Building on that foundation, a growing community of customers and partners are fueling rapid innovation by fine-tuning new models, deploying AI applications, and developing specialized agents that expand what’s possible across the diagnostic imaging ecosystem. This momentum is shaping the next era of radiology—one defined by continuous innovation, open collaboration, and powerful new ways to connect insights from image to action.

Listening first: How customer feedback shapes every innovation

For decades, PowerScribe has been built alongside radiologists, grounded in real-world workflows and shaped by continuous feedback and close clinical partnerships with healthcare organizations across the country. This approach, building with radiologists and grounding innovation in real-world use, is fundamental to how we design and evolve our solutions, especially when it comes to performant AI. Those insights directly shaped how we evolved to PowerScribe One, where preserving the workflows and integrations that teams rely on while introducing a more modern, cloud-enabled experience designed for what comes next.

We’ve invested in dedicated voice-of-customer programs and teams whose sole focus is to continuously gather feedback. From advisory boards, clinical partnerships, and real-world usage, we translate those insights directly into our roadmap. This isn’t a one-time input; it’s an ongoing loop that ensures the capabilities we deliver reflect the evolving needs of radiologists across a wide range of environments.

That’s why we partner closely with organizations like University of Rochester Medical Center (URMC), St. Luke’s University Health Network (St. Luke’s), along with many others, through early preview programs ahead of general availability, so they can guide how innovation needs to be integrated. By embedding structured preview and validation stages into our development cycle, we align our releases with customer readiness, continuously refining based on real-world feedback. The result: technology that not only pushes boundaries, but prioritizes the workflow and overall customer experience.

Ultimately, it’s this approach, continuous collaboration grounded in the day-to-day realities of radiology, that gives us confidence in how we are shaping the future of the reporting workflow. This foundation makes these customer stories not just possible, but repeatable at scale.

PowerScribe One serves as the foundation for what’s next

At URMC and St. Luke’s, trust in PowerScribe One began with confidence in a cloud-based foundation designed to scale and integrate seamlessly into the radiologist’s workflow. For URMC, moving to the cloud was essential to unlock advanced AI capabilities that improve efficiency and provider satisfaction amid rising volumes and increasing cognitive demands. At St. Luke’s, modernization with cloud capabilities was equally strategic, enabling innovation while maintaining continuity and trust across the enterprise.

Our partnership and deep engagement model with URMC and St. Luke’s are reinforced at scale: today, more than 10,000 radiologists across 250+ organizations have migrated to PowerScribe One, generating millions of reports every week, across environments ranging from large Integrated Delivery Networks (IDNs) and academic medical centers to independent reading groups. That experience shaped a clear understanding of how to bring AI into the reporting workflow—not as a separate tool, but as a capability embedded directly where radiologists work, without introducing additional steps or fragmentation.

Both organizations are realizing real outcomes through PowerScribe One and its AI features, including generated draft impressions personalized to each radiologist that support improved efficiency and report quality.

“We chose PowerScribe One so we could really take advantage of cloud-based reporting. It gives our radiologists built‑in AI, excellent speech recognition and personalized impressions, making it easier to keep up with increasing demands while continuing to deliver great patient care. Microsoft has been with us every step of the way, staying responsive and supportive through implementation, go‑live and ongoing adoption. We will continue this partnership to continue to improve our workflows and efficiency.”

Robert Fournier, MD, Chairman of Radiology, St. Luke’s University Health Network 

At URMC and St. Luke’s, generated draft impressions were widely adopted because the feature works natively inside the reporting workflow—helping ensure key findings are pulled from the report and summarized in the impression section, reinforcing radiologists’ confidence in their report quality.

The ongoing adoption of PowerScribe One and its draft impression capabilities reflects a broader principle: when AI is fully integrated into the workflow, it enables radiologists to deliver more consistent, efficient, and high-quality reports without disrupting how they work.

Extending AI in the reporting workflow with Dragon Copilot

Now, URMC and St. Luke’s are extending these capabilities with Dragon Copilot, building on PowerScribe One to introduce intelligent summarization and automation directly within the reporting experience. Both organizations are actively leveraging prior report summarization, a feature within Dragon Copilot, to surface essential patient context from relevant prior reports, helping radiologists interpret studies with greater clarity and focus. At URMC, this capability is already delivering value by improving visibility into patient history.

