AI where and when you need it with Dragon Copilot's ability to focus
At HIMSS 2026, we showed that the most useful place to apply clinical intelligence is often not in a separate app or side window, but at the cursor, in the field where the clinician is already working. Our last post on this topic described the problem Dragon Copilot's focus capability is designed to solve: clinicians becoming data couriers, moving between windows, copying information from one system into another, and stitching together a day's work across multiple applications. That post looked ahead to what was coming. Now, it's here. What Dragon Copilot's focus capability does Dragon Copilot's focus capability brings AI directly into the text field where clinicians work, whether that's an EHR, a browser, Microsoft Word, SharePoint, or another desktop application. There is no separate application to launch and no workflow to rebuild. Simply place your cursor where you're working, select content if needed, and ask for help using natural language by voice or text. The focus capability works directly within the application you're already using, helping you stay in the flow of work. With focus, Dragon Copilot can: Read content from applications such as an EHR, browser, Microsoft Word, SharePoint, and other desktop applications. Answer questions about selected content and provide responses in context, using information from trusted sources and resources approved by the organization. Surface relevant information and insights without requiring manual searches, copying, or pasting. Generate, edit, and refine text directly where you're working. The experience is conversational and voice-first. Because the focus capability operates directly at the cursor, clinicians can take action without switching applications or rebuilding context. Questions are answered in context using information from the EHR and trusted sources, including resources approved by the organization. Focus in action The following examples illustrate how Dragon Copilot's focus capability helps clinicians read, answer, write, edit and surface information directly within their workflow. Journal and guideline Q&A Highlight a passage from a clinical guideline or journal article and ask: "Summarize the three key takeaways in patient-friendly language for the after-visit summary." The focus capability analyzes the selected content and generates a draft directly where you're working. Answer questions in context Clinicians often have the information they need in front of them but spend valuable time locating or interpreting it. Highlight relevant content and ask: "What does this recommendation mean for a patient with diabetes?" The focus capability reviews the selected information and delivers an answer within the workflow, without requiring clinicians to leave the application. The information is sourced from the EHR, a credible source such as MSD Manual, DailyMed, Medline Plus or from an organization’s internal source. Edit in place Select existing text and ask: "Convert this into a bulleted list." or "Summarize this HPI in two sentences." The focus capability reshapes the content directly where it already exists, helping clinicians refine documentation without disrupting their workflow. Surface relevant information Place your cursor inside a note and ask: "What's the patient's BMI?" The focus capability can retrieve relevant information available in context and return the answer inline, eliminating the need to navigate between screens, search for values, or perform calculations manually. Generate new content Need a referral letter, patient instruction, or summary? Simply ask. The focus capability can generate content directly within the destination field, helping clinicians create documentation where it belongs without copying and pasting between applications. Why this capability matters Bringing AI directly to the cursor is more than a convenience. It's what makes AI practical, visible, and actionable within everyday clinical workflows. Dragon Copilot's focus capability sits in a useful middle ground between ambient AI, which operates largely in the background, and traditional dictation, which requires clinicians to explicitly construct documentation themselves. Outputs are reviewable and editable before being finalized. Actions remain visible within the workflow, providing transparency and control. Clinicians can work without repeatedly navigating between applications or rebuilding context. Because the focus capability operates directly at the cursor, it creates an extensible foundation for future Dragon Copilot experiences and integrations from Microsoft and partners. When Dragon Copilot's focus capability brings AI directly to where clinicians are already working, copying, pasting, and window-switching fall away. Clinicians can access information, generate content, and take action without leaving their workflow, helping them spend less time managing technology and more time focused on patient care. Learn more about Dragon Copilot.Extend clinical workflows with Dragon Copilot AI Apps and Agents in Microsoft Marketplace
GA ANNOUNCEMENT Today, we're excited to announce the General Availability (GA) of Dragon Copilot AI Apps and Agents for physician workflows, a major milestone in building an open and trusted healthcare AI ecosystem. Healthcare organizations can now discover, build, deploy, and manage trusted AI-powered applications and agents that support specialized clinical and operational capabilities through Dragon Copilot. At the same time, partners can use self-service experiences to build, validate, certify, publish, and manage solutions that integrate directly into clinician workflows. Together, these capabilities bring healthcare organizations, clinicians, and partners onto a common platform designed to accelerate innovation while maintaining the trust, transparency, and governance required in healthcare. Why it matters to clinicians Clinicians need relevant insights delivered in the flow of care—not in another disconnected tool. Dragon Copilot AI Apps and Agents can surface specialized intelligence within existing workflows to support coding and documentation, medical decision-making, risk adjustment, prior