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Healthcare Giant Mercy Extends Azure Partnership to Include AI
Mercy, a healthcare conglomerate that operates over 900 facilities across the country, is tapping Microsoft's cloud AI services to improve patient experience.
Mercy, a healthcare conglomerate that operates over 900 facilities across the country, is tapping Microsoft's cloud AI services to improve patient experience.
Microsoft and Mercy jointly announced an expansion of their existing partnership on Wednesday. Mercy already uses Azure as its "preferred" cloud platform. The partnership announced this week focuses on the generative AI technologies in the Azure OpenAI product "and other digital technologies."
Launched this past January, Azure OpenAI gives developers access to various large language models (LLMs), including GPT-4 and Meta's Llama, to create applications with intelligent natural-language AI capabilities.
In using Azure OpenAI, Mercy, which processed over 3 million patient visits in its fiscal 2022, aims to develop applications that can help patients get the medical care and information they need faster. For instance, Mercy wants to use "generative AI-assisted communication" to help patients better understand lab results, as well as an "AI solution" to help patients schedule initial and follow-up appointments.
Also in the works at Mercy are "smart dashboards" that -- powered by Azure's data processing and synthesizing capabilities -- can potentially shorten patient stays by providing "better visibility into the factors that impact how soon patients can return home."
In addition, Mercy is hoping Azure OpenAI can help it develop HR-specific chatbot apps for its roughly 42,000 employees. These apps, for example, can help employees quickly find information about their benefits or vacation time.
According to Joe Kelly, head of transformation and business development officer at Mercy, the organization is brainstorming "more than four dozen uses of AI," and expects to put several of them in use "by the middle of next year."
"This is predictive, proactive and personalized care at its best," Kelly said in a prepared statement.