Microsoft MSFT -0.22%decrease; red down pointing triangle is betting on healthcare as a path to become more competitive in artificial intelligence. The company’s biggest push yet: a new tool it describes as an AI concierge doctor—one that can access your medical records and health data, with your consent.
The company on Thursday unveiled Copilot Health, a feature within the Copilot app that lets the chatbot dispense personalized healthcare advice informed by the user’s disease history, test results, medications, doctors’ visit notes and biometric data as recorded by wearable devices.
Health data imported into the feature will be encrypted and firewalled from the rest of the app to address the privacy concerns of handing over one’s medical records to a generative AI platform, Microsoft AI Chief Executive Mustafa Suleyman said in an interview.
“It’s something that Microsoft is uniquely placed to do with our scale, with our regulatory experience, with the kind of trust and confidence that people have in our security and the history that we have as a mature, stable player,” Suleyman said.
The software giant is counting on the new health service to drive engagement for Copilot and attract new users to its app, which trails competitors such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini. Microsoft plans to eventually charge users for the feature, which is first launching in the U.S. in a phased rollout.
In focusing the general consumer version of Copilot on healthcare, Microsoft is following user behavior: The most common category of questions asked on the mobile app is health, the company said.
Microsoft hopes its new health service will attract users.
The new tool, which appears as a tab within the Copilot app, allows users to connect their hospital and lab data, as well as data from wearables such as Apple Watch and Fitbit, to receive personalized answers to inquiries about conditions or symptoms. For users who don’t plug in their personal data, the tool can provide more generalized answers.
The service could especially benefit those managing chronic medical conditions, executives said. The tool can plug into information from more than 50,000 U.S. hospitals and provider organizations, including lab results from those institutions or through Function Health.
Once users authenticate their identity through the identification service Clear, their data is pulled by vendor HealthEx, which adheres to the federal initiative known as Tefca, a nationwide framework for accessing health records. The data is then streamed into Copilot Health. Microsoft said users can manage and delete their information, and any data and conversations are kept separate from the general Copilot chat on the app using encryption and strict access controls.
