How Azure AI Foundry and UiPath Can Create Actionable Care Pathways

Healthcare organizations have adopted automation, yes. However, a simple automation rationale is not enough to deliver integrated care pathways, actionable decisioning insights, or resolve persisting data silos.

Forbes reports that fragmented workflows and siloed data are costing healthcare organizations billions. It is predicted to reach $7.7 trillion by 2032. Oxford research states that misled and unstructured data increases administrative costs by $166bn, which amounts to 17% of the entire hospital expenditure. This leads to fragmented care pathways leading to poor communication and patient outcomes.

Healthcare organizations need more dynamic, actionable care pathways. The combined power of Microsoft Azure AI Foundry and UiPath can help you realize this goal.

Azure AI Foundry provides the AI tools and models; UiPath gives the automation platform. Collectively, AI Foundry and UiPath create agentic workflows that automate report reviews, referrals, and follow-ups. Unified data insights streamline the decisions and help healthcare providers deliver well-informed pathways.

Read the blog to understand the problem of building actionable care pathways. Explore how Azure AI Foundry and UiPath integrated solutions can help you overcome this with smart workflow automation and actionable insights.

Health organizations possess a massive reservoir of dispersed datasets across multiple systems—imaging reports, vital signs, medical history, and even health wearables. Therefore, information is in abundance.

The challenge is to effectively use the fragmented and diverse data to:

• Raise patients’ risk flags on time
• Activate timely follow-ups, triage, and diagnosis
• Recommend personalized treatments and care plans
• Enable cross-departmental collaboration, and generate holistic patient data
• Provide the next best steps for care providers and clinicians

Azure AI Foundry and UiPath address this challenge with Agentic AI. It leverages existing care pathways and proven results to raise timely triggers for immediate admin and clinical actions.

In healthcare, every detail matters. For instance, subtle changes in bone density imply relevant osteoporosis treatment. Detection of a tiny nodule on an x-ray can signal a more life-threatening disease, such as cancer. Incorrect imaging reports lead to misdiagnosis.

Agentic AI helps in collecting data and triggers timely action to determine appropriate care pathways. One of the challenging tasks is identifying incidental findings in radiology reports such as MRI or CT scans. A 2024 study finds that 50% of the CT scans miss crucial incidental findings. This is one of the persistent gaps in patient care. High volume of data, lack of standardized workflows, and poor data fidelity lead to this problem.

This impacts care quality, delays, increases costs, and liabilities. Azure AI Foundry and UiPath agents can alleviate this hurdle. UiPath Maestro provides the orchestrated platform that powers AI Foundry and UiPath agents to integrate and automate this complex healthcare process automation:

1. The combined duo accurately generates and delivers the final radiology reports.
2. Azure AI Foundry helps in validating the radiology data and PACS images, collating recent and existing findings along with the additional discoveries.
3. UiPath empowers healthcare organizations to accumulate all results, such as imaging, ERM histories, and AI-driven insights, and convert them into a complete follow-up patient report.
4. AI Foundry and UiPath agents then forward the collected information to the assigned care provider along with the original radiology reports. This reduces the time to find relevant patient information. The system summarizes patient information and alerts healthcare professionals to any incidental findings. This facilitates prompt care delivery using suitable clinical interventions.
5. Many healthcare organizations struggle with setting up a consistent business process, leading to operational complexities. UiPath Maestro simplifies the business process. It acts as a key orchestration layer that enables seamless data coordination across different systems. The collective unified data helps care providers and specialists to get consolidated and structured patient data across systems—on time.

Azure AI Foundry and UiPath agents with UiPath Maestro orchestration convert fragmented data into consolidated documents. This boosts clinical decision-making processes, offloads responsibilities from care providers, and enhances patient outcomes.

• The combined duo helps patient outcomes with research insights and analytics. The Azure Health Data Services, built with FHIR and DICOM standards, adheres to compliance. It leverages de-identified patient data to generate AI-driven health insights and analytics.
• It generates organized reports that are easy to reuse, refer to, and compare to current patient data.
• It streamlines health workloads, enabling health professionals and carers to focus more on patient well-being.
• It provides standardized data, useful for high-end ML and AI apps to generate cohorts for in-depth clinical trials and research.
• Health providers can quickly process imaging data at scale, which is crucial to respond to urgent diagnosis queries.
• You can automate a triage system and share the collected data with the relevant specialist for further assessment.

Pathways

Actionable care pathways need updated data, seamless task execution across all systems and departments, and smart automation. Azure AI Foundry and UiPath convert this into reality.

• Standardize and centralize patient data: Azure Health Data Services collect data from diverse systems. UiPath validates and organizes data into digestible formats. For instance, in the case of the stroke identification pathway, Azure AI assesses EMR, scans, and vitals. Next, it converts unstructured information into structured data formats via UiPath. UiPath Maestro shares this information with the assigned nursing and radiology teams and neurologists. The data-driven pathways cut down the decision time and accelerate the treatment process.
• AI-Powered Insights Speed Up Care Decision Support: Azure AI Foundry agents help clinicians and care providers to quickly understand potential health risks and tailor and modify care steps based on real-time patient data.
• Automated Care Handoffs: Care handoff failure is one of the common struggles in healthcare. These risks cause missed steps and delayed care handoffs. UiPath Maestro automates the sequential multi-step workflows. This ensures the activities’ completion, logs, and appropriate escalation if overdue. The workflow automation does not require manual care handoffs and follow-ups, making the care pathway process seamless and reliable.
• Delivers Personalized Care Plans: It helps clinicians and carers with care plans as per individual health conditions and risk profiles. This, in turn, lowers readmission rates and enhances patients’ health outcomes.
• Lowers Administrative Burden: It automates routine tasks such as documentation, data entry, patient data management, and billing. This helps healthcare professionals to spend less time on admin tasks and focus more on patient care.
• Real-Time Monitoring: Azure AI helps collect data from remote monitoring devices and wearables. UiPath assists in raising escalations when a patient’s data exceeds specific health metrics. This helps in timely care interventions and prevents unwanted hospitalizations.
• Quality Care at Scale with Compliance: Azure AI Foundry and UiPath comply with ONC, GDPR, and HIPAA. Moreover, health professionals can modify the digital care pathway with changes based on a patient’s changing health needs. This feature saves the need to create a care pathway from scratch and reduces the unnecessary costs incurred. On the other hand, its compliance helps healthcare organizations avoid costly penalties.

Developing actionable care pathways needs a unified ecosystem where workflows coordinate and enable the free flow of data and insights. Azure AI Foundry and UiPath help health organizations achieve this goal. Its combined power helps health professionals to streamline interdepartmental operations and data collection and convert them into a holistic patient data overview. This, in turn, helps health organizations shift from a reactive to a proactive decision-making process, critical for creating proper care pathways. It reduces administrative burden, accelerates patient care, and ensures data accuracy and reliability.

However, working with the right service provider, such as Evoke Technologies, is crucial in this regard. Our team of in-house experts possess the expertise of UiPath and Azure AI Foundry services. Our customized services give you the key to leveraging the benefits of Azure AI Foundry and UiPath to develop reliable care pathways and elevate patient confidence.

. Connect with us to know more.