“It works amazingly…it provides a great interface for seeing so much about the patient you otherwise might not see.”

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

Looking ahead, both organizations see significant potential as Dragon Copilot continues to evolve. As it gains access to richer patient context and connects to a broader ecosystem of first- and third-party AI applications and agents, Dragon Copilot can help to further reduce cognitive load and enable continuous innovation without disrupting the radiologist’s workflow.

Meeting customers where they are: From deploying off-the-shelf AI to fine-tuning models

Increasingly, innovation in radiology is shaped not just by what Microsoft delivers, but by how customers and partners extend AI within real-world workflows—helping radiologists work more efficiently, surface critical insights faster, and support better patient care.

As AI adoption expands across radiology, organizations aren’t moving along a single path; they’re navigating a wide range of needs simultaneously. Some are focused on deploying trusted, ready-to-use AI solutions directly into clinical workflows, while others are exploring how to build, customize, and push the boundaries of what’s possible with AI. At Microsoft, we’re designing with this range in mind to meet customers where they are and support multiple approaches to innovation.

For organizations looking to quickly operationalize AI, we provide a streamlined path forward with centralized access to a curated set of FDA-cleared third-party imaging AI applications from our ecosystem of partners—helping simplify how they are evaluated, deployed, and integrated. These applications integrate with our reporting workflows, enabling radiologists to access AI-powered insights within PowerScribe One and helping simplify the adoption of new capabilities.

For St. Luke’s, this approach enabled the rapid deployment of a fracture detection model from Gleamer, delivering immediate impact across its geographically distributed network and helping ensure more consistent diagnostic support regardless of where patients entered the system.

In addition to bringing FDA-cleared imaging AI into practice today, we provide the flexibility for customers and partners to build, customize, and extend AI capabilities as their needs evolve. Our premium medical imaging foundation models, MedImageInsight Premium and CXRReportGen Premium, can be requested for preview through Microsoft Foundry, and are designed for fine-tuning across modalities and workflows. These models are not medical devices, but they enable teams to build and fine-tune models that can complement clinically validated imaging AI solutions.

Delivered as fully managed endpoints, our premium models are continuously improved with curated data and enable AI builders, health systems, and partners to develop institution-specific solutions tailored to local data, specialty use cases, and evolving clinical needs. Models derived from CXRReportGen Premium can be integrated into experiences like Dragon Copilot, bringing high-performing AI directly into the radiologist’s workflow for summarization and report generation.

Together, this approach allows organizations to combine production-grade, regulated AI with ongoing innovation on a single platform, bridging standardized diagnostics and bespoke AI development. Companies like Milvue, a radiology-focused AI developer, are already using our models to accelerate development of solutions tailored to real-world clinical workflows.

“Milvue is building a radiology-native VLM. By working with Microsoft and leveraging CXRReportGen, we could start from a strong foundation allowing our team to focus on what matters most: turning foundation-model capability into clinically validated, workflow-ready radiology solutions.”

Alexandre Parpaleix Co-Founder/CEO, Milvue

No matter where customers and partners are in their journey with generative, multimodal, and agentic AI, we’re here to support them. From clinical applications like PowerScribe One and Dragon Copilot to customizable models from Microsoft Foundry, we provide a trusted, scalable foundation for innovation—enabling organizations to advance at their own pace while keeping workflows, performance, and outcomes at the center.

We’re excited to bring this next wave of radiology innovation to life at the SIIM26 Annual Meeting + InformaticsTECH Expo. Join us in Pittsburgh, PA to experience it firsthand. Visit us at the SIIM 2026 Booth #630–632 where customers and partners can explore our solutions, see live demos, and engage with our models in an interactive learning lab. See what’s possible when AI is truly embedded in the workflow.

See how AI fits into your radiology workflow

• Connect with our team
• Read more about migrating to PowerScribe One
• See demo of how Dragon Copilot supports radiologists and other members of the care team
• Learn how Microsoft applies AI for better health outcomes

The post How collaboration advances workflow-native AI appeared first on The Microsoft Cloud Blog.

