Healthcare demand is outpacing the systems designed to deliver it—putting patients, clinicians, and communities under real strain. Researchers are racing to translate data into cures. Patients are waiting longer for the care they need. Clinicians and care teams are carrying heavier burdens. And communities—especially those in rural and remote areas—are at risk of losing critical health services altogether.
This is a defining moment for healthcare and the decisions made now will shape outcomes for years to come. The question is no longer whether to adopt AI—it’s how to alleviate these pressures with agency, security, and trust.
AI for Better Health is our ambition to enable every person on the planet to live healthier by transforming how care is discovered, delivered, and accessed at scale. We are redefining how AI works alongside people to transform health across three priorities:
- Accelerating lifesaving breakthroughs.
- Transforming the healthcare experience.
- Advancing global health equity.
Accelerating lifesaving breakthroughs
Across healthcare and life sciences, organizations are bringing human judgement together with AI to enable discovery—helping researchers identify patterns that may support earlier insights and accelerate innovation.
In practice
- Novo Nordisk aimed to scale a pipeline of drug discovery, development, and data science capabilities with AI and machine learning. The teams built a Novo Nordisk AI platform and amplified its culture of innovation across many use cases, including predictive AI models for advanced risk detection in cardiovascular diseases. The algorithm may be able to predict patients’ cardiovascular risk better than current clinical standards.
- In clinical settings, AI is helping clinicians act sooner and with greater precision. For example, AI-supported tumor boards are helping organizations like Providence surface potential data insights for clinician review, such as identifying biomarkers or matching patients to clinical trials, to support decision making.
These innovations are helping advance research so it can reach more patients, more communities, and more health systems worldwide.
Transforming the healthcare experience
As new discoveries move into practice, the way care is delivered is beginning to change. Increasingly, AI is being embedded directly into workflows with tools designed to reduce friction, connect information, and provide insights in context. As routine work is streamlined, people gain the time and clarity to focus on deeper impact—strengthening care, discovery and operations in service of better health for all.
In practice
- At Piedmont Healthcare in Atlanta, for example, an OB‑GYN is using Microsoft Dragon Copilot to capture and structure clinical conversations in real time—freeing her to listen more deeply, build trust, and apply more informed judgment during sensitive moments like pregnancy and postpartum. This shift toward more empathetic, patient-centered care improves reproductive health outcomes for women of color at her clinic.
- These capabilities extend beyond documentation. AI is beginning to surface new signals within the flow of care. For example, identifying patterns in vocal characteristics may provide additional context for clinician evaluation, subject to appropriate validation and oversight. Baptist Health in Kentucky is beginning to apply this approach within an ambient workflow, adopting tools from Canary Speech to support earlier and more informed intervention.
What begins as support for individual interactions can scale across teams, specialties, and health systems. And as some of the constraints on their time and attention are lifted, providers can focus more fully on their patients—bringing the human element back to care.
Advancing global health equity
Ensuring that better health is accessible to everyone remains one of the most important and complex challenges in healthcare.
AI has the potential to extend the reach of clinicians and care teams—bringing health information to remote communities, supporting resource-constrained environments, and providing individuals with more direct access to trusted health information.
As these capabilities scale, they can help reduce barriers tied to geography, infrastructure, and access to specialized care—supporting more equitable access to care.
In practice
- Through innovations like Microsoft Copilot Health, AI-powered health companions are helping individuals make sense of complex health information. By bringing together clinical records, wearable data, and medical knowledge, supported by Microsoft security and privacy technologies that help protect data, individuals can better understand their health. This can help them feel more empowered in discussions with their care teams.
- Partnerships are helping redesign care models and address long-standing inequities. For example, Microsoft is collaborating with Kearney to mobilize a global community of innovators through the Women’s Health Tech Manifesto—using data and technology to help close gaps in women’s health.
- Through the Rural Health Transformation (RHT) Collaborative, a multi-sector public and private partnership, co-chaired by Microsoft and others, we are uniting technology providers, health systems, payers, and non-profits to help states deploy CMS’s rural health funding into ready-to-adopt AI-enabled care models. Together, we are supporting efforts to expand access to primary care, telehealth, and remote monitoring for rural communities at risk of losing critical health services, while strengthening the cybersecurity and interoperability foundations more than 700 rural hospitals already rely on.
Ultimately, advancing health equity will depend not only on leveraging AI, but also on the responsible design, deployment, and use of these technologies with appropriate human oversight, transparency, and accountability.
Building the future of health—together
The decisions being made today will shape how AI is used in healthcare for years to come.
Progress will not be uniform. Every worker, leader and organization is learning how to harness AI-enabled workflows that amplify what we as humans can do to make meaningful change. Each step forward unlocks new possibilities for organizations and communities.
Taken together, these outcomes move us toward a broader vision for the future where every person on the planet can live healthier. That’s the goal of AI for Better Health.
Our ambition of AI for Better Health is grounded in use cases that create impact today.
- Get our e-book, AI for Better Health: Enabling transformation in healthcare, to explore how organizations are applying this approach in practice.
- Explore Microsoft for Healthcare to see how to drive innovation and improve healthcare experiences with trusted, AI-powered solutions.
