Ohio State and Microsoft sign a five-year AI and cloud hospital deal

Ohio State University and Microsoft signed a five-year partnership to move up to 80% of the university’s storage and computing to Azure, expand AI note-drafting at its Wexner Medical Center and build “smart hospital” systems. No financial terms were disclosed.

Ohio State University and Microsoft have signed a five-year deal to bring more AI and cloud computing into the university’s Wexner Medical Center, Microsoft said on Tuesday. Neither side disclosed financial terms.

The biggest shift is in infrastructure. Ohio State aims to move 70% to 80% of its storage and computing to Microsoft’s Azure cloud, including pathology and medical imaging. It will also keep a backup of its electronic health records on Azure, so staff can still reach them if its own systems fail.

Doctors already use Microsoft’s Dragon Copilot to draft notes from patient visits, which they then check and sign off. Such AI scribes can still make serious errors, as NHS records showed this year.

Other parts are earlier. Two Ohio State buildings run a “smart hospital” system that links building and clinical equipment to save energy. A shared data platform for forecasting things like surgery demand and staffing is still at the design stage, and an AI tool for cancer case reviews is only being explored.

“Artificial intelligence represents one of the most significant opportunities to transform and improve how hospitals care for patients,” said John J. Warner, the medical centre’s chief executive.

Big tech firms are racing to sell AI to health systems. NHS England is rolling out Microsoft’s Copilot to 505,000 staff, and Google Cloud launched Gemini for healthcare on the same day as the Ohio State deal. Amazon’s AWS also unveiled a $100M health programme.