be more agile when responding to market changes. A key blocker has been the inability to pull health data from multiple sources and manage it in a secure and compliant way.   

Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare includes configurable solutions to exchange data between Dataverse and external systems using the FHIR standard. Dataverse Healthcare APIs provide bidirectional synchronization between Dataverse and FHIR services such as Azure Health Data Services.  

As part of the April 2023 release, Virtual Health Data Tables (general availability) has been updated to include support for the create, update, and delete FHIR operations. Utilizing this functionality, customers can perform real-time updates to FHIR resource data on the remote FHIR service directly from within the Power Platform. This enables health customers to leverage Microsoft no-code and low-code Power Platform to build health applications, greatly simplifying the complexities of the FHIR standard. With the new capabilities, Microsoft is helping organizations reduce the cost of duplicate health data by directly connecting apps to where the data exists. Keeping data in fewer places means security improves by reducing the number of integration points and stores that need to be secured. 

Learn more about new capabilities with Microsoft

Read the links below and visit our team at HIMSS 2023 to learn more about new clinical and operational insights capabilities such as Project Health Insights (preview), the new Azure applied AI service that leverages multiple Cognitive Services, Healthcare API services , and other Azure resources.  

• Explore our demos and visit our in-booth Learning Center at HIMSS 2023 booth #1201.
• Learn more about Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare.
• Try Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare with a free trial.
• Learn more about the latest feature release for Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare.

Transform the healthcare journey

Deliver better experiences, insights, and care with Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare.

Discover our solutions

MEDICAL DEVICE DISCLAIMER. Microsoft product(s) and service(s) (1) are not designed, intended or made available as a medical device(s), and (2) are not designed or intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, treatment, or judgment and should not be used to replace or as a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, treatment, or judgment. 

The post Latest Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare capabilities optimize payor, provider productivity appeared first on The Microsoft Cloud Blog.

In our latest feature release for Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare, we’re excited to share how we can help your organization deliver exceptional patient and member experiences, accelerate data-driven decision-making, support your healthcare workforce, and enhance collaboration across the care continuum.

New Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare features accelerate transformation for health payors

We continue to help our customers and partners maximize the value of their investment in Microsoft Cloud technologies with industry specific apps, connectors, workflows, data, and AI models. With today’s announcement, and building on our October 2022 release, we’re accelerating value of the Microsoft Cloud and expanding our investment across a new vertical for health payors and insurers, which will complement the existing capabilities for healthcare providers:

• Unified member view for payors (preview). Helps organizations foster deeper member relationships by delivering useful member data to help relationship managers with a deeper understanding of a member’s wellness goals, important life moments, and other personal attributes. This application provides a comprehensive view of member data and member insights in one place for payor organizations. It builds upon the Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare Payor data model, previewed in 2022, and combines member information about claims, coverage, risk profile, care plans, and more. Customers can utilize this feature within existing Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights instances or utilize Microsoft Power Platform for building new member profile templates.
• Care journey templates for care management outreach (preview). Now payors and providers can automate workflows with common scenario templates (for example, patient discharge, care plan off track, diabetes management, and more) for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing that can be used out of the box or customized for care management scenarios and help improve the quality of the care journey for patients and members. Providers and payors can send messages through Microsoft Teams, surface to-dos in the patient interaction timeline, and allow for secure messaging through Patient Access Portal. The patient journey feature extends communication channels beyond email to include text messaging and push notifications.
• Device data support for remote care management (preview). Built within Microsoft Power Platform, this feature enables healthcare organizations to support better hybrid care services, resulting in fewer patient visits to clinics and more frequent insights into patients’ health. This feature allows care teams and care managers to remotely monitor their patients’ vital health data, identify trends with that data, and manage their inventory of assigned medical devices. This feature builds upon the capabilities of MedTech service in Azure Health Data Services as well that of our independent software vendor (ISV) partner, Life365, that has integration to more than 400 original equipment manufacturer (OEM) devices.
• Enhanced operations support for Virtual Health Data Tables (general availability). We have further enhanced the Virtual Health Data Tables functionality to include support for creating and updating, as well as deleting Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) data. This feature now allows users of Microsoft Power Platform based applications, built leveraging Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare Common Data Model and Virtual Health Data Tables, to also trigger real-time updates of clinical data stored in FHIR servers like Azure Health Data Services without the need for duplicating that data in Dataverse.

