Microsoft and Epic Expand Partnership to Bring AI-Powered Healthcare Solutions
On Monday April 07, 2023 Microsoft Corp. and Epic announced their plans to expand their strategic collaboration to develop and integrate generative AI into healthcare. This collaboration will combine Azure OpenAI Service with Epic’s electronic health record (EHR) software to provide a comprehensive array of generative AI-powered solutions. The aim is to increase productivity, enhance patient care, and improve the financial integrity of health systems globally. The collaboration will enable organizations to run Epic environments on the Microsoft Azure cloud platform.
One of the initial solutions will be to automatically draft message responses, and UC San Diego Health, UW Health in Madison, Wisconsin, and Stanford Health Care are among the first organizations starting to deploy enhancements. The integration of generative AI into daily workflows will increase productivity for healthcare providers, allowing them to focus on the clinical duties that require their attention.
Another solution will bring natural language queries and interactive data analysis to SlicerDicer, Epic’s self-service reporting tool, helping clinical leaders explore data in a conversational and intuitive way.
According to leading industry experts, health systems and hospitals need to address intense pressures on costs and margins. Approximately half of U.S. hospitals finished 2022 with negative margins due to workforce shortages, increased labor expenses, supply disruptions, and inflationary effects. Achieving long-term financial sustainability through increased productivity and technological efficiency is a mission-critical strategic priority.
Microsoft believes that when creating technologies that can change the world, organizations need to ensure that the technology is used responsibly. Microsoft is committed to creating responsible AI by design that is guided by a core set of principles, including fairness, reliability and safety, privacy and security, inclusiveness, transparency, and accountability. Microsoft is putting those principles into practice across the company to develop and deploy AI that will have a positive impact on society.
