Microsoft unveils healthcare cloud innovations
- October 15, 2024
- Steve Rogerson

Microsoft has unveiled several healthcare cloud innovations that connect care experiences, enhance team collaboration, empower healthcare workers, and unlock clinical and operational insights.
Through healthcare AI models in Azure AI Studio, capabilities for healthcare data in Microsoft Fabric, the healthcare agent service in Copilot Studio, and an AI-driven nursing workflow, Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare is supporting healthcare organisations.
“We are at an inflection point where AI breakthroughs are fundamentally changing the way we work and live,” said Joe Petro, corporate vice president at Microsoft. “Across the broader healthcare and life sciences industry, these advancements are dramatically enhancing patient care and rekindling the joy of practicing medicine for clinicians. Microsoft’s AI is helping lead these efforts by streamlining workflows, improving data integration, and utilising AI to deliver better outcomes for healthcare professionals, researchers and scientists, payers, providers, medtech developers and, ultimately, the patients they all serve.”
Microsoft has launched healthcare AI models (www.microsoft.com/en-us/industry/blog/healthcare/2024/10/10/unlocking-next-generation-ai-capabilities-with-healthcare-ai-models), a collection of multimodal medical imaging foundation models available in the Azure AI model catalogue. Developed in collaboration with partners such as Providence and Paige.ai, these models enable healthcare organisations to integrate and analyse diverse data types, ranging from medical imaging to genomics and clinical records.
By using these models as a foundation, healthcare organisations can rapidly build, fine-tune and deploy AI tailored to their needs, all while reducing the extensive compute and data requirements typically associated with building multimodal models from scratch.
“The development of foundational AI models in pathology and medical imaging is expected to drive significant advancements in cancer research and diagnostics,” said Carlo Bifulco, chief medical officer of Providence Genomics (www.providence.org/services/genetics-and-genomics). “These models can complement human expertise by providing insights beyond traditional visual interpretation and, as we move towards a more integrated, multimodal approach, will reshape the future of medicine.”
Historically, healthcare data have been difficult to access due to their unstructured nature and the limitations of existing data management systems. These challenges have limited organisations’ ability to gain a comprehensive view of patient experiences and access valuable insights.
With the general availability of healthcare data in Microsoft Fabric (www.microsoft.com/en-us/industry/blog/healthcare/2024/10/10/power-healthcare-ai-with-unified-and-protected-multi-modal-healthcare-data), healthcare organisations can overcome these barriers by reshaping how users access, manage and act on data with a single, unified AI-powered platform. Additionally, healthcare security application templates for Microsoft Purview, a suite of features designed to help govern healthcare data, are available in public preview.
Healthcare organisations face numerous difficulties, including workforce shortages, rising costs and increasing patient care demands. Generative AI offers a potential solution to these problems by automating administrative tasks, analysing vast amounts of data for actionable insights and assisting healthcare professionals in decision-making.
To address this, Microsoft is announcing the public preview of a healthcare agent service (www.microsoft.com/en-us/industry/blog/healthcare/2024/10/10/introducing-healthcare-agent-service-in-microsoft-copilot-studio) in Copilot Studio to build Copilot agents for appointment scheduling, clinical trial matching, patient triaging and more.
Organisations can leverage the healthcare agent service to create connected patient experiences, improve clinical workflows and empower healthcare professionals while helping organisations meet industry expectations with Microsoft Copilot Studio. Early adopters, such as Cleveland Clinic, which provided feedback to help optimise the product for a healthcare setting, are already using these innovations to enhance patient experiences and improve operational efficiency.
At Epic’s UGM, Microsoft announced (www.microsoft.com/en-us/industry/blog/healthcare/2024/08/15/transforming-the-nursing-workflow-with-ambient-voice-and-ai) the next focus area for its collaboration in Epic Workshop. It is collaborating with several healthcare organisations – including Advocate Health, Baptist Health of Northeast Florida, Duke Health, Intermountain Health Saint Joseph Hospital, Mercy, Northwestern Medicine, Stanford Health Care and Tampa General Hospital – so AI can use ambient technology that addresses nursing documentation by draughting flowsheets for review, allowing nurses to focus less on paperwork and more on their patients. This innovation expands on the company’s long-standing collaboration and joint development initiatives with Epic.
“AI is transforming nursing workflows by streamlining administrative tasks, allowing nurses to focus more on patient care,” said Corey Miller, vice president at Epic. “Together with Microsoft, we’re using AI-powered ambient voice technology to populate patient assessments. Nurses using the tool are already sharing positive feedback on how it enhances personalised patient interactions.”
For more information on Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare and the data and AI products and their impact, visit news.microsoft.com/hlth-2024.