authorization, diagnostic support, behavioral health screening, and preventive care. Dragon Copilot AI Apps and Agents for physicians provide capabilities for use cases such as: Coding and documentation optimization (Regard, RhythmX AI) Risk adjustment (RAAPID Inc) Prior authorization (Humata Health, Genzeon) Evidence-Based Hyper-Personalized Care Guidance (Atropos Health) Diagnostic support (Coming soon!) Cognitive & behavioral health screening (Canary Speech) Care Gaps & Preventive Health Reminders (Coming soon!) Clinician coaching (Whetstone Health) By bringing the right information into the physician’s existing workflow and using patient data from the EHR and the Dragon ambient context (audio, transcript and clinical note) to make insights more relevant, these capabilities can reduce context switching, streamline administrative work, and help physicians stay focused on patient care while maintaining clinical judgment and control workflows. Why it matters to healthcare organizations Healthcare organizations need a scalable way to expand the value of Dragon Copilot while maintaining enterprise governance. AI Apps and Agents provide access to a growing portfolio of specialized capabilities through a common platform, helping organizations increase return on their Dragon Copilot investment without adding fragmented solutions. Dragon Copilot AI Apps and Agents Helps increase ROI by extending Dragon Copilot across more clinical and operational use cases, seamlessly integrated into workflow Simplify solution discovery and purchase through Microsoft Marketplace Centralize deployment, policy, and lifecycle governance through the Dragon Admin Center Maintain clinician oversight and organizational standards for security, privacy, compliance, and responsible AI Reduce implementation burden with streamlined experiences that require minimal IT lift Build and deploy custom built apps/agents integrated with Dragon Copilot This creates a governed, scalable path to adopt new capabilities faster, making it easier to evaluate solutions, deploy them across teams, manage them consistently, and measure value without unnecessary operational complexity. Why it matters to partners Healthcare AI companies often have valuable, specialized capabilities but face significant complexity bringing them into clinical workflows and deploying them consistently across healthcare organizations. Dragon Copilot AI Apps and Agents give partners a standardized extensibility model for embedding their innovations where clinicians already work. Access ambient, patient and encounter context to deliver more relevant, timely experiences Integrate into the Dragon Copilot experience without building and maintaining bespoke workflow integrations for every customer Use self-service onboarding, technical validation, and applicable compliance certification to accelerate readiness Reach healthcare customers through Microsoft Marketplace and scale deployment through a trusted enterprise platform Build customer confidence with transparent solution information and consistent governance expectations By reducing the friction of workflow integration, distribution, and enterprise deployment, the platform helps partners focus on differentiated clinical value while expanding their reach at scale. Creating a trusted healthcare AI ecosystem Dragon Copilot connects specialized partner capabilities with clinical workflows through a trusted & scalable ecosystem. Streamlined self-service onboarding, package validation, compliance certification, and help partner innovations reach the market faster while giving healthcare organizations confidence to adopt and manage these AI solutions responsibly. “Healthcare moves at the speed of trust. You look at Microsoft and Dragon Copilot, we absolutely trust the combination of Microsoft and Dragon Copilot for industry leading innovation, highly trusted, responsible AI, and delivery at scale, and also the reach with the number of clinicians that Dragon Copilot has. And if you combine all these elements of innovation, your reach, track record, and the trust, that's a perfect recipe for partnership.” — Deepthi Bathina, CEO and Founder, GW RhythmX "I use Dragon Copilot in clinic every day. The extension program let me design, build, and implement the tool I wanted to make me a better clinician. It's never been this easy to be both the user and the builder." — Aaron Reinke, MD, Family Physician and Founder, Whetstone Health Explore the ecosystem For healthcare organizations – discover and deploy Explore how Dragon Copilot AI Apps and Agents on Microsoft Marketplace can deliver specialized AI solutions tailored to your clinical and operational needs through Dragon Copilot. Discover new capabilities, purchaseand deploytrusted solutions, and deliver more value to clinicians without disrupting existing workflows in Dragon Copilot, learn more here. For partners – build and publish Bring your differentiated expertise directly into Physician workflows by creating and publishing AI Apps and Agents that help healthcare organizations address high-value clinical and operational needs. Learn how to build and publish applications and agents Review our open-source code samples and start building today with Dragon Copilot’s extensibility framework and reach healthcare customers through Microsoft Marketplace. Publishyour Dragon offer on Microsoft on Marketplace Looking ahead Dragon Copilot is becoming a trusted destination for specialized healthcare AI—bringing partner innovation directly into familiar clinician workflows. As the ecosystem grows, we will expand support for Radiology and Nursing Apps and Agents, addressing the distinct role-based needs of multiple clinical personas. We will also evolve the end-user experience to be more adaptable, enabling chat-based experiences, richer interactivity, and new ways for clinicians to engage with partner capabilities in the flow of work. Streamlined self-service, transparent governance, and Marketplace distribution will help partners scale secure solutions while giving healthcare organizations confidence to adopt them. Together, we’re helping clinicians spend less time on administration and access the right intelligence at the right moment in care.
