Virtua Health innovates to improve patient care using Copilot as the UI to AI

In healthcare, better dataflows make a tangible difference to patient lives. This is something well understood by Virtua Health, a forward-thinking, premier healthcare provider in the South Jersey and Philadelphia region.

Across its five hospitals and more than 400 health facilities serving local communities, Virtua Health is known for its continuous improvement and innovation. By putting better information in the hands of clinicians and operational leaders at the right moment, Virtua Health is delivering efficiencies that improve outcomes and get patients home to loved ones sooner.

Delivering a 360-degree patient view with Power BI and Copilot

At the heart of Virtua Health’s innovation is the creation of Power BI dashboards and Copilot summaries which provide an at-a-glance patient overview for clinicians. Virtua Health integrates demographic, clinical and financial data in a unified Microsoft Fabric data layer to present a holistic 360-degree patient view.

“We then put a semantic layer on top to make sense of that patient information,” explains Ajit Shukla, Assistant Vice President of Advanced Analytics at Virtua Health. “We integrated Power BI with Teams, so the clinicians can look into their trends and insights. And having a layer of Copilot on top of Power BI provides a summary presented in human-like language that is easy for people to digest and act upon.”

Instead of spending half an hour for each patient reviewing screens in the Electronic Health Record (EHR) system, information is clearly and visually displayed – cutting clinician review time to five minutes. For cognitively overworked clinicians and operational leaders, this clarity and efficiency helps drive new standards in patient care.

Copilot as the UI to AI: Surfacing heart-failure prediction insights

To enable seamless integration between its EPIC EHR system, Microsoft Fabric, Power BI and Copilot, Virtua Health uses Microsoft Azure. Azure also provides the secure, scalable and interoperable foundation Virtua Health needs for its use of AI-powered data analytics to solve two of the biggest challenges in healthcare:

• Heart failure prediction

• Accurate sepsis diagnosis

Heart failure prediction rates are traditionally low. Only 13 percent of eligible patients were enrolled in specialized care programs, despite clear evidence that such programs reduce readmissions and improve outcomes. To improve this, the Virtua Health team built a custom transformer-based model in Azure AI Foundry to convert unstructured patient notes into structured prediction. The new model achieves 97 percent accuracy, lifting patient identification by 84 percentage points.

“We can see high-risk patients and track outcomes across all five hospitals and ensure they receive evidence-based therapies consistently,” says Dr. Tolulope Adesiyun Agunbiade, Medical Director of Advanced Heart Failure at Virtua Health. “We use the dashboard to determine how well we’re doing with guideline-directed medical therapy.”

The data directly powers enhancements in patient care. Heart failure follow-up rates have increased from 58 percent to 81 percent. And the average hospital stay for patients in specialized heart-failure units has been reduced by one day – so patients get home to loved ones sooner.

Copilot as the UI to AI: Acting more accurately and swiftly on sepsis

Virtua Health is innovating with AI in Azure and Copilot Studio in multiple projects running simultaneously. Another project making a huge impact is the accurate prediction of sepsis.

Around 1.6 million patients suffer from sepsis in the US every year. Existing commercially available prediction models have a high false positive rate: around 36 percent. Such a high false positive rate can lead to alert fatigue and slow responses – dangerous for sepsis cases for which fast action is critical.

The Virtua Health team built a custom XGBoost model in Azure which is trained on EHR data and integrated into EPIC’s clinical workflow. It is designed to predict sepsis cases four hours in advance of hour zero.

“It really helps look at a lot of things that we wouldn’t think would necessarily help predict sepsis,” advises Dr Emilio Mazza, ICU Care Director at Virtua Health. “But, as our data shows, it actually is very good at trying to predict sepsis before it actually happens. It has a sensitivity of 93 percent and 92 percent which is just phenomenal. That’s a huge gamechanger.”

Compared to commercial models, Virtua Health’s model reduces false positives by over 80 percent. And alerts show up in clinicians’ workflows, facilitating fast action.

Dr Emilio Mazza emphasizes, “Using the Microsoft technology and this early prediction model, we can find sepsis earlier, treat patients earlier and prevent avoidable negative outcomes.”

Copilot is the UI for AI: A path forward to continue to elevate patient care

Virtua Health’s innovation continues at pace. The team has developed an HR virtual assistant using Copilot Studio which helps staff find answers to their HR queries faster. This frees time for the HR team to focus on more proactive work.

Tom Gordon, Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer (CIO) at Virtua Health highlights the advantages of choosing Microsoft as the organization’s innovation partner.

“The Microsoft suite of products today is really exciting," he says. “It's fast. It's resilient. We don't have to have people skilled in multiple technologies and tools. It's all coming out of one toolset, which again, makes us more efficient. It makes our colleagues happier and allows us to deliver things at a faster pace.”

“It's really a great time to be in medicine when we have all these additional resources with AI, informatics, and predictive models,” confirms Dr. Tolulope Adesiyun Agunbiade. “I love the fact that Virtua is so collaborative, with all the multidisciplinary teams, and that we can come together to really focus on how can we best deliver care to our patients. It's really changing the way we deliver care on a daily basis.”

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