Microsoft reveals new healthcare tools including Copilot AI agents

Microsoft is no stranger to developing services and tools for the huge healthcare industry. Today, ahead of the HLTH 2024 conference in Las Vegas next week, the company announced a bunch of new features for those businesses, and of course, most of them involve some kind of generative AI functions.

In a blog post, Microsoft says one of them is a new healthcare agent service for Copilot Studio. There's more info on this new service in a separate blog. Microsoft says:

The healthcare agent service enables healthcare organizations to develop their own generative AI-powered agents for patients or clinicians, supporting diverse use cases across appointment scheduling, clinical trial matching, patient triaging, and more. The service also supports extending an organization’s agents with additional plugins, no matter where the plugins were built.

The new agent service is currently available as a public preview. Microsoft also announced that it is adding new clinical safeguards APIs for its healthcare service via a private preview for select customers. These new APIs will try to help healthcare-based AI services to detect fabrications and omissions. It will also help to find the sources of claims that the AI services will bring up among other things.

Microsoft has also announced new healthcare-based AI models. This is described further in yet another blog post. They will be made available via the company's Azure AI model catalog. One of these new models is called MedImageInsight, which is designed to analyze medical imaging content. Microsoft says:

Healthcare organizations and researchers can use the model embeddings and build adapters for their specific tasks, streamlining workflows in radiology, pathology, ophthalmology, dermatology, and other modalities.

Another new model is MedImageParse, which can analyze different kinds of images generated by devices like x-rays machines, CTs, MRIs, and ultrasound hardware. Yet another model is CXRReportGen, which is made specifically for AI to check out chest x-ray images.