Microsoft Copilot for Healthcare: How Can It Help?

The integration of AI tools such as Microsoft Copilot is transforming the healthcare sector, offering new opportunities to improve both efficiency and quality of care.

Thanks to its ability to analyze large amounts of data, support clinical documentation, and facilitate communication among professionals, Copilot can be indeed an extremely useful tool for all healthcare workers.

In this article, we will take a closer look at the practical applications of Microsoft Copilot in the medical field, highlighting its benefits and potential impact on the daily work of healthcare providers and on patient care.

Microsoft Copilot for Healthcare: a brief introduction

Does artificial intelligence have a role in healthcare?

According to Microsoft and much of the medical community, the answer appears to be yes.

In a study commissioned by Microsoft through IDC, 79% of healthcare organizations are currently using AI technologies and are seeing a return on investment within 14 months. Artificial intelligence has the potential to transform the healthcare sector by supporting professionals, improving patient outcomes, and reducing costs.

The healthcare sector is facing growing challenges: rising costs, staff shortages, and an increasing demand for care.

Clinical staff, from doctors to nurses, are often burdened with high levels of stress and administrative overload, leading to burnout and resignations. However, tools like Copilot could represent a light at the end of the tunnel for a healthcare system under increasing strain.

The Redmond-based company is also introducing new AI tools designed to reduce the administrative burden on healthcare staff.

The tech giant has announced the public preview of a healthcare-focused agent integrated into its Copilot Studio platform, aimed at managing a wide range of healthcare tasks, from appointment scheduling to matching patients with clinical trials.

In the next sections, we'll explore how this new agent can empower healthcare professionals to fully focus once again on what truly matters in medicine: the complete and attentive care of the patient.

What Is Microsoft Copilot

But for anyone who may have missed a few steps along the way, let’s begin with a brief introduction to the star of this article and take a broader look at what Microsoft Copilot actually is.

Copilot is the AI-powered digital assistant designed to simplify users’ daily tasks, boost productivity, and foster creativity. Its core strengths include code generation, writing assistance, and collaboration. Seamlessly integrated into popular Microsoft 365 applications like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Teams, Copilot provides contextual suggestions and helps users better understand and use information effectively.

Powered by the state-of-the-art GPT-4 language model, Microsoft Copilot boasts impressive features such as code auto-completion, documentation lookup, and collaborative writing. Microsoft continues to enhance Copilot over time with new features, underscoring how heavily the Redmond-based company is investing in its Gen AI solution as a cornerstone of the future of its business-focused products.

The capabilities of Microsoft’s digital AI assistant are aimed at a wide range of users and professionals, including developers, content creators, and knowledge workers seeking AI-powered assistance in their tasks.

The main ways to benefit from Microsoft Copilot include:

• ‍Adopting Copilot: Microsoft offers various Copilot assistants to enhance productivity and creativity. Integrated into multiple Microsoft products and platforms, Copilot transforms the digital workspace into a more interactive and efficient environment.
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• ‍Extending Copilot: Developers have the ability to incorporate external data sources, streamlining user workflows and reducing the need for context switching. This not only improves productivity but also promotes better collaboration. Through Copilot, integrating this data into everyday Microsoft products becomes seamless.
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• ‍Building your own Copilot: Beyond adoption and extension, it's possible to create a personalized Copilot for a unique conversational experience using Azure OpenAI, Cognitive Search, Microsoft Copilot Studio, and other Microsoft Cloud technologies. A custom Copilot can integrate corporate data, access real-time external information via APIs, and embed itself into enterprise applications.

Microsoft Copilot is available in various forms, with pricing packages tailored to different use cases, including:

• Copilot (Free): The free version provides access to generative AI features for PC management (in Windows), web browsing (in Edge), and general chatbot conversations online.
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• Copilot Pro: Designed for individual users who want to get the most out of generative AI. For around $20 per user per month, it provides access to Copilot within several tools such as Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote.
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• Copilot for Microsoft 365: Intended for individuals and teams working with Microsoft apps. It includes access to Copilot Studio, enterprise-grade security, privacy, and compliance, along with advanced capabilities.

In addition, there are various Copilot versions tailored for specific Microsoft tools. For example, there are Copilot solutions integrated into Microsoft Dynamics for sales and customer support teams, and security-focused Copilot features embedded in Microsoft Purview.

Recently, Microsoft has also begun launching and updating a series of domain-specific “Agents” for business sectors like finance, customer service, and marketing, each trained and optimized for those particular use cases.

Although many Windows 11 users were initially skeptical when Microsoft first introduced Copilot, the service has grown significantly since its preview release and is now considered one of the best productivity tools in the age of artificial intelligence.