This is a defining moment for healthcare and the decisions made now will shape outcomes for years to come. The question is no longer whether to adopt AI—it’s how to alleviate these pressures with agency, security, and trust.

AI for Better Health is our ambition to enable every person on the planet to live healthier by transforming how care is discovered, delivered, and accessed at scale. We are redefining how AI works alongside people to transform health across three priorities: 

1. Accelerating lifesaving breakthroughs.
   
2. Transforming the healthcare experience.
   
3. Advancing global health equity.
   

Accelerating lifesaving breakthroughs

Across healthcare and life sciences, organizations are bringing human judgement together with AI to enable discovery—helping researchers identify patterns that may support earlier insights and accelerate innovation.

In practice

• Novo Nordisk aimed to scale a pipeline of drug discovery, development, and data science capabilities with AI and machine learning. The teams built a Novo Nordisk AI platform and amplified its culture of innovation across many use cases, including predictive AI models for advanced risk detection in cardiovascular diseases. The algorithm may be able to predict patients’ cardiovascular risk better than current clinical standards. 
  
• In clinical settings, AI is helping clinicians act sooner and with greater precision. For example, AI-supported tumor boards are helping organizations like Providence surface potential data insights for clinician review, such as identifying biomarkers or matching patients to clinical trials, to support decision making.
  

These innovations are helping advance research so it can reach more patients, more communities, and more health systems worldwide.

Transforming the healthcare experience

As new discoveries move into practice, the way care is delivered is beginning to change. Increasingly, AI is being embedded directly into workflows with tools designed to reduce friction, connect information, and provide insights in context. As routine work is streamlined, people gain the time and clarity to focus on deeper impact—strengthening care, discovery and operations in service of better health for all.

In practice

• At Piedmont Healthcare in Atlanta, for example, an OB‑GYN is using Microsoft Dragon Copilot to capture and structure clinical conversations in real time—freeing her to listen more deeply, build trust, and apply more informed judgment during sensitive moments like pregnancy and postpartum. This shift toward more empathetic, patient-centered care improves reproductive health outcomes for women of color at her clinic.
  
• These capabilities extend beyond documentation. AI is beginning to surface new signals within the flow of care. For example, identifying patterns in vocal characteristics may provide additional context for clinician evaluation, subject to appropriate validation and oversight. Baptist Health in Kentucky is beginning to apply this approach within an ambient workflow, adopting tools from Canary Speech to support earlier and more informed intervention.
  

What begins as support for individual interactions can scale across teams, specialties, and health systems. And as some of the constraints on their time and attention are lifted, providers can focus more fully on their patients—bringing the human element back to care.

Advancing global health equity

Ensuring that better health is accessible to everyone remains one of the most important and complex challenges in healthcare.

AI has the potential to extend the reach of clinicians and care teams—bringing health information to remote communities, supporting resource-constrained environments, and providing individuals with more direct access to trusted health information.

As these capabilities scale, they can help reduce barriers tied to geography, infrastructure, and access to specialized care—supporting more equitable access to care.

In practice

• Through innovations like Microsoft Copilot Health, AI-powered health companions are helping individuals make sense of complex health information. By bringing together clinical records, wearable data, and medical knowledge, supported by Microsoft security and privacy technologies that help protect data, individuals can better understand their health. This can help them feel more empowered in discussions with their care teams.
  
• Partnerships are helping redesign care models and address long-standing inequities. For example, Microsoft is collaborating with Kearney to mobilize a global community of innovators through the Women’s Health Tech Manifesto—using data and technology to help close gaps in women’s health.
  
• Through the Rural Health Transformation (RHT) Collaborative, a multi-sector public and private partnership, co-chaired by Microsoft and others, we are uniting technology providers, health systems, payers, and non-profits to help states deploy CMS’s rural health funding into ready-to-adopt AI-enabled care models. Together, we are supporting efforts to expand access to primary care, telehealth, and remote monitoring for rural communities at risk of losing critical health services, while strengthening the cybersecurity and interoperability foundations more than 700 rural hospitals already rely on.
  

