Revolutionizing Clinical Workflows
Microsoft has unveiled Dragon Copilot, an innovative AI assistant designed specifically for clinical workflows. This groundbreaking tool integrates trusted natural language voice dictation capabilities from DMO with ambient listening features from DAX, enhanced by fine-tuned generative AI and healthcare-specific safeguards. As a core component of Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare, Dragon Copilot operates on a secure modern architecture, enabling healthcare organizations to deliver superior experiences and outcomes across various care settings for both providers and patients.
Addressing Clinician Burnout
While clinician burnout in the United States has seen a modest decline from 53% in 2023 to 48% in 2024, partly due to technological advancements, significant challenges remain. With an aging population and persistent professional burnout, the healthcare industry faces a projected workforce shortage. In response, health systems are increasingly turning to AI solutions to streamline administrative tasks, improve access to care, and enable faster clinical insights, ultimately enhancing healthcare delivery globally.
Microsoft’s Vision for Healthcare AI
“At Microsoft, we have long believed that AI has the incredible potential to free clinicians from much of the administrative burden in healthcare and enable them to refocus on taking care of patients,” explained Joe Petro, corporate vice president of Microsoft Health and Life Sciences Solutions and Platforms. “With the launch of our new Dragon Copilot, we are introducing the first unified voice AI experience to the market, drawing on our trusted, decades-long expertise that has consistently enhanced provider wellness and improved clinical and financial outcomes for provider organizations and the patients they serve.”
Real-World Impact
Healthcare professionals are already seeing the benefits. Dr. R. Hal Baker, senior vice president and chief digital and chief information officer at WellSpan Health, noted: “With Dragon Copilot, we’re not just enhancing how we work in the EHR — we’re tapping into a Microsoft-powered ecosystem where AI assistance extends across our organization, delivering a consistent and intelligent experience everywhere we work. It’s this ability to enhance the patient experience while streamlining clinician workflows that makes Dragon Copilot such a game-changer.”
Proven Performance
Dragon Copilot combines DMO’s speech capabilities, which has helped document billions of patient records, with DAX’s ambient AI technology, which has supported over 3 million patient conversations across 600 healthcare organizations in the past month alone. Organizations implementing these ambient AI capabilities have reported remarkable outcomes: clinicians save an average of five minutes per patient encounter, 70% report reduced burnout and fatigue, 62% state they are less likely to leave their organization, and 93% of patients report an improved overall experience.
Key Features and Capabilities
Dragon Copilot empowers clinicians and care providers across specialties with three core functionalities:
- Streamlined Documentation: Clinicians benefit from multilanguage ambient note creation, automated tasks, personalized formatting, natural language dictation, speech memos, editing capabilities, customized templates, and AI prompts—all within a single, intuitive interface.
- Enhanced Information Access: The embedded AI assistant enables clinicians to conduct general-purpose medical information searches from trusted content sources, putting critical knowledge at their fingertips.
- Automated Clinical Tasks: New capabilities allow healthcare professionals to automate key tasks including conversational orders, clinical evidence summaries, referral letters, and after-visit summaries in one centralized workspace.
Global Availability
Healthcare professionals across ambulatory care, inpatient settings, emergency departments, and other care environments will benefit from Dragon Copilot’s fast, accurate, secure, and intuitive speech and ambient capabilities. The solution will be generally available in the United States and Canada in May, followed by rollouts in the United Kingdom, Germany, France, and the Netherlands. Microsoft has also committed to bringing a new Dragon experience to other key markets currently using Dragon Medical.
Expanding Global Adoption
“We are aware of the administrative burnout affecting our clinicians, and the need for improved care access for our patients, and the newest evolution of Dragon represents a significant step forward in alleviating this strain,” said Glen Kearns, EVP and CIO at The Ottawa Hospital. “We are thrilled to be one of the first customers in Canada to use Microsoft’s ambient and generative AI technology. The newest evolution of Dragon Copilot could help alleviate documentation burden for our clinical teams.”
Partner Ecosystem Integration
Leveraging Microsoft’s extensive healthcare industry partner ecosystem, organizations can unlock additional value from Dragon Copilot through new solutions and integrated offerings. These partnerships include leading EHR providers, independent software vendors, system integrators, and cloud service providers, each playing a unique role in helping organizations achieve meaningful outcomes with Dragon Copilot.
Commitment to Responsible AI
Dragon Copilot’s new capabilities are built on a secure data foundation and incorporate healthcare-specific clinical, chat, and compliance safeguards to ensure accurate and safe AI outputs. These features align with Microsoft’s responsible AI principles—transparency, reliability, safety, fairness, inclusiveness, accountability, privacy, and security. Microsoft remains committed to developing responsible AI by design and ensuring these technologies positively impact both the healthcare ecosystem and broader society.
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