Overburdened healthcare system, Microsoft wants to help with cloud and AI

"80 percent of doctors in Germany are at risk of burnout", with these words Microsoft introduced its event "AI – the big relief?" as part of the Digital Medical Expertise & Applications (DMEA). Microsoft wants to use AI-based voice assistants to help with documentation, similar to some other software companies specializing in healthcare. To support the development of chat-based assistants in the healthcare sector, Microsoft provides developers with the Azure AI Health Bot, including triage protocols.

Dragon Ambient Experience (DAX) is designed to relieve doctors of documentation tasks, among other things - for more time with patients. DAX Copilot is a "combination of conversational, ambient and generative AI" and is already being used in the USA. The tool is not yet available in Germany.

According to a survey conducted by the tech giant, a third of patients are not averse to AI listening in to retrieve information, for example from the patient file or guidelines, and automatically documenting the doctor-patient consultation. When asked how the system would stop on particularly sensitive topics such as abortions or similar, Hadas Bitran, head of the Microsoft Health AI Research and Development department, replied that safeguards would then intervene.

Safeguards for AI programs

According to Bitran, safety measures are critical, and some have been specially developed for use in the healthcare sector: clinical safeguards are designed to detect hallucinations, for example, but also when information is missing.

"Compliance safeguards" are intended to enable conversations in the healthcare sector and also help to protect data subject rights, including with the help of audit trails and prefabricated consent management. Further chat safeguards, for example, are designed to ensure that responses are evidence-based, according to Bitran.

Bitran states that its platform has over 52 regional certifications worldwide to underline its compliance with international standards and regulations. However, despite all these measures, the company warns that they cannot replace human judgment, expertise, and responsibility.

Increasingly widespread

In Germany, Charité and the DRK clinics in Berlin, as well as Klinikum Region Hannover, among others, already use various Microsoft services such as Azure and Dragon. According to Markus Vogel, Chief Medical Information Officer of speech recognition company Nuance, which Microsoft acquired in 2022, Microsoft's Azure cloud service and Confidential Computing are particularly popular. With Azure, Microsoft provides "a really very redundant, secure, transparent and traceable infrastructure throughout Germany within the EU data border", explains Vogel.

The Microsoft Fabric analysis platform is designed to analyze vast amounts of data in the healthcare sector. According to Bitran, one patient produces around 80 megabytes of data per year. In addition, a study has shown that more health data was collected during the three-year coronavirus crisis than in the entire period before. In its white paper presented at the event, Microsoft also identifies eight medical areas in which AI can help:

1. Early detection of diseases
2. Support in diagnostics
3. Clinical decision support
4. Patient participation
5. Medical documentation
6. research
7. Logistics and resource planning
8. Identification of social determinants of health

(mack)