The Agent Era Has Already Arrived in Healthcare. Are You Ready to Govern It?
Start here. Answer honestly. Right now, how many AI agents are running inside your organization? Who built them? Which patient data, claims information, or proprietary research are they configured to access? If your CISO walked into your office tomorrow and asked for a complete inventory of every agent in your enterprise, including each one's owner, the systems it is permitted to access, and the policies that govern how it operates, could you produce that inventory before lunch? When the analyst who built that clinical summarization agent moves to a new role next quarter, what happens to the agent? Does its access continue? Does anyone notice? If a regulator opened an audit tomorrow, could you prove that every AI agent operating in your environment is subject to the same lifecycle controls, identity standards, and data protection policies you apply to your human workforce? Could you disable a compromised agent enterprise-wide with a single click, the same way you would revoke a lost access credential? If those questions made you hesitate, you are not alone. Almost no healthcare or life sciences organization can answer them confidently today. And that gap is exactly where the next decade of risk, and the next decade of competitive advantage, will be decided. The quiet crisis nobody talks about yet Healthcare and life sciences leaders are caught in a paradox. You need AI to survive the operational pressures squeezing your organization from every direction. Physician burnout is at crisis levels, with 45.2% of US physicians reporting symptoms in recent Mayo Clinic research. Revenue cycle complexity continues to climb, and McKinsey now estimates that the cost to collect consumes 30 to 60 percent of net patient revenue at many provider organizations. Prior authorization backlogs delay care. Clinical trial timelines stretch into years. Documentation burden eats hours that belong to patients. So you started piloting Microsoft 365 Copilot. You experimented with agents in Copilot Studio. Maybe a clinical team built an agent to draft discharge summaries. A revenue cycle group spun up an agent to triage denials. A medical affairs team built one to comb through literature. Each one delivered value. Each one was approved on its own merits. And then a quiet thing happened. You lost track of how many agents you have. According to KPMG's AI Quarterly Pulse Survey, 88 percent of organizations are now exploring or piloting AI agents. IDC projects that 1.3 billion agents will be in operation by 2028. Inside your own walls, the number is climbing fast. Each new agent is a digital identity that authenticates into your environment, accesses your data, and executes work on behalf of your business. Most have no formal owner. Most have no documented access scope. Most have no decommissioning plan. Most have never been reviewed by Compliance. Microsoft's 2024 Data Security Index found that 84 percent of organizations lack confidence in their AI data security posture, and 40 percent have already experienced an AI related data security incident. That is not a future problem. That is a now problem. If shadow IT was the defining governance challenge of the last decade, agent sprawl is the defining challenge of this one. And in healthcare and life sciences, where ePHI, member PII, and proprietary clinical trial data are at stake, the consequences are not theoretical. They are existential. The reframe that changes everything Here is the counterintuitive truth that separates HLS organizations that scale AI from those stuck in pilot purgatory. Governance is not the brake on AI adoption. Governance is the accelerator. When security, identity, and agent oversight are engineered in from day one, your teams stop tiptoeing. They build with confidence because the guardrails are real. They expand into clinical use cases because Compliance trusts the foundation. They scale wall-to-wall because IT can prove every agent is accounted for. The organizations that lead with trust end up moving faster in the long run, not slower. This is the bet behind Microsoft Agent 365 and Microsoft 365 E7. What Agent 365 and Microsoft 365 E7 actually are Microsoft 365 E7, announced March 6, 2026 and now generally available, is the Frontier Suite. It is Microsoft's answer to a single question that every healthcare CIO, CISO, and COO is wrestling with: how do you run AI safely, at scale, across an entire organization? E7 is not another SKU on top of your existing stack. It is one cohesive platform that brings together four essential capabilities: Microsoft 365 E5 for your enterprise productivity, collaboration, and security foundation, including Microsoft Defender, Microsoft Purview, and Microsoft Intune. Microsoft 365 Copilot for AI grounded in your organizational data through Work IQ, embedded in the flow of work for clinicians, researchers, operations teams, and administrators. Microsoft Entra Suite for identity governance, Conditional Access, and Zero Trust network access, extended consistently across users, applications, and AI agents. Microsoft Agent 365 as the centralized control plane to observe, govern, and secure every AI agent, whether built by Microsoft, your internal teams, or external partners. Agent 365 is also available as a standalone capability. But the magic happens when it works alongside the rest of E7, because that is where AI, identity, security, and governance stop being separate disciplines and become one operating system for the agentic era. The mental model that unlocks everything: agents are first-class digital identities Here is the simplest way to understand what Agent 365 does. Microsoft 365 governs your enterprise identities. Agent 365 governs your agent identities. The same control plane disciplines apply to both. Think about the rigor you apply to any privileged identity in your environment, whether a service account, an API integration, or a third-party application