Through the extended collaboration, the companies will bring together the scale and power of Azure OpenAI Service along with Epic’s EHR software

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Microsoft expands partnership with Epic Systems to develop and integrate generative AI into healthcare. (Credit: Coolcaesar/Wikipedia.org)

Microsoft has announced an expanded partnership with US-based healthcare software firm Epic Systems to develop and integrate generative artificial intelligence (AI) into healthcare.

Through the extended collaboration, the companies will bring together the scale and power of Azure OpenAI Service along with Epic’s electronic health record (EHR) software.

According to Microsoft, the partnership builds on the long collaboration that includes the ability of organisations to operate Epic environments on the Microsoft Azure cloud platform.

The partnership aims to offer an extensive range of generative AI-powered solutions integrated with Epic’s EHR to boost productivity and improve patient care and the financial integrity of health systems worldwide.

Microsoft AI platform corporate vice president Eric Boyd said: “The urgent and critical challenges facing healthcare systems and their providers demand a comprehensive approach combining Azure OpenAI Service with Epic’s industry-leading technology.

“Our expanded partnership builds on a long history of collaboration between Microsoft, Nuance and Epic, including our work to help healthcare organizations migrate their Epic environments to Azure.”

Microsoft stated that one of the solutions is already underway. Stanford Health Care, UW Health in Madison, Wisconsin, and UC San Diego Health are among the first organisations that have started rolling out improvements to automatically draft message responses, said the tech major.

A different solution will integrate natural language queries and interactive data analysis to Epic’s self-service reporting tool SlicerDicer. It is expected to allow clinical executives to examine data in a conversational and intuitive manner.

Epic research and development senior vice president Seth Hain said: “Our exploration of OpenAI’s GPT-4 has shown the potential to increase the power and accessibility of self-service reporting through SlicerDicer, making it easier for healthcare organisations to identify operational improvements, including ways to reduce costs and to find answers to questions locally and in a broader context.”

Earlier this month, Microsoft and Cognizant extended their healthcare partnership to bring the former’s cloud-based technology solutions to the healthcare market.