We recently announced our expanded collaboration with Cognizant and the plans to integrate Cognizant’s TriZetto healthcare products with the Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare. Through this integration we will be able to help support our mutual clients, deliver enhanced patient and member engagement, have access to improved data interoperability, improve insights, and achieve operational efficiencies in a significantly shorter time-to-value. Our companies will also collaborate to develop and run Cognizant’s current and future healthcare software as a service (SaaS) solution on Microsoft Azure, migrate new and existing clients from on premises environments to streamlined functions managed on the Microsoft Cloud, and support future technologies designed to deliver new insights for payers, providers, and consumers.

Seize the full potential of AI, while safeguarding your business, your data, and your health workforce

At Microsoft, we believe that AI is the defining technology of our time. Our company has been at the forefront of cutting-edge AI research and continually integrates powerful, innovative AI technologies into our products and services to help customers do more. We also recognize that data is the fuel that powers AI technology, and peak performance requires clean, integrated, accessible data. We continue to make huge investments in data and AI research, technologies, and partners because we’re committed to bringing technology and people together to realize the promises of AI responsibly.

Our momentum continues with updates across our Azure AI Services for Health:

• Text analytics for health released social determinants of health (SDoH) and ethnicity support. Enables unlocking mentions of social, environmental, and demographics factors from unstructured biomedical data including assertion detection such as negation of substance uses. Moreover, timing, frequency and amounts mentioned in the context of SDoH will be captured and associated with the entities using semantic relations that will now be surfaced as well. Healthcare organizations, providers, researchers, and pharmaceutical companies can extract insights, improve care, assess health inequity issues, track health outcomes, as well as incorporate underrepresented groups into clinical trials and research, breaking cycles of disparity. 
• Project Health Insights (preview). New Azure applied AI service that provides pre-built models which perform a decision support conclusion that can help health organizations solve high-value productivity challenges for clinical trial matching, and OncoPhenotypes. Project Health Insights models will enable healthcare providers to rapidly identify key cancer attributes within their patient populations based on their tumor site, tumor histology, and cancer staging. The models also matches patients to potentially suitable clinical trials, according to the trial’s eligibility criteria and patient data helping find clinical trials, that patients could be qualified for, as well as finding a cohort of potentially eligible patients to a list of clinical trials.
• Azure Health Bot integration with Azure OpenAI Service (preview). We are releasing a new Azure Health Bot template that allows our customers to experiment with the integration of Azure OpenAI Service into their Health Bot instances for fallback answers. This feature does not aim to facilitate the bot to answer unknown queries in the medical space, rather, it enables customers to access the Azure OpenAI Service API and decide how to use the model to improve their bot built through the Azure Health Bot service. Currently, we are offering the preview for internal testing and evaluation purposes only.

Today, we are also excited to announce the general availability of the accelerator kit for healthcare as part of the Responsible AI Dashboard in Azure Machine Learning. The Responsible AI Dashboard is applicable across industries; the accelerator kit for healthcare is aimed at training and debugging models for fairness, explainability, biases, and more before they are implemented in healthcare settings. The Responsible AI Dashboard accelerator kit for healthcare is a valuable tool to help check models for fairness prior to model adoption, allowing for confidence to use AI to inform space planning in hospitals or dispatching medical staff in facilities.

In addition to model debugging, the Responsible AI Dashboard accelerator kit for healthcare in Azure Machine Learning can equip healthcare providers with directional and causal relationship analyses between historical patient data and health scores to better provide lifestyle recommendations and modifications for patients.

Foster better collaboration and empower your healthcare workforce

Today, global health systems and payors are turning to collaborative technology platforms—intended to reduce administrative burden and proactively share data for interventions—to drive much-needed change. Technology should offer better ways of working, evolving the parts of healthcare delivery that are working and eliminating those that aren’t.  

In our booth at HIMSS 2023, attendees can experience the power of Microsoft Teams to simplify care coordination to help reduce clinician burnout, streamline communication and data sharing, facilitate multidisciplinary collaboration, and improve the patient-care team relationship—without compromising data security and compliance or adding unnecessary friction.

Virtual care tools reduce constraints on what clinical teams can accomplish and enable new and different ways to work. By leveraging virtual care, you remove barriers that hinder traditional care delivery models and empower people to create new solutions that are far more flexible, efficient, and supportive. Virtual Appointments in Microsoft Teams provides an out-of-the-box solution for clinicians to make patient-care team interactions as easy and personalized as possible, now generally available. Built on top of scheduling solutions like bookings or integrated with your scheduling solution through application programming interfaces (APIs), Virtual Appointments enable care teams to serve their patients in new and innovative ways. And with Teams Premium, healthcare organizations get advanced Virtual Appointments to manage the end-to-end appointment experience with capabilities like text messaging, custom-branded waiting rooms, analytics, and more.

