Microsoft Corporation has announced Microsoft Dragon Copilot, an artificial intelligence system for healthcare that, among other things, can listen to and create notes based on clinical visits. The system combines voice dictation and ambient listening technologies created by Nuance, an AI voice company that Microsoft acquired in 2021.
According to Microsoft, the new system can help users organize their documentation with features such as “creating multilingual notes in the environment” and natural language dictation. The AI-enabled assistant offers “general-purpose medical information retrieval from trusted content sources,” as well as the ability to automate tasks such as “spoken orders, clinical data notes and summaries, referral letters, and post-visit summaries.”
According to Joe Petro, Microsoft’s vice president of healthcare and life sciences solutions and platforms, the goal of all this is to “free physicians from much of the administrative burden of healthcare” so they can focus on patient care. Microsoft says its own research has shown that doctors who used the Nuance technology behind Dragon Copilot suffered less from burnout and that 93 percent of their patients reported a “better overall experience.”
Microsoft is one of many companies offering similar artificial intelligence tools for healthcare organizations. A Google Cloud blog post published today highlights how healthcare firms are using Google’s medical AI offerings, for example, by creating medical assistants to identify health risks for patients; they are also using the new multimodal image search features that Google introduced in its Vertex AI Search for Healthcare product.
Last year, the FDA published considerations for artificial intelligence generative devices in healthcare, which noted the many potential benefits of this technology, as well as the risks associated with fictional models. In a study last year, researchers found that this was sometimes a problem with Nambla’s OpenAI-based medical transcription software Whisper. Microsoft says it is “committed to developing responsible AI by design,” and that Dragon Copilot’s “capabilities are built on a secure data warehouse and include healthcare-specific clinical, chat, and compliance safeguards for accurate and secure AI results.”
