By
Godfrey Benjamin
April 26th, 2024
Healthcare organizations are struggling to keep up with higher volume and increasing variety of data, it is challenging to organize the data properly. Using generative AI, Microsoft will help with that.
Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ: MSFT) has introduced a line of new AI products aimed at helping healthcare organizations “stay focused on improving patient and clinician experiences while delivering quality care more efficiently and at a lower cost.” During the 2023 HLTH conference in Las Vegas, Microsoft revealed such tools as Azure AI Health Bot – a new chatbot that can assist staff and patients with queries, and Text Analytics for Health – an Azure AI Language service. With these solutions, health organizations can benefit from the breadth and scale of Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare. The new AI tools have been developed in Fabric –a comprehensive analytics platform for businesses launched by Microsoft in May.
As Microsoft has explained in its press release, healthcare organizations are struggling to keep up with higher volume and increasing variety of data. The healthcare and life sciences industry is in charge of producing more than 30% of all data generated globally. However, it is challenging to organize the data properly, and as a result, about 97% of this information remains unused. With AI, structuring data will be much easier. And Microsoft will assist with that.
There are three new AI models available in the preview: patient timeline, clinical report simplification, and radiology insights.
Patient timeline employs generative AI to highlight the key information in unstructured data and organize them chronologically, which provides a more accurate view of a patient’s medical history for better treatment in the future.
Clinical report simplification, as its name implies, simplifies the medical language into words clear for those not familiar with the complicated jargon used by doctors.
Finally, the radiology insights model provides quality checks via feedback on errors and inconsistencies.
The new data solutions have been tested by Microsoft in Fabric in collaboration with Northwestern Medicine, Arthur Health, and SingHealth. Fabric offers a number of opportunities, including efficient combining of data from previously siloed sources across an organization, protecting data, and better engagement with patients.
For example, Northwestern Medicine will leverage the healthcare data solutions in Fabric to integrate clinical data across various sources, meet regulatory mandates for information exchange, and unlock insights with data and AI, which will help provide high-quality and timely care.
Meanwhile, SingHealth will use Fabric’s healthcare data solutions to empower its existing data infrastructure.
Doug King, the chief information officer at Northwestern Medicine, stated:
“Data is king now within health care, and that goes from everything from understanding what’s happening in the OR, to how many patients are coming in? How many patients are leaving the house or the hospital? And then how can you get them in faster?”
Speaking of other AI tools launched by Microsoft, Azure AI Health Bot and Text Analytics for Health, they are also innovative solutions that will enhance the general healthcare experience for both doctors and patients. Azure AI Health Bot provides cutting-edge healthcare intelligence that can be customized. It uses healthcare organization’s own content sources and employs generative AI to provide answers from reliable sources like the National Institutes of Health and the US Food and Drug Administration.
Text Analytics for Health is a tool that can extract crucial medical information from unstructured data sources, it supports multiple languages.