connector. You issue it a unique identity in Microsoft Entra. You assign a human owner who is accountable. You scope its access to least privilege. You apply DLP, sensitivity labels, and Conditional Access. You monitor for anomalous behavior. You have a documented decommissioning path. Identities that no one watches over become identities that get exploited. Now ask yourself how the last AI agent in your environment was created. The honest answer at most organizations: someone opened Copilot Studio, pointed it at a SharePoint library of clinical protocols, gave it a name, and moved on. No documented owner. No access review. No retirement plan. Compliance was never consulted. You would never stand up a privileged service account that way. Yet that is exactly how most organizations are standing up the fastest-growing class of digital identities in their environment. Agent 365 closes that gap by extending the identity, security, and lifecycle controls you already trust for users and applications so they apply with the same rigor to AI agents. Every agent receives a unique Entra Agent ID, a first-class identity in Azure AD with the same governance primitives as any other privileged identity. Every agent has a designated human owner who is accountable for its scope and behavior. Access is granted explicitly through Conditional Access and policy templates, so each agent operates only against the resources its purpose requires. Microsoft Purview DLP and sensitivity labels govern which data the agent is permitted to read, generate, or share. Microsoft Defender monitors agent activity for anomalies and surfaces alerts the same way it does for any other identity-driven risk. Lifecycle rules flag or auto-retire agents that are dormant, orphaned, or risky, eliminating the unowned automations that quietly accumulate in every enterprise. This is not metaphor. It is the actual architecture. The fastest path to governing agents is to extend the identity infrastructure you already trust. The three pillars of Agent 365: Observe, Govern, Secure Pillar 1: Observe. Know what is actually happening. You cannot govern what you cannot see. The first job of Agent 365 is to give you complete, continuous visibility into every AI agent operating in your environment. The Agent Registry is the single authoritative inventory of every agent, whether built by Microsoft, custom developed by your team, deployed by a partner, or discovered as a shadow agent operating without oversight. Each entry shows the owner, purpose, capabilities, lifecycle status, and business context. Agent Analytics tracks adoption, quality, performance, and business impact. Agent Map visualizes how agents connect with other agents, people, tools, and data sources, surfacing dependencies and risk concentrations you would never spot in a spreadsheet. Real time monitoring flows directly into Microsoft Defender, so unusual agent behavior generates alerts the same way unusual user behavior does today. For a health system CISO, that means finally being able to answer the question: which agents are touching ePHI, and is every one of them authorized? For a life sciences compliance officer, it means audit ready visibility into every AI system operating across R&D, regulatory affairs, and commercial. For a payer operations leader, it means knowing which claims processing agents are actually delivering accuracy and throughput, and which are quietly underperforming. Pillar 2: Govern. Set the rules. Control the lifecycle. Visibility is the start. Control is what turns visibility into outcomes. Agent 365 ensures that every agent is approved, compliant, and accountable from creation through retirement. IT led onboarding workflows make sure each agent launches with the right identity, access, and ownership before it ever touches data. Policy templates enforce data handling, permission, and usage rules consistently from day one through Defender, Entra, and Purview. Rules based agent management gives admins an automated If This Then That interface. If an agent is unused for 90 days, auto retire it. If an agent is flagged as risky, block it and alert the security operations team. No human in the loop required for the routine cases, full alerting and override for the exceptions. Ownership enforcement requires every agent to have a designated human owner. When that owner leaves the organization, the platform flags the orphaned agent for bulk reassignment, so nothing operates without clear accountability. The Tools Gateway brokers and audits tool access for agents, enabling least privilege at the action level, not just the identity level. For HLS specifically, that translates to outcomes you can take to your board. A hospital CIO can ensure any agent touching Epic or Cerner goes through standardized approval. A pharma IT director can enforce that clinical trial matching agents only touch de identified data unless elevated permissions are explicitly granted and documented. A payer compliance team can automatically retire agents tied to a completed open enrollment campaign instead of letting them silently expand the attack surface. Pillar 3: Secure. Protect agents and data with the stack you already trust. The final pillar is what makes Agent 365 production grade for healthcare and life sciences. Security and compliance are not bolted on. They are the same proven Microsoft security stack you already run for your users, extended natively to agents. Microsoft Purview, your data security and compliance backbone: Data Security Posture Management for AI gives visibility into how agents interact with sensitive data and detects risky usage patterns. Data Loss Prevention stops agents from accessing or processing files labeled Highly Confidential, even when a user prompts them to. Sensitivity labels are inherited automatically by agent outputs, governing how data is viewed, extracted, or shared downstream. Insider Risk Management detects risky behavior by users interacting with agents, such as unusual prompt