Microsoft is beefing up its artificial intelligence capabilities for clinical users.
At the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society’s annual conference in Las Vegas on Monday, the big tech company announced a new way for clinicians to interact with its AI tools. Microsoft launched a natural language chat interface called Dragon Copilot, which takes clinician's text commands and documents them in the electronic health record.
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Microsoft, which first added generative AI to its EHR documentation products two years ago, is developing the technology to conduct more complex tasks, said Kenneth Harper, a general manager of Dragon products at Microsoft. In Dragon Copilot, clinicians will be able to use AI to draft letters for referrals and extract clinical orders such as imaging tests during the conversation, he said.
"You can just talk to the system," Harper said. "In one fell swoop [with] all these natural language instructions, [the program] will rewrite your documentation based on those commands."
The program can also pull medical information from trusted websites and provide clinicians answers based on a patient's medical history and other contextual information in the EHR, Harper said. He cited Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Medline Plus or the Food and Drug Administration as trusted sources that will be integrated into Microsoft's AI copilot.
Microsoft, which acquired Nuance for $19.7 billion in March 2022, has continued to build healthcare-focused AI. In October, the company partnered with EHR vendor Epic Systems along with several health systems to build an ambient AI tool for nurses. Last year at HIMSS, it joined a group of 16 health systems to launch a stakeholder group focused on implementing AI guardrails.
The announcement follows a busy month of healthcare-focused AI announcements from large technology companies. Both Salesforce and Innovaccer have released AI tools in the past two weeks.
