Ohio State Wexner Medical Center and Microsoft Announce Five-Year Partnership to Develop Smart Hospitals

The initiative will initially focus on deploying connected hospital operations and migrating 70% to 80% of the medical center’s enterprise storage and compute workloads to Microsoft Azure.

The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center and Microsoft Corp. have announced a five-year strategic partnership to co-develop a Smart Hospital model, combining clinical systems, facility management, cloud infrastructure and artificial intelligence (AI).

The initiative will initially focus on deploying connected hospital operations and migrating 70% to 80% of the medical center’s enterprise storage and compute workloads to Microsoft Azure.

The partnership will integrate Microsoft Azure, Internet of Things (IoT) technology and AI to improve hospital operations, optimize resource utilization and support clinical care. The smart hospital architecture is already operational at the Richard M. Ross Heart Hospital and James Outpatient Care facility, where it is being used to optimize energy consumption, room occupancy and medical asset distribution.

The operational model will also serve as a blueprint for Ohio State’s new University Hospital inpatient tower and provide a framework for expansion across its regional outpatient network.

Cloud Migration and Enterprise Data Integration

As part of the partnership, Ohio State Wexner Medical Center is transitioning 70% to 80% of its enterprise storage and compute workloads to Microsoft Azure. The migration will include digital pathology image stores, diagnostic radiology archives and academic research computing workloads.

The medical center is also establishing a secondary cloud backup environment on Azure for its primary electronic health record (EHR) system to strengthen disaster recovery, system availability and business continuity.

Another focus is building a centralized enterprise data platform using Microsoft Fabric and OneLake. The platform will integrate clinical, operational and financial data across academic colleges, inpatient facilities and outpatient locations.

Initial applications include predictive analytics for operating room utilization, emergency department flow management and clinical nurse staffing requirements. The infrastructure will also provide secure, HIPAA-compliant research environments where researchers can access standardized, de-identified clinical datasets.

AI Deployment in Clinical Workflows

The partnership will also expand the use of generative AI and ambient documentation across clinical settings. Care teams at Wexner Medical Center are using Dragon Copilot, which integrates Nuance DAX technology, to draft structured clinical notes from patient-provider conversations. Physicians review and attest to the generated documentation.

Additionally, Microsoft and Ohio State clinical teams are developing AI-supported oncology workflows for multidisciplinary tumor boards. These will bring together digital pathology, radiology imaging, genomic sequencing reports and longitudinal patient histories in a consolidated workspace.

John J. Warner, MD, Chief Executive Officer of The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center and Executive Vice President at Ohio State, said, “Artificial intelligence represents one of the most significant opportunities to transform and improve how hospitals care for patients. Through this collaboration, we have an opportunity to help reimagine the future of healthcare as we bring together Ohio State’s academic medical expertise with Microsoft’s technological capabilities to accelerate the pace of innovation across patient care, research and education.”

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