Jeff Ferranti, Senior Vice President and Chief Digital Officer at Duke University Health System, has expressed Duke Health's commitment to the responsible use of generative AI in addressing complex issues in academic medicine. He recognizes the transformative potential of AI in patient care, research, and medical education. Ferranti responded to Microsoft's AI solutions aimed at assisting healthcare organizations by collaborating with Microsoft to explore the ethical implementation of AI in healthcare.
"Duke Health is committed to using generative AI in a responsible manner to address some of the most perplexing issues in academic medicine," Ferranti stated. "This technology has the potential to transform every facet of our operations, including patient care, research, and medical education. We have formed a team of diverse experts, along with a top-tier corporate partner, Microsoft, to investigate the ethical deployment of this technology in the healthcare sector."
Duke Health, an academic medical institution affiliated with Duke University, offers extensive healthcare services, research, and medical education in Durham, North Carolina, and the surrounding area. The responsible use of generative AI is seen as a way to tackle intricate issues in academic medicine and bring about positive changes in patient care, research, and medical education.
Microsoft's AI solutions offer various tools and services to assist healthcare organizations. One of these solutions is Microsoft Fabric, which provides industry-specific solutions to streamline healthcare data and insights through a unified architecture. This simplifies the process of consolidating diverse health data sources and provides a secure platform for data access, analysis, and visualization within healthcare organizations.
Another tool offered by Microsoft is Azure AI text analytics for health. This tool, with support from Microsoft partner Dataside, is being utilized by Oncoclínicas in Brazil. They are extracting information from unstructured data sources like medical notes, pathology reports, genomic data, and MRI reports. This extracted information is then used for various applications, including clinical trial feasibility, pharmacoeconomic insights, and a deeper understanding of group epidemiology and outcomes.
Microsoft Fabric and Azure Health Data Services also provide machine learning-powered de-identification services. These services allow healthcare institutions to anonymize clinical data while preserving clinical relevance and complying with privacy regulations. The services automatically redact or substitute over 30 entities, including protected health information identifiers specified by HIPAA. Future plans involve extending these de-identification services to structured, imaging, and medtech data.
In addition, Azure AI Health Bot is being expanded to allow healthcare organizations on the cloud to develop customized generative AI chatbot experiences for administrative and clinical tasks, as well as patient interactions.
The collaboration between Duke Health and Microsoft aims to explore the ethical implementation of generative AI in healthcare. With the responsible use of AI, Duke Health hopes to address complex issues and transform patient care, research, and medical education.