While hospitals are said to produce 50 petabytes of data per year, only 3% of that potential goldmine gets put into use — and Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare is looking to turn that lost opportunity into life-saving insights.
Built on the Microsoft Fabric analytics platform, the new healthcare-data solutions “eliminate the costly, time-consuming process of stitching together a complex set of disconnected, multimodal health data sources — text, images, video, etc.,” according to Microsoft corporate VP for industry and Azure Alysa Taylor.
The goal of this sweeping data integration is to provide “a secure and governed way for organizations to access, analyze and visualize data-driven insights across their organization,” Taylor writes in a recent blog post.
The new data solutions arrive as hospitals and healthcare systems realize that if they hope to be able to harness the power of artificial intelligence (AI), they must first overhaul their capabilities around data: collecting it, storing it, managing it, and ensuring the data silos that have hardened for decades are obliterated.
Taylor’s blog post cited several distinct advantages offered by the new Microsoft Fabric healthcare solutions:
Combining data from siloed sources including electronic health records (EHRs), picture archives, medical devices, lab systems, and claims systems.
“A multimodal data foundation that allows them to build standardized, scalable solutions that help accelerate the process of uncovering impactful clinical and operational insights and ultimately drive better patient care.” Enhancing patient care by helping healthcare teams rapidly create scalable solutions that uncover clinical and operational insights.
Providing more-personalized patient engagements by bringing together various industry models.
Enhancing patient privacy by using machine learning (ML) models that can also unlock insights from doctors’ notes, clinical trials, and other unstructured data.
Within Taylor’s detailed and wide-ranging blog post, this generative AI excerpt stood out to me as an insightful picture into the healthcare future that is now within reach: “Bringing generative AI to healthcare chatbots and virtual assistants — This new preview capability in Azure AI Health Bot provides out-the-box healthcare intelligence that can be customized and connected into existing workflows, using answers from a healthcare organization’s own content sources, as well as leveraging generative AI to provide answers from credible sources like the National Institutes of Health and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.”
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