Microsoft Debuts AI-Powered Data Tools for Doctors

Microsoft has unveiled artificial intelligence-powered products to help doctors glean insights from healthcare data.

The product launch, announced Tuesday (Oct. 10), followed a similar debut this week from rival Google, and comes at a time when some clinicians are showing hesitancy about the use of generative artificial intelligence (AI) in patient care.

“Healthcare data continues to grow rapidly, and organizations are struggling to keep up with higher volume, greater variety and increased velocity,” Microsoft said in a news release.

“According to the World Economic Forum, hospitals produce 50 petabytes of siloed data per year — that’s equivalent to approximately 10 billion music files. Ninety-seven percent of this data goes unused, leaving many valuable insights locked away.”

To help combat this issue, Microsoft is launching industry-specific data solutions from its Fabric analytics platform.

The healthcare data solutions in Fabric, the company said, do away with the process of “stitching together a complex set of disconnected, multimodal health data sources” such as text and video and “provides a secure and governed way for organizations to access, analyze and visualize data-driven insights across their organization.”

Microsoft is also launching AI-powered features for its Azure cloud computing platform, including a clinical report simplification tool that lets clinicians use generative AI to convert medical jargon into simpler language “while preserving the full essence of the clinical information so that it can be shared with others, including patients,” the company said.

As PYMNTS wrote earlier this week, the generative AI healthcare market is projected to reach $22 billion by 2032, offering a number of possibilities for better patient care, diagnosis accuracy, and treatment outcomes.

“And given its ability to analyze vast amounts of medical data, generative AI can assist clinicians in making more informed decisions, identifying patterns that may not be immediately apparent to human practitioners, and even predicting patient outcomes,” that report said.

Still, there seems to be some disparity in the openness to generative AI adoption between more recently developed economies and more established ones, according to the “Generative AI Tracker®” study by PYMNTS Intelligence, which examines the current state and future potential of generative AI in healthcare.

“This trend can be attributed to several factors,” PYMNTS wrote. “First, newer economies often have less bureaucratic and regulatory hurdles, allowing for more agile adoption of emerging technologies. Established economies, on the other hand, may have more complex regulatory frameworks and established healthcare systems, making it challenging to integrate generative AI seamlessly.”