Microsoft AI for health providers

  • 6 minutes

We already discussed how AI can empower healthcare experts and businesses prior to the patient arriving at the hospital. Now, let’s explore how AI can help health providers.

The Microsoft Azure ecosystem

Azure Health Data Services enables secure management of patient data. At the core of Microsoft AI solutions for healthcare providers, a robust ecosystem lies designed to facilitate seamless integration with diverse forms of medical data including electronic health records and digital imaging.

Electronic Health Records (EHR)

Photograph showing healthcare worker holding a tablet.

Electronic Health Records (EHR) serve as comprehensive repositories of patient information, encompassing a wide array of critical healthcare data. To ensure interoperability on a local or national/regional scale, these systems adhere to established industry standards such as the HL7 ® Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) standard.

Microsoft Azure offers a dedicated Application Programming Interface (API) as part of Azure Health Data Services that implements these industry standards and serves as a bridge connecting the Azure ecosystem with external EHR systems. Azure Health Data Services plays a pivotal role in this ecosystem by serving as the conduit through which healthcare data is seamlessly brought into the Azure ecosystem, enabling the harnessing of advanced AI capabilities. Through Azure Health Data Services, AI-driven predictive analytics can be applied to EHR data to identify patients at high risk of developing chronic conditions. By analyzing historical patient data, AI models can predict potential health issues and enable healthcare providers to intervene proactively with preventive care strategies. This measure reduces hospitalization rates and improves patient outcomes. Additionally, these EHR systems seamlessly interface with Microsoft Teams, using advanced AI capabilities to automate tasks and enhance team efficiency.

Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM) images

Photograph showing healthcare worker rushing through a medical room.

Modern healthcare heavily relies on medical imaging for precise diagnostics and treatment planning. The DICOM standard plays a pivotal role in enabling the secure and standardized storage and exchange of these critical medical images. Within Azure Health Data Services, seamless integration for DICOM images is provided which is an enabler for facilitating the adoption of AI use cases for enhanced diagnostics and treatment planning. AI algorithms integrated with DICOM image data can automate the detection and classification of anomalies in medical images, such as X-rays or MRI scans. For instance, AI can accurately identify and highlight areas of concern in radiology images. It can aid radiologists in diagnosing conditions like fractures or tumors more efficiently and with higher accuracy, ultimately leading to improved patient care.

All this medical data can be easily integrated into the whole Microsoft ecosystem. Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare is conceived for this purpose, as it provides Microsoft Azure, Microsoft Dynamics 365, and Microsoft 365 for the needs of healthcare professionals. This infrastructure is optimized to provide the necessary controls to maintain the privacy and security of patient data. This ecosystem is the ground that supports the AI use cases and functionalities we discuss.

Microsoft Copilot enhances productivity

Solutions like Microsoft 365 Copilot, Dynamics 365 Copilot, Microsoft Power BI, and Microsoft Teams apply AI to improve productivity. For example, these products can help professionals create and edit patient reports, medical studies, and other relevant documents.

Besides, they’re also helpful in making communications more efficient to give doctors more patient time. For instance, they enable them to automatically summarize emails, draft responses, and create concise meeting summaries.

Generative AI enables contextualized interactions

There are many healthcare scenarios that benefit from improved interactions:

  • Personalized treatment: Azure AI Services and Dynamics 365 Copilot use AI to deliver hyper-personalization. This feature enables you to offer personalized treatment plans to your patients, based on AI-powered insights on what is going to work best specifically for them.
  • Better virtual assistants: Many available Microsoft tools use AI to help users in a conversational format. For example, Azure OpenAI Services, Azure AI Services, Dynamics 365 Copilot, Power Virtual Agents, or AI in Power Platform. For healthcare professionals, it means a helping hand to process and organize patient records, medical research, and operational data. For patients, it offers them a new chat service, in which they can ask deeper questions about health topics before consulting with physicians. This service would help patients get quicker responses and would liberate doctors by screening consultations.
  • Onboarding and help desks for doctors: These applications help doctors find the most pertinent training materials, protocols, and patient information. Azure AI Services, and Azure OpenAI Services in particular, can power these solutions.

AI amplifies automation

New generation AI, including generative AI, is taking document AI technologies to the next level. This progress allows for further, smarter automation.

  • Process and organize medical data: Azure AI Document Intelligence, Azure OpenAI Services, and Azure Cognitive Search can help you manage patient records, medical research, and operational data.
  • Anticipate equipment needs and patient admission rates: You can use Azure Machine Learning, Microsoft Power BI, and Azure OpenAI Services to do predictive analytics. That means you know beforehand when your MRI scanner or other devices are likely to start malfunctioning or when you’ll receive more patients.
  • Generate full-circle medical reports: With Azure OpenAI Services, Microsoft Power BI, and Azure Synapse Analytics, you can automatically create reports on patient outcomes, treatment efficiency, or operational metrics.

Intuitive discovery of critical information

Photograph showing medical professional looking at computer screen.

Healthcare professionals can use AI to get more insight into already available information. For example:

  • Analyze patient feedback, medical research, and health trends: Healthcare providers can use Azure OpenAI Services to identify what’s working and what’s not for their patients. These tools process tremendous amounts of information, so they can easily detect subtle trends and help providers react accordingly, for example in terms of discovering new effective treatments.
  • Optimize claims management: Azure OpenAI Services can help payor organizations deal with volumes of content by generating summaries of manual and denied claims issues and sources to determine solutions. These generative AI models can also aggregate information for complex claims to reduce processing time, autogenerate summaries and outcomes for prior authorization requests, and help claims processors draft responses to appeals and grievances inquiries. Besides, you can use these models to detect duplicate claims. This process doesn’t only help you optimize claims management, but also detect fraud.
  • Empower doctors to stay up to date: Azure OpenAI Services can help physicians find new, pertinent medical research. They can also summarize this information and extract key insights.
  • Help doctors get better diagnoses: Image scanning can sometimes be limited, but AI can augment it to provide clearer information to medical professionals. In some cases, AI is already making better diagnoses than real doctors.2 If doctors use these AI systems, there’s potential for better diagnoses.
  • Analyze calls to your contact center: Azure AI Services and Microsoft Power BI can boost your contact center with AI-powered analytics. With these products, you can transcribe and analyze patient calls and queries for insights into patient experiences and satisfaction. Going further, you may even want to use sentiment analysis, as covered in Azure AI Services, to gauge patient satisfaction, treatment effectiveness, and public health perceptions.

AI for good

The priority for healthcare providers is always to deliver the best quality care for everyone. AI can make this goal easier. As the next section highlights, AI empowers healthcare professionals to spend more and better time with patients and to deliver better diagnoses and treatments. Furthermore, AI can help underserved communities get better healthcare. It delivers expertise into rural areas and enables decentralized follow-ups and treatments.

Tip

Take a moment to think about which of these (or other) AI use cases are most relevant to your organization. Photograph showing people working and talking around a table.

Next, let’s explore how Zimmer Biomet and Microsoft are collaborating to implement AI solutions that enable better treatment for patients.