Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella listens to an audience member’s query in the course of the company’s annual shareholder meeting in Bellevue, Washington, Nov. 30, 2016.
Stephen Brashear | Getty Images News | Getty Images
Microsoft on Tuesday announced latest data and artificial intelligence products that aim to assist health-care organizations easily access and learn from the mountains of knowledge collected by doctors and hospitals.
The health care and life sciences industry is answerable for generating greater than 30% of all data produced globally, in accordance with a recent report from Deloitte. But it may well be difficult to leverage all that information because it is stored across quite a lot of different systems and formats. Around 97% of all the information generated by hospitals stays unused, as an illustration.
To assist address this issue, Microsoft said Tuesday on the HLTH conference in Las Vegas, it developed latest health-care-specific tools in Fabric, a knowledge and analytics platform the corporate announced in May. It will possibly mix data from sources resembling electronic health records, images, lab systems, medical devices and claims systems so organizations can standardize it and access it in the identical place. Microsoft said the brand new tools will help eliminate the “time-consuming” means of looking through these sources one after the other.
Microsoft Fabric for health-care organizations
Microsoft has been trialing Fabric for health care with select customers including Northwestern Medicine, Arthur Health and SingHealth, and it is out there in a preview capability starting Tuesday.
Doug King, the chief information officer at Northwestern Medicine, said Northwestern remains to be within the means of moving its data into the Fabric system but that the organization is already excited in regards to the potential.
He said consolidating disparate data will ultimately help health systems improve care and see more patients.
“Data is king now inside health care, and that goes from every little thing from understanding what’s happening within the OR, to what number of patients are coming in? What number of patients are leaving the home or the hospital? After which how are you going to get them in faster?” he told CNBC in an interview.
King said Northwestern is deploying Microsoft’s technology thoughtfully, nevertheless it may very well be a “game changer” if it is completed well. He said the organization is fascinated about future applications resembling managing patient flow and staffing, in addition to the best way to integrate broader population health data, resembling where food deserts are situated, into care.
“The present state of technology and Microsoft Fabric and Azure and generative AI, all of that, it will change the way in which we live. And it will change the way in which we care for patients. And it’s probably among the finest shots that we’ve to unravel a number of the biggest problems we’ve inside health care,” he said.
Microsoft’s latest patient timeline model
Latest Azure AI health tools
Microsoft also introduced latest tools for health-care organizations inside its Azure AI services Tuesday.
The corporate will offer a latest generative AI chatbot called the Azure AI Health Bot, which may pull information from a health organization’s own internal data in addition to reputable external sources resembling the Food and Drug Administration and the National Institutes of Health.
Linishya Vaz, principal product manager at Microsoft Health and Life Sciences, said the chatbot will be used to assist staff inside a corporation ask questions, resembling the best way to treat a particular disease and what the interior protocols and processes are. Patients may also use the chatbot inside their patient portal to ask clarifying questions on their symptoms and medical terms they encounter, she added.
“What’s also really essential is that we inbuilt guardrails and safeguards into this process,” Vaz told reporters at a press briefing. “There is a approach to confirm this information, ensure the client can do an audit of the answers to see that they’re credible.”
Microsoft announced one other solution called Text Analytics for health, which may label and extract essential medical information from quite a lot of unstructured data sources resembling clinical documents and notes. Vaz said the tool can be released in Spanish, French, Italian, German, Portuguese and Hebrew along with English.
Finally, Microsoft unveiled three latest models inside Azure AI Health Insights, which offers tools to assist doctors, nurses and researchers make more informed decisions.
The primary model, patient timeline, gives clinicians an easy, chronological overview of a patient’s medical history through the use of generative AI to consolidate information from different unstructured data sources.
“You are capable of visually see, immediately, there was a medical encounter here, there was a procedure done here, that is the medication that somebody took, and [the clinician’s] capable of get a very good picture,” Vaz said.
The second model, called clinical report simplification, allows clinicians to make use of generative AI to simplify reports stuffed with complex medical terminology into language that patients may understand higher. And the ultimate model, radiology insights, goals to assist clinicians and radiologists by identifying errors and inconsistencies that may come up across different reports. The model may also offer follow-up recommendations.
Vaz said Microsoft’s latest health-care tools inside Azure AI will help improve patient experiences and permit clinicians to concentrate on delivering higher care. The brand new solutions can be found in a preview capability starting Tuesday, Microsoft said.