Ultimately, advancing health equity will depend not only on leveraging AI, but also on the responsible design, deployment, and use of these technologies with appropriate human oversight, transparency, and accountability.

Building the future of health—together

The decisions being made today will shape how AI is used in healthcare for years to come.

Progress will not be uniform. Every worker, leader and organization is learning how to harness AI-enabled workflows that amplify what we as humans can do to make meaningful change. Each step forward unlocks new possibilities for organizations and communities.

Taken together, these outcomes move us toward a broader vision for the future where every person on the planet can live healthier. That’s the goal of AI for Better Health.

Our ambition of AI for Better Health is grounded in use cases that create impact today.

• Get our e-book, AI for Better Health: Enabling transformation in healthcare, to explore how organizations are applying this approach in practice.
  
• Explore Microsoft for Healthcare to see how to drive innovation and improve healthcare experiences with trusted, AI-powered solutions.

The post AI for Better Health: Enabling every person on the planet to live healthier appeared first on The Microsoft Cloud Blog.

For years, nurse leaders and frontline nurses have generously shared their time, experience, and candor with us—helping guide how we think about technology, set priorities, and show up as a partner to the nursing profession. That sustained collaboration underscores the importance of aligning technology with the realities of nursing today and continues to inform Microsoft’s approach to supporting the nursing practice.

Honoring nurses through partnership and progress

To nurses everywhere: thank you.

Thank you for the care you deliver across long shifts and constant transitions. Thank you for the judgment calls made between alarms, handoffs, and documentation. And thank you for the partnership you have offered—sharing insights about what works, what doesn’t, and where healthcare must go next.

Over the years, nurses have helped surface some of the most pressing challenges in healthcare today:

• Increasing complexity of care
• Persistent staffing pressures
• Growing documentation burden
• The cognitive load of coordinating across distributed workflows
• The emotional toll of balancing efficiency with compassion

Their voices, lived experience, and willingness to share candid feedback have helped bring clarity and urgency to these challenges.

Nurses have consistently pushed assumptions and raised the bar for what supportive technology should look like. Their perspective has reinforced a simple but powerful truth: technology must fit the realities of nursing practice, not the other way around. That’s why we are continuing to take action—working alongside nurses to design solutions that bring meaningful relief to the operational, cognitive, and emotional demands of day-to-day practice.

Turning insight into action has meant spending time alongside nurses during real shifts—observing handoffs, documentation workflows, and care coordination in practice—and using that input to shape support in the moments that matter most.

Built with nurses—guided by decades of clinical trust

Microsoft’s work to support nurses builds on decades of clinical innovation—supporting care teams through technologies that strengthen communication, coordination, and access to information across care settings. Through this work, we’ve developed a disciplined approach to designing technology that aligns with how care is delivered in practice. Over time, health systems challenged us to apply that same rigor to relieving administrative burden within nursing workflows—grounded not in physician‑oriented tools, but in purpose‑built solutions designed around the unique realities of nursing practice.

That focus intensified through hands‑on co‑innovation with healthcare systems, where nursing leaders were unequivocal: workforce strain and administrative burden require urgent action—not observation. Instead of starting with a predefined solution, we worked side-by-side with nurses—designing in real care environments, testing during live workflows, and learning quickly. That sustained collaboration established nursing as a long‑term focus for digital and AI innovation, grounded in trust, relevance, and real clinical impact.

That momentum carried forward into deeper engagements with nurse leaders across the country, including industry forums and collaborative sessions where nurses identified practical opportunities to better support care coordination, communication, and wellbeing. These insights continue to inform how solutions evolve to support the full scope of nursing work.

Continuous feedback mechanisms have helped nurse voices remain central. The result is progress shaped not by a single program or moment, but by sustained partnership, iteration, and trust—reflected in solutions that increasingly align to how nursing work actually happens.

These stories reinforce why listening matters. They highlight the humanity of nursing work and the importance of building tools that support nurses without adding friction or complexity.

What’s new for nurses

Nurses deserve technology that works as hard as they do—respecting their expertise, valuing their time, and fitting naturally into care delivery. Progress isn’t just incremental improvement; it shows up when nurses can stay focused on patients, move more seamlessly across tasks, and leave a shift with less unfinished work and mental fatigue.