For healthcare organizations using Epic® or Oracle Cerner, the Microsoft Teams EHR connector enables care teams to schedule and launch Teams virtual visits directly from their electronic health record (EHR) system. The connector gives patients flexibility with the option to join virtual visits via browser, the Teams app, patient provider portals, or text messaging, and offers support for group visits. Microsoft Teams with Teladoc Health Solo’s medical-grade whole-person virtual care delivery solutions for hospitals and health systems helps to optimize clinical efficiency, improve patient satisfaction, reduce burnout, and increase profitability, all while supporting an organization’s telehealth goals for today and tomorrow.

Health that connects and tech that cares at HIMSS 2023

We’re excited to join other innovators at the HIMSS 2023 conference to showcase how customers’ need for flexibility, choice, and future innovation doesn’t have to mean more complexity, people, and cost. For those of you traveling to Chicago for HIMSS 2023, I look forward to seeing you there. And I look forward to showcasing our latest Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare capabilities and more.

Here are additional ways you can learn more about Microsoft updates:

• Explore our demos and visit our in-booth Learning Center at HIMSS 2023 booth #1201
• Learn more about Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare
• Try out a free limited trial of Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare

Transform the healthcare journey

Deliver better experiences, insights, and care with Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare.

Explore resources today

• Epic® is a registered trademark of Epic Systems Corporation.
• For Oracle Cerner customers, the EHR Connector is only available in the United States.

The post Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare: Empowering healthcare to deliver meaningful outcomes appeared first on The Microsoft Cloud Blog.

At Microsoft Ignite 2022, we’re excited to share our latest release wave for Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare, which helps support organizations navigating this changing environment. The solution showcases new tools to free up critical resources and support consumer-centric operating models that ease the burden on providers and help facilitate proactive healthcare, creating “customers” for life.

Enhance patient engagement

The economic case for consumer-driven healthcare is clear. Enhancing patient experience so that it is convenient, transparent, and personalized can drive greater patient satisfaction and reduce care costs. A recent McKinsey survey shows that satisfied patients who receive a more personalized, engaged experience report having 36 percent fewer visits and are 28 percent less likely to switch providers. These patients are also five to six times more likely to use other services from the same provider.¹ While patients may generally be more involved in their healthcare, satisfied patients feel more empowered to engage in their own health and feel as though they are getting better care, leading to improved outcomes overall. 

In this latest release, we continue to improve patient insights to provide a more enriched 360-degree patient view that is at the center of many healthcare processes. Now, care teams see relevant information faster through the Patient snapshot (generally available) in the Unified patient view. It enables an organization to customize their own end-to-end scenarios leveraging low-code and no-code tools like Microsoft Power Apps to optimize the patient view summary. Now, organizations can create unique snapshots that meet the most relevant use cases and help support faster and better care management. 

We’ve also extended the Unified patient view with a Patient trends (preview) feature to share patient indicators based on computed measures and insights about patient activities, for example, the number of days since the last appointment or the number of hospitalizations in the last year. This feature can be customized once installed to help measure relevant activities for each organization. 

Missed appointments can have a significant cost for healthcare organizations through wasted time and resources. They not only lead to a decline in patients’ health, but the economic effects of patient no shows significantly affect clinic operations and fixed cost calculations, resulting in overstaffing and unscheduled downtime—ultimately leaving healthcare providers struggling with everyday operations. Additionally, research has also shown that patients are significantly more likely to miss an appointment if they have missed appointments in the past.² The new Missed appointment prediction (preview) is a fully integrated AI solution that enables organizations to use AI to assess the likelihood that a patient will miss their next appointment. It also provides users with an explanation of the factors that influenced the prediction. Now, organizations can use these predictions to improve the decision-making process and take proactive measures, like care coordinators reaching out to the patient ahead of time, to help ensure patients will attend their next appointment and maintain continuity of care. Patients in turn have peace of mind knowing their physician’s office is prioritizing appointments that work best for them, building trust, and ensuring better patient-centric care.

Empower health team collaboration

Care plans are critical for healthcare organizations switching to value-based care to improve the quality and cost of care. With this new update for Care plan management (generally available), we have improved usability for care providers, making it easier to create and customize care plans to meet existing workflows and view a patient’s goals, interactions, and activities throughout their care journey. Organizations that leverage our Patient Access solution can now empower patients to update their activity progress in their care plan through the patient portal. Patients can view care plans, view upcoming, completed, overdue activities, and modify the status of an activity. Patients engaged in their own health and wellness are more likely to follow through with ongoing treatment and activity recommendations.