patterns or excessive access to sensitive data. Communication Compliance monitors AI driven interactions for regulatory or ethical violations and unauthorized disclosures. eDiscovery and Audit logs every agent interaction, giving legal, compliance, and IT teams the transparency required for HIPAA, GDPR, and FDA 21 CFR Part 11. Oversharing Assessments run weekly checks for sensitive data exposure across SharePoint sites and agent access patterns. Microsoft Entra, your identity control plane: Entra Agent ID gives every agent a unique identity in Azure AD, so Conditional Access, role based access, and risk based policies apply individually. Conditional Access for agents enforces policies like only allow this prior authorization agent to access claims data from approved devices and locations during business hours. Identity Governance provides access packages for agents with reduced scope permissions and least privilege defaults. Block at Scale lets you instantly disable all high-risk agents from Entra in a single action. Microsoft Defender, your threat protection layer: Security Posture Management identifies and remediates agent misconfigurations, such as agents running with no authentication. Threat Detection and Blocking monitors suspicious agent activity, generates alerts, and blocks unauthorized tool invocations. Threat Investigation and Hunting collects unified agent observability logs so SOC teams can forensically trace every action an agent took. One Click Kill Switch instantly disables any agent and surfaces the complete audit trail of every action it took before being stopped. For a hospital security operations team, that means the same DLP policies protecting patient records in email and Teams now protect agents that summarize clinical notes. For a life sciences data protection officer, it means agents accessing proprietary compound data respect the same sensitivity labels as human researchers. For a payer CISO, it means an anomalous claims agent can be killed in seconds, with a complete forensic record of every member record it touched. Why this only works as an integrated platform Individual capabilities are useful. Integration is what makes them transformative. Here is the contrast HLS leaders feel today versus what changes the moment E7 lights up. Without an integrated platform, you operate with: Fragmented tools for identity, security, compliance, and AI, each with its own console and its own gaps. No centralized agent inventory, forcing your IT and security teams to track bots and automations in spreadsheets. Inconsistent policy enforcement across agents, creating compliance gaps every audit team will eventually find. Blind spots where agents access data, invoke tools, or interact with other agents without any oversight. Manual triage when an incident hits, because nothing connects user identity, agent identity, and data classification in one view. With Microsoft 365 E7, you gain: A Unified Agent Registry providing a single source of truth for every agent, whether Microsoft built, custom developed, partner deployed, or shadow discovered. Entra Agent ID giving each agent a unique identity, so Conditional Access, role based access, and risk based policies apply at the individual agent level. Full lifecycle governance with standardized onboarding, periodic review, ownership transfers, auto retirement of dormant agents, and structured offboarding. Policy by design, where Purview DLP, sensitivity labels, and compliance rules extend to all agent interactions through pre built templates applied consistently from day one. One click disable to instantly freeze any agent, with Defender threat detection extended to agents and full audit trails for forensic investigation. Expanded threat coverage that addresses agent sprawl, overprivileged access, tool misuse, misconfiguration, and inter agent risk patterns no legacy tool was designed to see. Shared registry and controls that let IT, Security, and Compliance reference the same authoritative inventory across Defender, Entra, and Purview, eliminating the silos that slow incident response. This is the reason E7 exists as a platform, not a bundle. AI, identity, security, and governance stop being separate disciplines and start operating as one system. What this is actually worth: the Forrester numbers Microsoft commissioned Forrester to conduct a Total Economic Impact study of Microsoft 365 Copilot, published in March 2025. The composite organization in that study, modeled on real customer interviews, achieved: 132 percent three-year ROI with payback in under one year. 9 hours saved per Copilot user per month through automation of routine work like drafting, summarizing, and analysis. Up to 2.6 percent top line revenue lift through better qualified opportunities, improved win rates, and stronger retention in customer facing teams. 25 percent acceleration in new employee onboarding as new hires ramp faster on summarized institutional knowledge. Those are the verified numbers. The bigger story for HLS is what they look like when applied to clinical, claims, and research workflows where every reclaimed hour is an hour that goes back to patients, members, or science. AI is already defending AI The same agentic capabilities transforming clinical and operational workflows are now embedded in your security stack. Microsoft Security Copilot agents work alongside human analysts inside Defender, Entra, Purview, and Intune, accelerating threat response and absorbing the manual load that today drowns most security operations teams. Independent benchmarks back the impact. In a 162 admin randomized study published in 2025, the Conditional Access Optimization Agent in Microsoft Entra completed configuration tasks 43 percent faster and produced 48 percent more accurate Conditional Access policies than admins working without it. Security triage, alert investigation, and identity hygiene are following the same trajectory. For HLS security teams already stretched thin, that is hours