Purpose‑built with direct input from nurses, recent advancements to Microsoft Dragon Copilot represent a meaningful shift in how technology supports nurses. These innovations are designed to reduce friction across the full scope of a shift—extending well beyond documentation and aligning to how care is delivered across settings, teams, and shift-based responsibilities.

Recent advancements include:

• Smart room and wearable device integrations, powered through partners including Artisight, Caregility, hellocare.ai, and Stryker, help capture key information passively—reducing interruptions and freeing up time to stay focused on patient care.
• In-workflow access to organizational content such as policies, procedures, schedules, and communications, giving nurses access to even more information without breaking focus.
• Expanded service line support, including emergency departments and intermediate/stepdown units—meeting nurses where they practice.
• Dragon Copilot mobile app, extending support beyond in-EHR documentation to match how nurses work—reducing friction as they move between rooms, stations, and tasks.

Together, these enhancements reflect continued progress shaped by close collaboration with nurses—expanding where and how Dragon Copilot can be used and reinforcing a commitment to evolve alongside nursing practice.

A partnership that continues

Looking ahead, Microsoft remains committed to continued innovation in partnership with nurses—focusing on the most challenging aspects of nursing and applying technology where it can make a real difference. That commitment goes beyond listening; it means investing, building, and evolving solutions that support nurses across the full scope of their work.

This Nurses Week 2026 is both a moment of gratitude and a reaffirmation of how progress happens—together. By continuing to build with nurses and for nurses, we can help advance nursing in ways that honor the profession and support the future of care.

To nurses everywhere: thank you for all that you do every day, and for continuing to partner with us on this journey.

• Watch the Microsoft Dragon Copilot demo.
• Continue the conversation—The Nurse’s POV podcast explores how AI can support nurses, while keeping people at the center of change.
• As a thank you, LinkedIn Learning is providing access to CEU-eligible courses for nurses through the end of July 2026. 

Microsoft Dragon Copilot

Bring documentation, clinical context, and knowledge into one workflow.

Watch the demo

The post Built with nurses, shaped by trust: Honoring the humanity at the heart of care appeared first on The Microsoft Cloud Blog.

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.

That’s why I’m excited to share that Microsoft Azure has completed an independent, industry‑led GxP supplier audit conducted through the Joint Audit Group managed by Ingelheimer Kreis (IK).

GxP refers to regulations that ensure quality, safety, and data integrity in highly regulated environments, particularly in life sciences. This milestone provides independent validation that Azure’s systems and processes meet the standards required to support regulated workloads in the cloud, giving organizations greater confidence to accelerate their AI transformation and scale innovation responsibly.

“Overall, the audit observed strong organizational maturity, robust processes, and effective governance structures. Microsoft demonstrated a high degree of transparency, collaboration, and readiness to address regulatory expectations. Furthermore, Microsoft demonstrated strong maturity in quality, security, compliance, engineering, and operational processes. The organization showed strong commitment from leadership and robust operational controls.”

As quoted by the Joint Audit Group managed by Ingelheimer Kreis

This milestone builds on Azure’s longstanding commitment to compliance, reinforcing trust across life sciences and other highly regulated industries while helping accelerate broader cloud and AI adoption.

Raising the bar for cloud trust in life sciences and beyond

IK conducted a GxP-aligned supplier audit of selected aspects of Microsoft’s cloud service operations within an agreed scope. The sessions provided insight into governance, security and software engineering practices, and operational processes that may impact regulated GxP use of Microsoft Azure and related services. The audit was performed using a spot-check approach and reflects the information presented by Microsoft during the sessions. The IK audit results provide IK members with assurance regarding the Azure controls environment, enabling members to work to remove compliance blockers, accelerate their adoption of Azure services, and obtain confidence and trust in the security and sovereignty controls of Azure.

