Partner Audience: #AllPartners #PartnersMakeMorePossible
Relevant to: #MicrosoftDragonCopilot #Healthcare #AI
Microsoft and our partners are driving innovation to address unprecedented challenges within the healthcare industry. By delivering scalable, impactful AI solutions, we’re transforming care delivery today and shaping the future of healthcare. To dive into these innovations, I had a great conversation with Healthcare Strategist Doug McMillian from CDW and Austin Park, Founder and CEO of Sapphire Health.
Advancing care, together
The healthcare industry faces more pressure than ever: an aging population, workforce shortages, and increasing demand for streamlined, modern solutions. But with every challenge comes opportunity. This is where Microsoft and our partners step in.
As complexity mounts for healthcare systems, we’re doubling down on innovation that delivers meaningful, measurable impact. Together with our partners, we’re helping reshape how care is delivered today and reimagining what’s possible for tomorrow.
Addressing healthcare’s biggest challenges through AI
The challenges in healthcare are well-known: rising demand for care, a lack of providers (and the threat many will suffer from burnout), an aging infrastructure, and pressures to limit costs. It’s easy to see why healthcare systems around the world are looking for smarter, faster solutions that can help improve outcomes.
At Microsoft, we believe AI is key to overcoming many of these hurdles. And we’re already seeing it make a difference—enhancing resource management, enabling remote monitoring, delivering more personalized care, and even improving early diagnosis through predictive analytics.
In the latest video from my Microsoft + Partners Make More Possible series, I spoke with leaders from CDW and Sapphire Health, two Microsoft partners that have been instrumental in helping transform healthcare with AI.
Doug McMillian, a healthcare strategist at CDW, shared that AI is assisting with practical tasks every day in medical settings.
“We know, hands down, there are some great AI products and features that many practices are starting to widely adopt. I think that’s going to continue over the next three to five years, especially as AI capabilities get better,” McMillian says.
Microsoft is helping lead the way by enabling partners to put AI into practice—delivering real-world impact to patients and providers.
“Microsoft is showing everyone what’s possible,” adds Austin Park, CEO and Founder of Sapphire Health. “And then we are turning those possibilities into reality through real healthcare solutions.”
Imagine AI helping surgeons perform minimally invasive procedures, reducing recovery times, and improving patient outcomes. Or analyzing massive datasets to uncover new treatments like predicting drug efficacy before a trial begins. These aren’t the ideas of the future. They’re taking shape now.
Here are just a few of the ways our partner ecosystem is making a difference today:
- Active listening to capture doctors’ verbal observations and automatically convert them into notes for patient files. This can help reduce the amount of time providers spend on administrative tasks versus interacting with patients.
- Smarter resource management to ensure providers aren’t spread too thin. For example, Rhythm Pharmaceuticals, a small firm focused on treatments for rare diseases, enlisted Microsoft partner RMS to deploy Microsoft Dynamics 365 setting Rhythm up for success and future growth.
- Virtual assistants and remote monitoring to help patients stay healthy from home. One healthcare assistant comes from Mobile Heartbeat, which partnered with Microsoft to offer Banyan, a modular, cloud-native clinical communication and collaboration (CC&C) solution. A study conducted at Yale New Haven Health found this solution greatly improved hospital communication.
- Early detection and predictive analytics to spot potential health issues before they become major problems. Plan Heal, a Microsoft partner and Microsoft for Startups company, is one of many using generative AI for personalized health assessments to detect health risks or diseases, so they aren’t undiagnosed or misdiagnosed.
Perhaps most exciting of all, AI is enabling the discovery of new drugs faster and more effectively by analyzing vast amounts of data, making breakthroughs in medical research a reality.
Developing new solutions to help patients and providers
In my discussion with McMillian and Park, we explored more about how Microsoft and our partners are using AI and other technologies to achieve better results in healthcare.
For example, CDW helped Florida-based Baptist Health reduce long app login times and manual software setups using Microsoft Azure Virtual Desktop. With more than 14,000 employees and hundreds of points of care, including outpatient surgery centers and specialty clinics, Baptist Health also offers telehealth and at-home care options. Those services require eliminating barriers to accessing devices, whether caregivers are at bedside or offering advice through a virtual meeting with a patient.
Meanwhile, Sapphire Health worked with Samaritan Health Services in Oregon to deploy the Epic electronic health record system on Microsoft Azure. The result? Over 30% cost savings and better, faster access to records—both wins for clinicians and patients.
From improving data management to consolidating patient records, the results enabled by Microsoft and many other partners speak for themselves. Here are just a few:
- Microsoft partner Quisitive’s Fabric Data Solutions and Generative AI for Healthcare, as well as Microsoft Fabric for Healthcare enable healthcare providers to unlock AI-driven insights from vast stores of data.
- To ensure accurate and timely billing for both large healthcare organizations and small practices, Veradigm and Microsoft partner ai used Microsoft Azure AI to develop a self-service healthcare chatbot.
- Shriners Children’s enlisted Microsoft partner Fractal and Azure OpenAI to speed up care and house clinical notes in a new secure, cloud-based system.
Driving healthcare forward with AI innovation
AI’s potential in healthcare is boundless. Microsoft and our partners are improving hospital workflows, accelerating medical breakthroughs, and helping providers deliver more efficient, patient-centered care. But the best part? We’re just getting started.
At the HIMSS 2025 conference, Microsoft introduced Dragon Copilot, a next-generation AI assistant that is helping providers streamline clinical documentation, surface insights, and automate time-consuming administrative tasks. It’s one of many multimodal AI innovations we’re proud to share.
We’re committed to building healthcare solutions that improve the lives of patients and providers responsibly and with impact. Stay tuned as we continue to innovate together.
To learn more, watch my discussion with Doug McMillian of CDW and Austin Park of Sapphire Health. I also recommend you explore more about our healthcare technology and how we’re committed to responsible AI:
- Healthcare providers solutions
- Meet Microsoft Dragon Copilot
- Expanding healthcare AI models
- Learn about Azure AI
- Microsoft Responsible AI
