Today, we're pleased to announce the private preview of a new AI-powered project from Microsoft's Healthcare NExT initiative which is designed to enable our healthcare partners to easily create intelligent and compliant healthcare virtual assistants and chatbots. These bots are powered by cognitive services and enriched with authoritative medical content, allowing our partners to empower their customers with self-service access to health information, with the goal of improving outcomes and reducing costs. So, if you're using a health bot built by one of our partners as part of our project, you can interact in a personal way, typing or talking in natural language and receiving information to help answer your health-related questions. Our partners, including Aurora Health Care, with 15 hospitals, over 150 clinics and 70 pharmacies throughout eastern Wisconsin and northern Illinois, Premera Blue Cross, the largest health plan in the Pacific Northwest, and UPMC, one of the largest integrated health care delivery networks in the United States, are working with us to build out bots that address a wide range of healthcare-specific questions and use cases. For instance, insurers can build bots that give their customers an easy way to look up the status of a claim and ask questions about benefits and services.

GE Healthcare and the corporate parent of two of Harvard University's teaching hospitals will spend the next ten years working on ways to bring artificial intelligence (AI) to every aspect of a hospital visit, the companies announced today. The Center for Clinical Data Science will include teams from both companies and will develop, test and deploy AI software at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) and Brigham and Women's Hospital, the Boston Globe reported. GE, which moved its corporate headquarters to Boston last year, is working to transform itself from an industrial company to one that develops software that powers equipment from MRI machines to jet engines, among other innovations, the article noted. AI -- sometimes called deep learning technology -- refers to computers that can sift through vast amounts of data and learn to become more accurate and efficient over time. Executives from GE, one of the nation's largest corporations, and Partners Healthcare (which owns MGH and Brigham and Women's Hospital), said integrating the technology into healthcare could help patients receive better care.