Microsoft announces new health-care AI tools

Microsoft on Thursday announced new health-care data and artificial intelligence tools, including a collection of medical imaging models, a health-care agent service and an automated documentation solution for nurses. 

The tools aim to help health-care organizations build AI applications quicker and save clinicians time on administrative tasks, a major cause of industry burnout. Nurses spend as much as 41% of their time on documentation, according to a report from the Office of the Surgeon General. 

“By integrating AI into health care, our goal is to reduce the strain on medical staff, foster the collective health team collaboration, enhance the overall efficiency of healthcare systems across the country,” Mary Varghese Presti, vice president of portfolio evolution and incubation at Microsoft Health and Life Sciences, said in a prerecorded briefing with reporters. 

The new tools are the latest example of Microsoft’s efforts to establish itself as a leader in health-care AI. Last October, the company unveiled a series of health features across its Azure cloud and Fabric analytics platform. It also acquired Nuance Communications, which offers speech-to-text AI solutions for health care and other sectors, in a $16 billion deal in 2021.

Many of the solutions Microsoft announced on Thursday are in the early stages of development or only available in preview. Health-care organizations will test and validate them before the company rolls them out more broadly. Microsoft declined to share what these new tools will cost.

Health-care AI models 

Roughly 80% of hospital and health system visits include an imaging exam because doctors often rely on images to help treat patients.

Microsoft is launching a collection of open-source multimodal AI models that can analyze data types beyond just text, such as medical images, clinical records and genomic data. Health-care organizations can use the models to build new applications and tools.

For example, digitizing a single pathology slide can require more than a gigabyte of storage, so many existing AI pathology models have trained on small pieces of slides at a time. Microsoft and Providence Health & Services built a whole-slide model that improves on mutation prediction and cancer subtyping, according to a paper published in the peer-reviewed journal Nature.

Now, health systems can build on it and fine-tune it to meet their needs. 

“Getting a whole-slide foundation model for pathology has been a challenge in the past … and now we’re actually able to do it,” Sara Vaezy, chief strategy and digital officer at Providence, told CNBC in an interview. “It was really sort of a game changer.” 

The models are available in the model catalog within Azure AI Studio, which serves as Microsoft’s generative AI development hub. 

Health-care agent service

Microsoft also announced a new way for health systems to build AI…