Microsoft Copilot for Healthcare: key features

After our brief introduction to Microsoft’s AI-powered digital assistant, we now arrive at the main topic of this article.

When considering what AI, and specifically Microsoft Copilot, can do, the possibilities are numerous, and healthcare professionals can take advantage of its advanced features to reclaim time otherwise spent filling out forms or searching for relevant data in documents.

That time can instead be devoted to treating and caring for patients.

How exactly?

Let’s look at some examples of Copilot’s key features in the list below:

• ‍Automated data analysis and report generation: Microsoft Copilot can speed up and streamline the creation of reports based on medical data. Suppose a medical researcher wants to generate a report on patient data related to a specific disease. By entering the relevant data into an Excel spreadsheet, Copilot can analyze it and produce a summary of key findings, including charts and diagrams to visualize the data. The researcher can specify the format and style of the report, which Copilot will generate accordingly.
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• ‍Monitoring clinical trial progress: Copilot can be used to track the progress of clinical trials. Since clinical trials are a crucial part of drug development, accurately monitoring their progress is essential for healthcare professionals and researchers. With Copilot, Excel can be used to track clinical trial metrics and generate natural-language summaries of the data. For instance, a summary might include the number of enrolled patients, the treatment under testing, the study duration, and any interim results.
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• ‍Converting medical reports into usable data: Keeping track of medical records for patients treated across multiple healthcare facilities can be challenging, especially when information is scattered across various reports. With Copilot, healthcare professionals can extract relevant information from these reports using natural language processing and convert it into structured data to be imported into Excel. This data may include the patient's name, age, diagnosis, treatment history, lab results, and imaging studies, among other details.
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• ‍Summarizing medical and genomic data for tumor boards: Another potential application of Microsoft Copilot is its ability to automatically generate summaries of medical and genomic data for tumor board discussions. Copilot can assist in synthesizing genomic data by analyzing medical records in Excel and producing summaries that are easily understandable even for non-geneticists. The summary may include information such as specific genetic mutations present in a patient’s tumor.
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• ‍Analyzing health outcomes and overall treatment costs: The AI digital assistant can also support the analysis of health outcomes and the overall costs of treatments. The vast amount of data generated in the healthcare field can make it difficult for professionals to analyze and interpret the information. Copilot can review patient data imported into Excel, including electronic health records and claims data, to deliver insights into outcomes and costs, helping to identify patterns, trends, and areas for improvement in patient care.

• ‍Automatic summarization of virtual medical meetings. Copilot can assist in automatically summarizing virtual medical meetings held on Microsoft Teams. This feature is especially useful for large medical training programs or conferences with multiple parallel sessions. Copilot can identify and extract the key topics discussed and generate a summary email for attendees and other stakeholders, such as hospitals or institutions. The summary might include key discussion points, links to relevant resources or presentations, and a list of tasks or action items that emerged during the meeting.
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• ‍Translating external patient reports into usable data: Copilot can help healthcare professionals convert external patient reports into structured data. Keeping track of records from patients treated in different facilities can be complex, as the information may be dispersed across various documents. With Copilot, these tracking challenges become a thing of the past—professionals can extract relevant details and convert them into structured data to be imported into Excel.

Ok, but what about the protection of private medical and patient data?

There’s no need to worry: Copilot is designed to prioritize patient data privacy and confidentiality. The platform is built to protect the data of tenants, groups, and individuals. The language models powering Microsoft’s AI assistant are not trained on tenant data or user prompts, meaning data remains private and secure.

To prevent data leaks between user groups, Copilot uses a proven authorization model within the tenant.

This ensures that only authorized users with appropriate access rights can view patient data. Additionally, at the individual level, Copilot only presents data users are permitted to see, using the same technology Microsoft has used for years to safeguard customer information.

Microsoft Copilot for Healthcare: What’s new?

Recently, Microsoft has announced several updates related to its AI solutions designed for the healthcare sector.

Many of these solutions are still in early development or available only in preview. Healthcare organizations will test and validate them before the company rolls them out more broadly. Below are the most noteworthy innovations.

Healthcare-focused AI models

Approximately 80% of visits to hospitals and healthcare systems involve some form of imaging, as doctors often rely on medical images to treat patients.

Microsoft is launching a collection of open-source multimodal AI models capable of analyzing more than just text, including medical images, health records, and genomic data. Healthcare organizations can use these models to develop new applications and tools.

For example, digitizing a single pathology slide can require over one gigabyte of storage, meaning that many existing AI-based pathology models have been trained on small slide segments. Microsoft and Providence Health & Services have developed a whole-slide model that improves mutation prediction and cancer subtyping, according to an article published in the peer-reviewed journal Nature.

