A Deeper Look at Microsoft Dragon Copilot: Transforming Clinical Workflow with AI
This week, we unveiled Microsoft Dragon Copilot, the first AI assistant for clinical workflow that brings together voice dictation, ambient AI, and new natural language capabilities into a single unified experience for clinicians. Microsoft Dragon Copilot combines the trusted natural language voice dictation capabilities of Dragon Medical One, which is trusted by over 600K clinicians around the world to document billions of patient records, and DAX Copilot ambient listening capabilities, which have assisted more than 3 million ambient patient encounters in the last month alone, into a new unified solution. For years, DAX Copilot and Dragon Medical One have delivered proven outcomes at scale across various care settings, enhancing patient experience and clinician well-being, while also improving operational efficiency and financial impact. We are especially proud that, in some cases, these improvements have inspired clinicians to continue practicing medicine and remain with their current healthcare organization. Transform the way clinicians work Dragon Copilot enables clinicians to streamline documentation with new levels of customization, surface information without leaving their workflow, and automate other workflow tasks with a single click: Streamline documentation and workflow with multiple modalities Dragon Copilot provides unparalleled flexibility in how work gets done with multiple modalities that allow clinicians to choose the best approach for their needs. This flexibility helps reduce the administrative burden across the care continuum, enabling clinicians to select the most efficient method based on their specific tasks and circumstances. The power of ambient: Clinicians can securely capture multiparty, multilingual patient-clinician conversations and convert them into comprehensive, specialty-specific notes. This allows clinicians to focus on patient care rather than screens, fostering a more personal and attentive connection. The power of natural language: Clinicians can interact with their documentation naturally – editing, querying, and even creating new content in natural language. This modality transforms the review process, enabling multiple updates at once to deliver further time savings. The power of voice dictation: Clinicians are often highly proficient using voice dictation for tasks such as documenting outside the patient visit and reviewing and navigating clinical content. Dragon's features and capabilities, such as voice commands, edit controls, and shortcuts like Step-by-step commands and AutoTexts, refined over two decades, enhance these processes, ensuring a truly personalized documentation workflow. Step-by-step commands allow clinicians to automate navigation and highly repeatable tasks performed within the EHR workflow by issuing a single command. AutoTexts enable clinicians to automate and integrate commonly used templates into their documentation. These customizations and voice commands are widely used by more than 600K Dragon Medical users today, with 140 million AutoTexts and 300 million voice skills and commands used annually. They will continue to be available in Dragon Copilot. New levels of customization Dragon Copilot allows clinicians to further customize their documentation, such as configuring the writing style and formatting of notes. Clinicians can define custom templates for capturing highly repeatable clinical information and even have those templates be updated automatically based on pertinent findings detected in the ambient conversation. Surface information without leaving your workflow Dragon Copilot provides access to relevant information when needed, from querying notes and getting medical information from certified content sources to receiving encounter recording suggestions. This ensures that clinicians can easily get the information they need without leaving their workflow. Automate tasks with a single click Dragon Copilot helps automate clinical and non-clinical tasks, such as summarizing notes and evidence, prepping orders, and drafting pre-defined referral letters and after-visit summaries. This saves time and increases clinician productivity and efficiency. Repeatable tasks Dragon Copilot enables clinicians to easily manage their own library of highly repeatable, custom tasks and trigger them when desired. Do more with Dragon Seamless modality selection Organizations often use a hybrid solution that combines ambient and speech recognition capabilities from separate products leading to an inconsistent user experience. With Dragon Copilot, clinicians can easily transition between voice dictation, ambient, and natural language across care settings and the clinical documentation workflow. Natural language prompt interface Dragon Copilot allows clinicians to speak naturally to edit, query, and create clinical documentation. This new and innovative prompt interface will allow us to rapidly bring new innovations to Dragon Copilot, such as enabling seamless access to clinical intelligence without disrupting workflow. Here are a few examples of how clinicians might use the prompt interface: Edit and append summaries: “Update the fever reading to 102” Generating: Success! Query encounter transcripts for information: “Was the patient experiencing ear pain?” Create new outputs: “Summarize the ear issues briefly for a referral to an otolaryngologist.” Meeting clinicians where they are Dragon Copilot is available across mobile, web, and desktop. It is fully integrated inside Epic and is compatible with all major EHRs. Manage prompts Dragon Copilot enables clinicians to easily create and reuse their favorite prompts for frequent tasks. Whether simple or complex, prompts help clinicians get the most out of our AI. The copilot for clinicians Our vision for Microsoft Dragon Copilot is to serve as the copilot for clinicians, with functional expansion to include new priority personas (e.g., nurses) and future extensibility for third-party capabilities. Microsoft’s extensive healthcare partner ecosystem is core to this vision, ushering in a new layer of proactive intelligence driven by conversational context to deliver meaningful outcomes. Built on trust The gains we are making in helping to improve patient and clinician experiences—by transforming clinical workflows with AI—will only be durable if we foster an environment of high public trust in these technologies. We are committed to helping customers use and build AI that is trustworthy, secure, safe, and private. By leveraging the Microsoft Secure Future Initiative, we support the highest standards of security, privacy, and compliance. Our AI aligns with Microsoft's Responsible AI practices and incorporates healthcare-specific clinical, chat, and compliance safeguards to provide accurate and safe outputs. Additionally, our data is grounded in privacy principles, backed by transparent policies, and protected by rigorous safeguards. Working together We are excited for you to see—and help shape—what comes next. Together, we can enhance the patient experience and rekindle the joy of practicing medicine for clinicians. We look forward to sharing updates with this community and to hearing your feedback and questions. Learn more at aka.ms/DragonCopilot.