The joint GxP audit provides pharmaceutical and life sciences organizations with a higher level of confidence that Azure’s operational, security, and compliance practices meet industry expectations for validated GxP workloads. By having a coalition of major pharmaceutical manufacturers audit Microsoft’s cloud controls, customers gain assurance that Azure’s change management processes, evergreen update model, and underlying operational rigor align with the standards historically required in on-premises validated environments. This independent industry assessment reduces longstanding adoption barriers for regulated workloads and gives customers a basis for trusting Azure as a compliant, reliable platform for GxP relevant applications.

Microsoft Azure is designed to meet stringent requirements for data residency, privacy, and compliance. With Microsoft, organizations can keep sensitive data within defined geographic boundaries and under local jurisdictional control.

Microsoft offers a comprehensive set of compliance offerings to help organizations comply with national, regional, and industry-specific requirements. Backed by more than 100 compliance certifications—including ISO, HIPAA, and HITRUST, Azure meets rigorous security and privacy requirements across global and industry frameworks.

Securing the future: a collaborative approach

Security and compliance in the cloud is a shared responsibility, and the division of those responsibilities between the cloud service provider and customer depends on the cloud offering utilized. Microsoft works to ensure that we are compliant with industry and international standards, and customers are responsible for ensuring their data within the Microsoft Cloud is protected in a manner that is compliant with the standards and regulations imposed on the customer.

Azure integrates with services such as Microsoft Purview Compliance Manager and Defender for Cloud to provide organizations with visibility into their compliance posture and enable proactive governance across cloud environments.

We also provide clear guidance and detailed, auditable evidence through the Microsoft Trust Center and the Service Trust Portal. These tools exist to give customers transparency and confidence, pairing high‑level trust principles with concrete proof customers can use to meet their own regulatory and assurance needs.

With independently audited controls now recognized by leading multinational pharmaceutical companies, Azure gives life sciences organizations the confidence to run their regulated workloads in the cloud—so they can focus on what truly drives value: discovering new therapies, accelerating R&D, scaling clinical operations, and manufacturing medicines reliably at global scale. Instead of diverting resources toward duplicative cloud platform audits, customers can trust that Azure’s underlying operational rigor, change management processes, and security practices meet GxP expectations.

The audit strengthens the foundation that lets life sciences innovators move faster, modernize safely, and keep their focus on bringing breakthrough medicines and devices to patients. For more information on the audit, contact the team.

Empowering our customers

Microsoft remains committed to meeting today’s compliance, security, and regulatory standards. Across our cloud platforms and services, we maintain rigorous and independently validated controls, adhere to applicable laws and industry requirements, and continually strengthen our frameworks to protect the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of customer data. This commitment is reinforced by foundational company policies, a robust global compliance program, and active oversight from senior leadership—ensuring that every Microsoft offering is built on trust, transparency, and responsible innovation.

By working with industry leaders and regulators to shape compliance frameworks and advance sovereign cloud capabilities, Azure supports the next era of regulated AI innovation. By upholding these standards, we empower organizations in regulated industries to operate confidently, knowing their workloads run on a platform designed to meet stringent expectations today and evolve alongside emerging regulatory guidance, validated by independent experts and experienced by customers every day.

More on our approach to trust and compliance

• Dive deeper into how leading life sciences organizations are building readiness and resilience with trusted cloud platforms. Explore the e-book, Reshaping Manufacturing and Supply Chain in Pharma and MedTech, to discover actionable strategies for compliance, innovation, and operational excellence in regulated manufacturing.
• Explore From Vision to Value: AI Use Cases Transforming Healthcare to learn how healthcare and life sciences organizations are applying AI today on trusted cloud platforms.
• To learn more about Microsoft’s approach to trust and compliance, explore resources at the Microsoft Trust Center.

Connect with us at upcoming industry events to see how Azure can help your organization achieve more with confidence.

The post Microsoft Azure achieves GxP milestone, reinforcing trust for regulated workloads 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.

From supporting clinical research and helping teams prepare documentation to assisting teams with documentation review for prior authorization workflows, organizations need AI that does more than generate text. They need AI that is designed to support medical and scientific complexity, reasons across multi-step workflows, and can be deployed responsibly at enterprise scale.