Now, healthcare systems can use this model as a foundation and customize it to meet their specific needs.

The models are available in the model catalog within Azure AI Studio, which serves as Microsoft’s hub for generative AI development.

Healthcare agent service

Microsoft has also announced a new way for healthcare systems to build AI agents to further automate repetitive tasks.

Using Copilot Studio, healthcare providers can create custom agents with reusable capabilities, preconfigured intelligence, and healthcare-specific models.

These “agents” can handle tasks such as appointment scheduling, clinical trial matching, patient triage, and more, freeing healthcare professionals to spend more time on patient care. The service also allows for extending existing agents by adding plugins, regardless of the environment in which those plugins were developed.

Agents can vary widely in complexity and help users answer questions, automate workflows, and perform specific tasks based on their training.

A healthcare organization, for instance, could develop an AI agent to help doctors identify relevant clinical trials for a patient. Microsoft explained that a doctor could type a question like:

“What clinical trials are available for a 55-year-old male with diabetes and interstitial lung disease?”

and receive a list of potential matches, saving time and effort in the search.

Agents that assist patients with answering basic questions are already popular among healthcare systems piloting the service, according to Hadas Bitran, General Manager of Health AI at Microsoft Health and Life Sciences, in an interview with the American press. Agents that help physicians answer questions about recent guidelines and patient medical histories are also common, she added.

To address the sensitive nature of healthcare data, Microsoft has integrated responsible AI practices throughout the healthcare agent service.

The service includes clinical safeguards such as source tracking and clinical semantic validation to ensure the AI-generated information is accurate, transparent, and trustworthy. These safeguards help prevent common generative AI issues, such as inaccuracies or omissions, which are particularly critical when dealing with patient health.

The Microsoft Healthcare Agent Service has been available in public preview since October 2024.

Conclusions

While the impact of Gen AI, and Microsoft Copilot in particular, across a wide range of fields and industries is undeniable, it is equally true that artificial intelligence has also met with strong skepticism, especially in sensitive areas like medicine and healthcare administration.

However, these doubts are now largely a thing of the past.

The implementation of Copilot in a wide variety of medical institutions and organizations has immediately demonstrated the potential benefits of having an AI-powered digital assistant capable of efficiently and accurately handling the most tedious aspects of healthcare professionals' work.

If the already proven applications of Copilot in the healthcare field weren’t enough, the innovations and previews released at the end of last year show that the landscape of medical AI is only just beginning to evolve. The true potential of these new AI technologies (particularly Microsoft’s solutions) may be even greater than we currently imagine.

FAQ on Microsoft Copilot for Healthcare

What is Microsoft Copilot for Healthcare?

Microsoft Copilot for Healthcare is the version of Microsoft’s AI assistant designed specifically for the medical and healthcare sector. It supports professionals in managing daily activities, reducing administrative tasks, and improving the quality and efficiency of care.

How can Copilot support healthcare professionals?

Copilot assists doctors, nurses, and researchers in several areas, such as automatically generating clinical reports, tracking the progress of clinical trials, converting reports into structured data, summarizing genomic and clinical data, and drafting summaries of meetings. This allows professionals to spend more time directly caring for patients.

Does Copilot simplify clinical documentation?

Yes. Copilot is built to extract relevant information from reports and medical records and convert it into structured data, for example in an Excel spreadsheet. This makes healthcare documentation more organized and less time-consuming.

Can Copilot be used to analyze medical images or genomic data?

Yes, Microsoft has introduced multimodal AI models capable of analyzing not just text, but also medical images and genomic information. These models can be customized by hospitals and research centers to build tailored clinical tools.

What tools does Microsoft provide to build customized Copilot solutions?

Healthcare organizations can use Microsoft Copilot Studio and integrated cloud services to create personalized conversational agents. These agents can be configured to answer clinical questions, suggest clinical trials, manage appointments, and automate repetitive tasks, adapting to the operational context of each organization.

Is using Copilot secure in the healthcare field?

Yes. The platform is designed to protect the confidentiality of sensitive data. Patient data is not used to train the models, and every access is managed through permission systems that follow Microsoft’s security standards. Each user can only access the data they are authorized to view.

Can Copilot operate autonomously?

No. Microsoft emphasizes that Copilot is an assistant, not an automated system. Its use in healthcare always requires the supervision and judgment of qualified personnel. In this context, AI is a support tool—not a replacement for human expertise.

Can Copilot be used for staff training?

Yes. Copilot can automatically summarize medical meetings or training sessions held on Microsoft Teams. It can identify the main discussion points, collect relevant materials and links, and generate summaries to share with participants, supporting continuous learning and professional development.