Mercy lays the foundation for a future of innovation in patient care using Microsoft Azure to unlock insights from data in the cloud

Mercy, one of the largest U.S. healthcare systems with 4,000+ physicians and 40,000 staff, held nearly 5 petabytes of patient data but operated siloed systems that limited its ability to use that information to improve care delivery and staff retention. Mercy partnered with Microsoft on a cloud-first digital strategy using Azure Data Lake to centralize data, Azure Machine Learning for predictive analytics, Azure Synapse Analytics for clinical insights, and Azure AI Document Intelligence for insurance-card processing. The system reduced average length of stay, removing thousands of days of hospital stay over the past year, automated patient engagement such as appointment confirmations, moved offices toward paperless operations, and enabled predictive identification of conditions like hypertension and congestive heart failure.

Microsoft Azure is Microsoft's cloud AI platform, combining Azure Machine Learning and Azure OpenAI Service — the delivery channel for a large share of pharma's enterprise GPT deployments.

This sits in the Build stage of the AI use-case lifecycle: Named examples from the foundation-model labs and platforms pharma teams use to actually construct, train and generate the model or application.