Patient journeys follow a series of interconnected events from being introduced, admitted, cared for, discharged, and possibly repeating a cycle as a retained patient. Later this year, we’ll release new Patient journey templates (preview) and tools to help organizations automate workflows across care management, and surface tasks and notifications to improve the quality of the patient journey. This capability will help save valuable time and create even more efficiency for care managers and administrative users who interact with the patients. It also includes out-of-the-box patient scenario templates for patient discharge, maternity care, diabetes management, and care plan off-track journeys.

During Microsoft Ignite 2022, we will also be joined by our partner Teladoc Health, who will share how the combination of communications, collaboration, and workflows in Microsoft Teams with Teladoc Health’s Solo™ will simplify the way healthcare organizations and clinicians work by streamlining the technology and administrative processes associated with providing virtual care.  

Working with Microsoft enables Teladoc Health to integrate with Teams, further strengthening care team communication and collaboration. Clinicians can securely access clinical data included within their electronic health record (EHR) system via Teladoc Health Solo without having to leave the Teams environment.

Data management

If there’s one thing 2022 has taught us is that data is truly a strategic asset for businesses today. The benefits of getting this right are significant. Harvard Business Review found that organizations that embrace data to drive transformations can experience a 54 percent growth in revenue and profits, 62 percent enhancement to customer satisfaction, and 44 percent faster time to market.³

As part of the ongoing strategy for Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare, we are intentionally innovating with data at the center of all that we do and striving to make it easier for customers to manage, connect, and leverage their entire data estate. With the new Data integration toolkit, we have provided IT administrators and integration specialists with a single pane of capabilities and tools to set up, configure, and manage their data integration components. This will make it easier to enable health data exchange within an organization’s existing landscape.

We’re also excited to announce the full feature release of Dataverse healthcare APIs to support the bi-directional integration capabilities of Fast Health Interoperability Resources (FHIR) data. These APIs provide a new, improved way to integrate and exchange FHIR data between Microsoft Dataverse and FHIR endpoints like Microsoft Azure Health Data Services or EHR systems.

We continue to invest in health industry data models. With Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare, we’re using FHIR R4 inspired data models to bring multiple systems and applications together by providing a “shared data model” for applications. This month, we’re releasing an updated Provider data model with an updated set of HL7® FHIR® R4 entities commonly used by customers and partners to build or extend their own healthcare apps leveraging Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare. Later this year, we’ll release a Payor data model that contains the set of HL7® FHIR® R4 entities for health insurers and payors. Health data models simplify data management and app development by unifying data into common data model shapes and applying consistency across multiple apps and deployments. This leads to faster innovation and easier data interoperability across various health data systems.

Organizations today can spend a lot of time defining a harmonized and consistent plan for their enterprise data warehousing, clinical and operational analytics, or lake house initiatives. Our industry-specific health database templates in Azure Synapse are data models that act as blueprints and enable organizations to quickly jumpstart their analytics-based industry use cases. Customers and partners can customize and extend these standard templates using the database editor in Azure Synapse. Our latest release includes templates for providers, payors, pharmaceuticals, clinical trials, retail pharmacies, and genomics.

Our deep commitment to supporting healthcare organizations remains steadfast. Partnering in this evolving healthcare environment requires rapid response, predictive capabilities, and continued innovation to help realize value faster and strengthen the resilience of organizations moving forward.

Learn more at Microsoft Ignite 2022

Microsoft Ignite 2022 is a chance for us to reaffirm our commitment to serving our healthcare customers and demonstrate our commitment to equipping them with the most innovative healthcare tools, partners, and technologies in the industry. On October 12, 2022, I encourage you all to attend the online Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare session and see a demo of the latest feature release. You can also interact with us at Microsoft Ignite 2022 by joining our hybrid Ask the Experts session with Teladoc and Nuance, or if you’re joining us live in Seattle, you can attend our in-person Expert Meet-up session, and you can also take the opportunity to hear from Nuance at our live Ask the Experts session.  

1 The-next-frontier-of-healthcare-delivery.pdf (mckinsey.com)

2 Evaluating the Impact of Patient No-Shows on Service Quality – PMC (nih.gov)

3 How to lead a data-driven digital transformation by Harvard Business Review

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