Today, we’re excited to announce that Anthropic has added new tools, connectors, and skills that allow Claude in Microsoft Foundry to bring advanced reasoning, agentic workflows, and model intelligence purpose built for healthcare and life sciences industries. Built on Azure’s secure, enterprise-grade foundation, Foundry ensures these capabilities scale responsibly while integrating with familiar Azure services for data, compliance, and workflow automation.

From general intelligence to domain expertise

1. Claude for healthcare
   A complementary set of domain specific model intelligence tools and resources that enable healthcare providers, payers, and organizations to use Claude for medical and operational workflows. These capabilities unlock use cases like qualifying prior authorization requests, supporting claims appeals processing, coordinating patient care and triage, and more.
2. Claude for life sciences
   New components that accelerate every stage of the research and development (R&D) lifecycle connecting Claude to more scientific platforms and enabling it to generate more consistent, high-quality experimental and clinical protocols. These capabilities unlock use cases like supporting teams in generating initial drafts of protocol materials, preparing regulatory submissions, and more.

Together, these capabilities build on major recent advances in Claude’s general intelligence bringing domain-aware AI into the workflows that matter most.

Built for regulated, real-world workflows

Claude’s advanced healthcare and life sciences capabilities enable organizations to deploy vertical-specific AI agents tailored to critical industry use cases. These agents combine:

• Advanced model capabilities optimized for healthcare and scientific reasoning.
• Enterprise-grade deployment paths aligned to industry requirements.
• Domain-specific connectors via model context protocol (MCP), and skills to complete specialized tasks.

All within the trusted, unified Microsoft Foundry platform.

Transforming healthcare from insight to action

Healthcare teams are often constrained by administrative burden, fragmented systems, and time-intensive workflows. Anthropic’s Claude helps address these challenges by supporting use cases such as:

• Prior authorization: Streamlining documentation review and decision support.
• Insurance claims appeal processing: Accelerating appeals with structured reasoning and evidence synthesis.
• Care coordination and patient message triage: Helping clinicians prioritize and respond more effectively.

Why it matters

• Powerful: Frontier-level reasoning across clinical, operational, and coding-related tasks.
• Tailored: Purpose-built for healthcare workflows with MCP connections.
• Committed: Part of a planned long-term evolution alongside healthcare organizations.

Accelerating life sciences from discovery to translation

In life sciences, speed and scientific rigor are critical. With intelligence and capabilities purpose built for life sciences, Claude supports end-to-end workflows across research, development, and operations.

Key life sciences use cases

• Preclinical R&D acceleration
  • Bioinformatics analysis
  • Protocol and experimental design
  • Literature synthesis and hypothesis generation
• Clinical trial operations and data management
• Regulatory affairs and submission preparation

Why it matters

• Trusted: Life sciences–specific capabilities built with biosafety guardrails.
• Powerful: Frontier AI for bioinformatics, experimental design, and synthesis.
• Tailored: Deep integrations with scientific databases, lab tools, and clinical and regulatory platforms.
• Committed: Co-developed alongside pharma and research leaders.

Powered by the latest advances in Claude intelligence

These domain-specific capabilities build on major improvements in Claude’s underlying models. According to Anthropic, when assessed on detailed simulations of real-world medical and scientific tasks, Claude Opus 4.5 substantially outperforms earlier releases across benchmarks such as:

• Scientific figure interpretation
• Computational biology
• Protein understanding

Combined with ongoing investments in safety, low hallucination rates, and responsible AI, these advances make Claude designed to provide improved support for real‑world workflows including prior authorization, care coordination, and regulatory submissions.

One platform. Many models. Built for trust.

With Microsoft Foundry, customers can choose from a growing catalog of industry-leading models—including Claude—while benefiting from a unified platform for governance, observability, deployment, and compliance.

Claude in Microsoft Foundry adds another powerful option for organizations that need:

• Domain-aware reasoning
• Enterprise-grade controls
• Flexible deployment across regulated environments

Get started

These advanced capabilities are available today using Claude in Microsoft Foundry. To learn more, explore the Foundry Models catalog or connect with your Microsoft account team to understand how Claude can support your healthcare or life sciences workloads.

The post Bridging the gap between AI and medicine: Claude in Microsoft Foundry advances capabilities for healthcare and life sciences customers 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.