reclaimed every week to focus on the threats that actually matter, with the same Agent 365 governance applying to the security agents themselves. The defenders are governed by the same rules as the workforce they defend. How HLS organizations are putting Agent 365 to work Here is how the value shows up across the three biggest HLS segments. For providers: reclaiming time for care The challenge: clinicians spend more time on documentation than on patients. Care coordination is fragmented. Burnout is gutting retention. The strategy: deploy agents that absorb administrative load while Agent 365 ensures every one of them respects ePHI boundaries. Clinical documentation agents integrated with Microsoft Dragon Copilot structure dictation against EHR requirements, apply billing codes, and flag missing elements before submission. Care coordination agents generate care plans, allocate tasks, and surface relevant patient context during multidisciplinary rounds, optimized for HL7 FHIR interoperability. Patient intake and scheduling agents built in Copilot Studio handle appointment booking, reminders, eligibility verification, and referral management. Handoff and shift summary agents pull from multiple systems to generate complete handoff summaries for nurses and physicians transitioning between shifts, reducing communication gaps that drive adverse events. The aha moment: applied across a 10,000 employee health system, nine hours per user per month is more than one million reclaimed hours a year. That is the equivalent of hundreds of full time clinicians, returned to direct patient care, with every agent governed under the same Conditional Access and DLP policies your IT team already manages today. For payers: transforming revenue cycle and member experience The challenge: prior auth backlogs delay care. Denial rates climb. Member services teams drown in volume. The strategy: agentic AI rewires the most expensive, most manual workflows in your operation while Agent 365 keeps every agent inside the lines on member PII. Prior authorization agents autonomously gather clinical documentation, cross reference medical policy, determine approval criteria, and route decisions, accelerating turnaround from days to hours. Claims processing agents automate billing and denial management. With cost to collect running 30 to 60 percent of net patient revenue at many organizations, even modest automation produces material margin recovery. Denial resolution and appeals agents analyze denial patterns, surface root causes, generate appeal documentation, and track success rates over time, turning a cost center into a continuous improvement engine. Member services agents integrated with Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat handle benefits inquiries, claims status, and self service triage, deflecting call volume and improving first contact resolution. Fraud detection and risk adjustment agents scan claims data for anomalies and optimize coding accuracy for Medicare Advantage and ACA populations. The aha moment: a payer CISO can disable an anomalous prior auth agent in one click and produce a complete forensic record of every member record it accessed, while Compliance simultaneously confirms the agent never violated DLP. That is regulatory readiness that legacy automation cannot deliver. For life sciences and pharma: accelerating discovery and commercialization The challenge: clinical trials take years. Regulatory submissions consume teams. Medical affairs cannot keep up with literature volume. The strategy: orchestrate agents across R&D, regulatory, medical, and commercial, with Agent 365 enforcing the data classification rules that proprietary IP and clinical data demand. Clinical trial matching agents scan patient profiles and eligibility criteria to surface trial opportunities, accelerating recruitment. Regulatory document preparation agents assemble submissions, cross reference data across modules, and ensure consistency in FDA, EMA, and global filings. Medical research and literature review agents powered by Microsoft GraphRAG retrieve research backed insights with verified source references, giving medical science liaisons trustworthy synthesis on demand. Pharmacovigilance agents monitor safety databases, flag potential adverse events, and generate timely case reports. Commercial insights and launch planning agents synthesize market data, payer policy, and HCP sentiment for sharper launch and field strategy. The aha moment: cutting even three months off a regulatory cycle on a single high revenue product can mean tens of millions in additional sales, while Purview sensitivity labels guarantee every agent accessing proprietary compound data respects the same data classification as your senior researchers. A phased path that actually works in regulated industries In regulated industries, a big bang AI rollout is a recipe for incidents. The HLS organizations getting this right are following a five-phase pattern that builds expertise and validates governance before scale. Establish. Form a cross-functional champion team across IT, Compliance, Clinical Operations, and Research. Define what risks you are mitigating and what outcomes you are unlocking. Inventory the agents already in flight. Configure. Stand up identity, DLP, and policy templates in Microsoft 365 Admin Center, Power Platform Admin Center, and Microsoft Purview. Enforce that any agent handling PHI runs in a secure environment with audit logging on by default. Pilot. Choose a small group of makers in a controlled environment. Start with non-critical workflows like internal reporting or scheduling before moving to clinical or member facing use cases. Run weekly reviews with Compliance and Security. Empower. Launch role specific training for clinicians, researchers, makers, and IT. Stand up a Center of Excellence to provide templates, best practices, and reusable patterns. Promote success stories internally to build momentum. Scale. Expand agent development across