Microsoft announces several new data and AI solutions targeting healthcare organizations

Microsoft today announced new healthcare data solutions and AI capabilities that will help organizations improve patient and clinician experiences.

First, Microsoft Fabric is introducing new healthcare data solutions that unify data, providing a secure and governed way for organizations to access, analyze, and visualize data-driven insights. This will drive business value and enable better patient care. Microsoft Fabric is offering the following:

• The ability to combine data from previously siloed sources across their organization, such as electronic health records (EHRs), Picture Archiving and Communication Systems (PACS), labs systems, claims systems and medical devices. Also, connectors and converters make it easier to transform FHIR, DICOM and MedTech data from one format to another or build pipelines for specific use cases.
• A multimodal data foundation that allows healthcare organizations to build standardized, scalable solutions that help accelerate the process of uncovering impactful clinical and operational insights and ultimately drive better patient care.
• Standard capabilities like Observational Medical Outcomes Partnership (OMOP) analytics enable clinical research and patient outreach analytics help provide more personalized engagement with patients.
• A new de-identification service will allow organizations to de-identify clinical data, keeping patient-protected health information (PHI) private by using machine learning models to extract, redact or surrogate identifiers while unlocking insights from unstructured data, such as doctor’s notes, medical documents and clinical trial studies.
• In addition, through healthcare-specific pre-built classification rules, labels and data glossaries in Microsoft Purview (preview), healthcare organizations can govern, protect and manage their entire data estate.

Azure AI services are getting the following capabilities to empower healthcare organizations in the AI world.

• Azure AI services are launching new capabilities to help clinicians and researchers make informed decisions. These include Azure AI Health Insights models such as patient timeline, clinical report simplification, and radiology insights.
• Azure AI Health Bot now has generative AI capabilities, enabling organizations to quickly build and deploy compliant, AI virtual health assistants and chatbots to support patient engagement.
• Text Analytics for health is now available in seven languages and offers newly released healthcare open source templates to help extract and label medical data.

“Through these innovations, we are making it easier for healthcare organizations to create connected experiences at every point of care, provide tools that foster collaboration, empower the healthcare workforce, and unlock the value from clinical and operational data using data standards that are important to the healthcare industry,” wrote Alysa Taylor, CVP, Azure + Industry, Microsoft.