On Thursday, Microsoft unveiled numerous new artificial intelligence features aimed at healthcare organizations, including a tool for creating custom AI agents. The new offerings also feature foundational models for medical imaging and a healthcare data analysis platform, alongside plans for an AI documentation product focused on nursing. As healthcare organizations express growing interest in AI tools, some experts and lawmakers continue to voice concerns about safety and fairness. Tech companies argue that these innovations could streamline workloads and reduce clinician burnout. Kees Hertogh, vice president for healthcare and life sciences product marketing, emphasized the transformative potential of AI in healthcare during a press briefing, noting its ability to improve patient care and revive the joy in practicing medicine. ### AI Agents Microsoft's new AI agent service enables organizations to develop AI tools via pre-built templates and data sources, aiding in tasks like appointment scheduling, clinical trial finding, and patient triage. This service, currently available in public preview, allows feedback to enhance its functionality. For example, doctors can query the AI to identify clinical trials for specific patients. Cleveland Clinic has already employed this service to help patients navigate healthcare offerings. The platform allows organizations to create agents with healthcare-specific features, enhancing safety through reliable data sources.

Microsoft is also rolling out new application programming interfaces (APIs) in private preview to verify AI outputs, including features for detecting errors and linking results to source data. ### Medical Imaging Models The tech giant introduced foundational models tailored for medical imaging, developed with partners like Providence and Paige. ai. These models allow healthcare organizations to create AI tools without extensive data resources. Included in this suite are MedImageInsight for scan analysis, MedImageParse for image segmentation, and CXRReportGen, which generates reports from chest X-rays to improve diagnostic speed and accuracy. ### Healthcare Data Analysis Platform Microsoft announced that healthcare-focused data tools are now available in Microsoft Fabric, which supports health data ingestion, storage, and analysis. This platform enhances reporting on patient demographics and outcomes and allows for the integration of additional data types in public preview, including conversational data from Microsoft’s DAX Copilot. ### AI Documentation for Nursing In collaboration with Epic and various health systems, Microsoft is developing an AI documentation tool specifically for nurses. This tool, which builds upon the Nuance Communications’ DAX Copilot that records clinician-patient conversations, uses ambient voice technology to automate the drafting of patient data forms for nurse review. Mary Varghese Presti, vice president at Microsoft Health and Life Sciences, remarked that this aims to reduce the burden of data entry for nurses, allowing them to focus more on patient care.