Clinect Challenge is an open, collaborative set of projects addressing real-life digital health challenges. Groups of vendors and project champions will work together over a six – month period on a rapid-fire proof of concept project with the goal of presenting the theoretical outcome at Intelligent Health 2019 – The World's Leading AI in Medicine Summit. To tackle some of the world's greatest medical challenges in areas from oncology to diabetes, mental health to surgery, self-care to patient privacy and data management in collaboration with world leaders in artificial intelligence.

Microsoft has announced a slew of projects aimed at helping global healthcare providers harness the power of artificial intelligence and the cloud. The computing company said it wanted to help speed up innovation in the healthcare sector by providing clinicians with "intelligent health" tools that drive interoperability, while allowing for more face-to-face time with patients. Amongst the announcements is the launch of new collaboration tools for health workers within Microsoft 365 and the development of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven clinical platform that listens to and transcribes doctor-patient interactions. Called Project EmpowerMD, developed in collaboration with University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC), the platform leverages Microsoft's speech-to-text and natural language engines to record speech data, the primary aim of which is to enable hands-free note taking. According to the project's information page, Microsoft's ambition is to develop "a learning system that incorporates data from longitudinal medical records, medical devices, genomics, population health, research papers, and more."

Ahead of the upcoming Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) conference, Microsoft has announced a number of new solutions, projects and AI accelerators to assist hospitals and healthcare professionals in making intelligent health a reality. Last year the company launched Healthcare NexT to accelerate healthcare innovation through the use of artificial intelligence and cloud computing. After working together with pioneers in the industry, Microsoft is bringing its research and product development in the field to healthcare providers, biotech companies and organisations so that they too can utilise AI and the cloud to innovate. Microsoft Genomics, which will be generally available on Microsoft Azure, will provide researchers and clinicians with cloud-powered genomic processing services. The company has also named ST.

Healthcare is an industry that touches all of us, given the most basic of human goals: we all want to lead healthy lives. Last year we embarked on Healthcare NExT, a Microsoft initiative which aims to accelerate healthcare innovation through artificial intelligence and cloud computing. By working side-by-side with the healthcare industry's most pioneering players, we are bringing Microsoft's capabilities in groundbreaking research and product development to help healthcare providers, biotech companies and organizations around the world use artificial intelligence (AI) and the cloud to innovate. It's exciting work with unique challenges, and in the lead-up to next week's Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) conference, we're announcing a number of solutions, projects and AI accelerators that we believe will help make intelligent health possible, with more details below: We will also continue progress on current Healthcare NExT research-based projects like our Health Bot project as well as our partnerships with UPMC and Adaptive Biotechnologies. Several themes emerge at the convergence of healthcare and technology.