Scott Guthrie joins the show this week from Microsoft Build 2024 to discuss Microsoft being all-in on AI. From Copilot, to Azure AI and Prompty, to their developer first focus, leading GitHub, VS Code being the long bet that paid off, to the future of a doctor’s bedside manner assisted with AI. Microsoft is all-in on AI and Build 2024’s discussions and announcements proves it.
Matched from the episode's transcript 👇
Scott Guthrie: I think some of the stuff I get most inspired by is in healthcare. Partly because the healthcare industry has just gone through a super-difficult time with COVID. Physician burnout is at an all time high. This is an industry where there are fewer doctors leaving every year than entering the workforce. And peep doctors and nurses are just tired. And they’ve gone through a lot these last several years. And unfortunately, in parts of the world, including here in the US, the demands in terms of documentation are very high. And so part of what doctors don’t like isn’t that – they like medicine, but spending two hours a night writing up your case notes from the people that you saw during the day - they don’t like that. They’d much rather have dinner with their families and unwind. And if we can really add productivity to their lives and take that drudgery away, they have much more fulfilling experiences.
[00:39:53.26] And we’re doing some work ourselves with Nuance, which is a company we acquired two years ago… And it’s with clinical documentation. And now you can basically just put – the doctor has a cell phone, ask the patient “Is it okay to record this conversation from my notes?” Pushes a button, and then the doctor can have a conversation with the patient, look them in the eye, have empathy, not have to take any notes. And at the end, it’ll automatically create not a transcript, but actually a summary that you can save in the EHR, of the complete visit. And the doctor can review it, edit, save.
And we literally get love notes from doctors who are just like “This transformed my life. I now see my family, I’m spending – I leave at the end of the day, and I don’t have work I’m taking home.”
And we’re also - and we showed it in the keynote - working with Epic, who is the leading healthcare provider system. And in the keynote we showed scenarios where if you use My Chart, as an example… In the US, lots of people probably are familiar with My Chart. A lot of health systems expose it directly to patients. And it’s where you can message your doctor. And it’s great – at the same time, sometimes doctors then have to respond. And if all their patients are sending them hundreds of mails a day, that his work. And what My Chart now does with the built-in Copilot support they’ve done is they can draft responses for the doctor, and it adds more empathy, it helps bring in a lot of the details, it helps the doctor understand, and potentially understand things they might have missed, based on the medical records and based on what the patient’s saying.
It’s a great example of leading to much better healthcare outcomes, much better patient experience, but at the end of day making physicians so much more productive, happier and more engaged with their jobs. And that gets me kind of excited, because it’s – I’ve literally had doctors cry in front of me, as they’re describing how it’s changed their life. And you know, that feels good. Cry in a good way.