Microsoft has announced Microsoft Dragon Copilot, an AI system for healthcare that can, among other things, listen to and create notes based on clinical visits. The system combines voice-dictating and ambient listening tech created by AI voice company Nuance, which Microsoft bought in 2021.
According to Microsoft’s announcement, the new system can help its users streamline their documentation through features like “multilanguage ambient note creation” and natural language dictation. Its AI assistant offers “general-purpose medical information searches from trusted content sources,” as well as the ability to automate tasks like “conversational orders, note and clinical evidence summaries, referral letters, and after visit summaries.”
The goal of all of this is to “free clinicians from much of the administrative burden of healthcare” so they can focus on patient care, according to Joe Petro, Microsoft VP of Microsoft Health and Life Sciences Solutions and Platforms. Microsoft says its own surveys found that clinicians who have used the Nuance tech that makes up Dragon Copilot suffered less burnout and that 93 percent of their patients reported a “better overall experience.”
Microsoft is one of many companies offering such AI tools for healthcare settings. A Google Cloud blog published today highlights how healthcare firms are using Google’s medical AI offerings, like by creating medical assistant AI agents for identifying patient health risks; they’re also using the new multimodal image-searching features Google debuted for its Vertex AI Search for healthcare product.
The FDA published considerations for generative AI devices in healthcare last year, in which it noted many potential benefits of the tech, but also the risks of models making things up. In a study last year, researchers found that was an issue at times with Nambla’s OpenAI Whisper-powered medical transcription software. Microsoft says it is “committed to developing responsible AI by design,” and that Dragon Copilot’s “capabilities are built on a secure data estate and incorporate healthcare-specific clinical, chat and compliance safeguards for accurate and safe AI outputs.”