departments with governance as a guardrail, not a gate. Use pay as you go metering to track usage and optimize licensing. Refine policies continuously based on Purview signals and audit results. The strategic insight: organizations that lead with governance reach scale faster than those that lead with experimentation. Trust is the unlock, not the obstacle. Governance is a team sport Here is the pattern we see again and again. The HLS organizations that succeed with AI at scale are not the ones with the smartest IT shop or the boldest Compliance officer. They are the ones whose IT, Security, Compliance, Clinical, Research, and Operations leaders sit at the same table on agent strategy from week one. Agent 365 was designed for that table. The Agent Registry is the shared truth. Purview policies satisfy your Compliance officer. Entra controls reassure your CISO. The lifecycle workflows give your CIO confidence. The clinical and research outcomes give your COO and Chief Medical Officer the business case. Everyone gets the view they need from the same single source. Stand up an agent governance council. Meet every two weeks. Use the Agent Registry as your standing agenda. Make decisions in plain sight. The organizations that do this consistently outperform on both speed and safety. The ones that try to keep AI inside a single function fall behind on both. Who contributes what Think back to the mental model. You would never let a single function authorize, configure, and oversee a new privileged system on its own, not when it touches ePHI, claims, or proprietary research. Security, IT, Compliance, Clinical, and the relevant business owner all weigh in because the stakes are too high for any one seat to carry alone. Agent governance demands the same multidisciplinary scrutiny, and the council is where that happens. Each seat brings something the others cannot. CIO. Owns the agent strategy and the platform investment. Translates board-level AI ambition into an operating model the rest of the organization can execute against. CISO and Security Operations. Define agent identity standards, Conditional Access policies, and incident response playbooks. Without this seat, an anomalous agent touching ePHI becomes a breach instead of a contained event. Chief Compliance Officer and Privacy. Translate HIPAA, GDPR, FDA 21 CFR Part 11, and state regulations into Purview policies and audit requirements. This is the seat that keeps you out of an OCR investigation or a 483 letter. Chief Medical Officer and Clinical Operations. Validate that clinical agents are safe, accurate, and aligned with care standards. Own the clinical risk review for any agent that touches patient care, the same way you would for a new clinical protocol. Chief Research Officer or Head of R&D. Govern how agents interact with proprietary trial data, compound libraries, and scientific IP. The seat that protects the next decade of pipeline value. COO and Revenue Cycle Leadership. Prioritize the operational workflows where agents will move the needle on cost to collect, denial rates, and throughput, and own the business outcomes that justify the investment. Center of Excellence Lead. Maintains templates, reusable patterns, and maker enablement. Turns every council decision into a guardrail builders can actually use the next morning. Frontline champions. Clinicians, claims specialists, and researchers who pilot, give feedback, and carry credibility back to their peers. The seat that decides whether agents get adopted or quietly ignored. When every one of these voices is in the room, your governance council operates like a tumor board for AI. Different lenses, one shared decision, full accountability. That is how regulated industries make complex calls safely, and it is exactly the muscle Agent 365 was built to support. Seven questions to bring to your next leadership meeting If you want to know whether your organization is ready, run through these together. The places you hesitate are exactly where Agent 365 and E7 deliver the most value. Visibility. Do you know which AI agents, bots, and automations are running in your environment today, who built them, what they have access to, and whether they are still needed? Control. If someone on your team builds a new AI agent tomorrow, what is the actual process to make sure it is approved and secured? Or could they deploy it with wide open access? Security. What prevents an AI agent from reading or transmitting patient data it should not? Do you have a way to detect and stop a rogue or compromised agent? Accountability. Who owns the outputs of an AI agent's actions? What is the offboarding process when the agent or its creator leaves? Scale. Six months from now, you may have a hundred agents deployed across departments. Are your oversight and compliance structures ready for that volume? Cross-functional alignment. How are your IT, Security, and Compliance teams partnering on AI today? Governance is a team sport. Data readiness. How confident are you that your data estate is clean, labeled, and governed well enough for AI to surface accurate answers and not outdated or conflicting information? If you hesitated on even one of those, you have just identified where Agent 365 and Microsoft 365 E7 will pay for themselves the fastest. The path forward Here is the honest truth. The healthcare and life sciences organizations that lead in the next decade will not be the ones that adopted AI first. They will be the ones that adopted AI safely, compliantly, and at scale, with intelligence and trust woven into every layer. Microsoft Agent 365 and Microsoft 365 E7 give you the only integrated platform that brings AI, identity, security, and governance into one cohesive system, running in the flow of work you already use. This is not about adding another tool to your stack. It is about extending the investments you have already made in Microsoft 365, Entra, Defender, and Purview to cover the fastest-growing class of digital identities in your environment. The agent era has already arrived. The question is whether you will govern it with confidence or chase it with anxiety. We would love to help you lead. Take the next step Explore Microsoft Agent 365: The Control Plane for Agents Microsoft Entra Agent ID: aka.ms/EntraAgentID Learn more about Microsoft 365 E7, the Frontier Suite: Introducing Microsoft 365 E7 See Microsoft 365 Copilot in action: Microsoft 365 Copilot Read the Forrester TEI study: The Total Economic Impact of Microsoft 365 CopilotDocument Acknowledgement and Attestation with Microsoft’s PowerPlatform - Step by Step
