HIMSS Global Health Conference

The HIMSS23 conference was held during the week of April 17-21 in Chicago, IL. It is no surprise that AI took center stage at HIMSS this year. Andor Health announced new clinical decision support capabilities using Azure Communication Services and Azure OpenAI Service on its telehealth platform. Epic, Nuance, and eClinicalWorks all made announcements about enhanced AI capabilities, demonstrating its potential to transform healthcare operations and experiences for both providers and patients. Already, providers are beginning to see the benefits of AI in clinical notes summarization, post-care follow-up, and virtual care.

Transforming Healthcare with AI

The Microsoft for Startups Health and Life Sciences team hosted a panel discussion on “Transforming Healthcare with AI”. The panelists addressed the potential applications of AI in healthcare, such as enhancing patient engagement using large language models and generative AI to excerpt, draft, and reframe answers to commonly asked questions. While this might look compelling to the human recipient, the panelists also discussed the challenges of promoting AI tools for delivering actual medical guidance or advice, with concerns about the accuracy of the output of the model. As AI technology evolves, building responsible AI into healthcare solutions is a collective effort to ensure access and inclusion for patients. Ethical and responsible AI is an indicator of maturity. 

Image: (From left to right): Sally Frank, Microsoft for Startups Leader, Patty Obermaier, Emerging Growth Leader, Global HLS, John Barto, Chief Digital Transformation Officer, Matt Lungren, Chief Medical Information Officer at Nuance, Nick Switanek, Principal Technical Architect for AI

Highlighting Virtual Care at HIMSS

As discussed in the pre-HIMSS blog, virtual care was another major theme at HIMSS. Cordula Lechner showcased a demo of Siemen Healthineer’s eHealth platform in, “The Physician-Patient Relationship, Virtualized”. Powered by Azure Communication Services, the eHealth platform has seen high adoption and patient satisfaction with quality and ease-of-use across global regions.  

In another session, hospital leaders from Thomas Jefferson University and Geisinger recounted their experiences implementing telehealth in, "Closing the Gap to Goal for Transformational Integrated Virtual Care" with Teladoc Health. Contrary to the perception that telemedicine ended with the pandemic, hospital providers are heavily investing in virtual care as a core function of healthcare operations. Like a newly built hospital wing, telehealth is here to stay. Below is a summary of findings –

• Telehealth presents significant cost savings at a tenth of outpatient clinic visits. Additionally, tele-triaging has reduced incorrect and costly specialist referrals by 30%.
• Provider satisfaction is essential for patient adoption as clinicians will not take on second chances with minimum viable products. Therefore, it is critical to get it right the first time.
• Surprisingly, EMT and urology have been willing to adopt telehealth more quickly than anticipated, suggesting that a hospital-wide roll-out across services could be more successful than starting small.
• Telehealth has lowered no-show rates for behavioral health.

Image: (From left to right) Tony Burke, SVP, Partnerships and Innovation at Teladoc, Judd Hollander, SVP Health Delivery Innovation at TJU, David Fletcher, AVP Telehealth at Geisinger. Note: Teladoc Solo has embedded Azure Communication Services with Microsoft Teams to deliver telehealth.

Microsoft Build Conference

Microsoft’s largest conference for developers was held on May 23-25 in Seattle, WA. Following HIMSS trends into Build this year, Microsoft shared how AI can empower new and easy-to-use solutions across healthcare and other industries. Notable sessions included “Learn Live: Get started with AI on Microsoft Azure”, which explored healthcare business problems and responsible AI practices and “Leverage AI Kits for Faster AI Solutions Tailored to Your Needs”, which covered how to accelerate AI development cycles with AI reference kits with Intel and Accenture.

At Build, Azure Communication Services shared how developers can build intelligent conversation experiences with Azure OpenAI Service in “Build AI-assisted communication workflows for customer engagement”, demonstrating how to build programmable communication workflows that adapt to customer needs.

Image: Snip from Build AI-assisted communication workflows for customer engagement featuring Anuj Bhatia and Ashwinder Bhatti from Azure Communication Services.

In another session, Azure Communication Services showcased increased flexibility and integrations with Microsoft Teams to enhance virtual care in “Create a custom Virtual Meetings app with Azure Communication Services and Microsoft Teams”.  Bob Serr, VP of Azure Communication Services, joined the Dynamics Hotdish podcast to share more about Enhancing Communication. 

Enhancing Patient Engagement with Intelligent Communications

As patient demand for omnichannel communications grows, healthcare organizations can leverage AI to scale communications with an integrated and personalized approach across the patient care lifecycle from pre-, during, to post-visit care. For example, providers can build a Conversational Bot using Azure Communication Services with Azure OpenAI Service to answer a wide variety of patient inquiries, allowing patients to access post-visit care instructions, billing details, or locate the nearest pharmacy seamlessly. Real-time communications can be personalized by training AI models against patient insights, such as preferences, demographics, and sentiment.  Check out the low-code hero samples for SMS and Email using Power Automate.

Even post-visit care is an opportunity to engage patients. For instance, AI can help reduce the burden of manual follow-up for post-operative discharge by replacing paper-based, self-care instructions in a digitized format. Communications can be delivered frequently over an extended period to promote stickiness and adherence, while also tailored to a patient’s language and reading level to promote understanding. Bot-assisted follow-up care is low-cost, freeing up time for care coordinators and nurses as hospitals face increased staff shortage and burnout. We are excited to see more innovations in intelligent communications.