Microsoft Announces Dragon Copilot, a Medical AI Assistant That Will Take Paperwork Off Doctors

Microsoft has announced a new AI assistant for healthcare called Dragon Copilot, which the company says will help doctors spend more time with patients by reducing the amount of routine administrative work.

Image source: Nuance Communications

The Dragon Copilot AI assistant was created based on existing solutions – the Dragon Medical One speech recognition application and the DAX Copilot solution for documenting doctor-patient conversations during an appointment, by combining their capabilities. According to the company, Dragon Copilot will help doctors quickly extract information from medical sources and automatically generate clinical notes, drug recommendations, post-visit summaries and much more.

«”This technology will allow doctors to focus on the patient, not the computer, which will lead to better outcomes and ultimately better care,” Dr. David Rhew, Microsoft’s vice president of global health, told reporters. According to an October Google Cloud study, doctors spend nearly 28 hours a week on administrative tasks such as filing paperwork. Clerical workload is the leading cause of burnout in the health care field.

In 2021, Microsoft acquired Nuance Communications, the developer of Dragon Medical One and DAX Copilot solutions, for $16 billion, making it a major player in the highly competitive AI scribing (speech recognition and recording) market.

Apps like DAX Copilot allow doctors to take clinical notes in real time during patient interactions. Microsoft says DAX Copilot has been used in more than 3 million patient visits in the last month across 600 healthcare organizations.