Leveraging Microsoft’s PowerPlatform and Office 365 we can securely store policy related documents, use Flow to automate document acknowledgement and attestation, use PowerApps to provide a mobile friendly app to review and accept policy documents, and finally we can build beautiful dashboards to visualize that status of a given document acceptance process.Unlock Outlook Productivity with Snooze and new Calendar Scheduling with Copilot
Hey everyone, welcome back! If you're looking to supercharge your productivity, especially with Outlook, you're in the right place. Today, we're diving into some really cool and amazing features in Outlook that can help you stay on top of your game. Snooze Feature in Outlook First up, let's explore the Snooze feature in Outlook. This feature has been around for a while, but it's perfect for those moments when you need to temporarily set aside emails. Whether you're at an event and need to push emails back until you return, or you just need to prioritize your inbox, the Snooze feature is incredibly useful. For example, I often use it when my workload is packed. I can snooze an email until next Monday at 9:00 a.m., which is my focus time. This way, the email is removed from my inbox, helping me stay focused on my current tasks. If you're wondering where the email goes, it will pop back into your inbox at the scheduled time. You can also view all your snoozed emails in the Snooze folder and unsnooze them if needed. This feature is great for maintaining an organized and prioritized inbox. How to Use the Snooze Feature: Open Outlook and go to your inbox. Select the email you want to snooze. Click the Snooze button (clock icon) at the top of the ribbon. Choose a predefined time or select Pick a date to set a custom time. The email will be removed from your inbox and reappear at the scheduled time. To view snoozed emails, go to the Snoozed folder on the left sidebar. Scheduling with Copilot Next, let's talk about scheduling with Copilot. This feature is a game-changer for managing your calendar. When I first joined Microsoft, I found it overwhelming to network and establish new relationships. That's when I discovered this powerful tool. For instance, if I receive an email from a colleague and need to have a broader conversation, I can use the "Schedule with Copilot" feature. It automatically schedules time with the colleague, finds available slots, and even creates an agenda for the meeting. This helps ensure that everyone is prepared and knows what to expect. It's a fantastic way to streamline scheduling and make meetings more efficient. How to Schedule with Copilot: Open the email from the person you want to schedule a meeting with. Click the Schedule with Copilot button at the top of the ribbon. Select Schedule with Copilot. Copilot will find available times for both you and the other person. Review the suggested times and agenda, then click Send to schedule the meeting. Upcoming Feature: Scheduling 1-on-1 Meetings with Copilot Lastly, I want to give you a sneak peek at an exciting upcoming feature: scheduling 1-on-1 meetings with Copilot. This feature is expected to roll in December and January and will make scheduling individual meetings even easier. Copilot understands the context of your emails and can look at both your calendar and the other person's calendar to find the best time for a meeting. After opening the event Copilot created you can even use Copilot to draft an agenda based on the email content, ensuring that your meetings are productive and focused. This feature is particularly useful for maintaining regular check-ins and building strong working relationships. How to Schedule 1-on-1 Meetings with Copilot: Open Outlook and select the Copilot icon at the top right. Enter your prompt to Schedule a 1-on-1 meeting. Enter the name of the person you want to meet with. Copilot will find available times for both of you. Review the suggested times and agenda, then click Send to schedule the meeting. I hope you find these features as exciting and useful as I do. They have certainly helped me become more efficient and organized in my daily work. Whether you're looking to prioritize your inbox, streamline your scheduling, or prepare for upcoming features, Outlook has the tools you need to boost your productivity. Thanks for reading, and I hope these tips help you make the most of Outlook. Have a great day, and I'll talk to you later!YOTNM Ep. 2: March is Colorectal Cancer Awareness month
Hear a personal journey of the importance of timely health screenings to proactively manage your health and wellbeing. Kathleen McGrow, DNP, CNIO, RN, MS, discusses Colorectal Cancer Awareness month in Episode 2 of Year of the Nurse & Midwife series.
Modernize DevSecOps and GitOps journey with Microsoft’s Unified solution (Azure DevOps + GitHub)
Modernize your DevSecOps and GitOps journey with Microsoft’s Unified solution and best-in-class tools (Azure DevOps + GitHub) to Simplify, Automate, Secure entire software supply chain including containers, and Govern each phase with shift-left approach.Microsoft Planner Tips for Checklist Items and Complete but Open Status - HLS Show Me How
In this HLS Show Me How per customer questions I demonstrate how to indicate a person is assigned to a Task Checklist Item. I also demonstrate how to visually mark a task completed but keep it actively open for review and re-use.
