Microsoft, UpToDate partner to give clinicians evidence-backed treatment recommendations

Microsoft is partnering with a new company in an effort to double down on its healthcare ambitions.

Professional software provider Wolters Kluwer Health’s clinical decision support tool, UpToDate, is integrating with Microsoft’s Dragon Copilot AI clinical assistant, Microsoft 365 Copilot, and Microsoft Teams, the two companies announced today.

UpToDate is an over 30-year-old subscription-based content library full of peer-reviewed clinical information and recommendations for 13,000+ healthcare topics across 25 specialties, all written exclusively for UpToDate by physicians. It’s used as a reference tool in more than 50,000 institutional sites worldwide.

The collaboration will allow Dragon to cite and link back to UpToDate’s content when guiding its more than 600,000 users, Hadas Bitran, partner general manager of health and life sciences AI services at Microsoft, told Healthcare Brew.

“This integration allows us to provide information [and] answers to clinicians within their workflow from a trusted source,” Bitran said.

The deets. Essentially, UpToDate’s content library will be “plugged in” to Microsoft’s system, Yaw Fellin, SVP and general manager of UpToDate clinical decision support and provider solutions, told Healthcare Brew.

The information gathered by Microsoft’s AI through its ambient listening and scribing features will be combined with the information in UpToDate’s library to create custom recommendations for patient care, all without leaving the Microsoft ecosystem, said Fellin, who described the move as a response to customer demand.

“We might have a recommendation on what’s the best way to treat hypertension, but if you know from the ambient experience that the patient has had elevated blood pressure for the last week or month or if you know that the patient happens to be pregnant…what you’re going to get is a much more sophisticated, rich set of recommendations,” Fellin said.

This collaboration is the latest step in Wolters Kluwer Health’s efforts to remain a go-to physician resource in the era of AI search.

In September, Wolters Kluwer Health announced the introduction of its own generative AI, UpToDate Expert AI, trained exclusively on UpToDate’s content. It provides a similar service as other healthcare-focused generative AI search tools, like OpenEvidence.

But whereas other tools train their bots directly on peer-reviewed literature or on information from the internet, UpToDate’s generative AI is trained on its library of expert-written clinical recommendations based on peer-reviewed literature.

This AI is not being used in the Microsoft deal.

UpToDate also has a partnership with ambient note-taking software Abridge, announced in October 2024.