Each year, about 20 million people around the world are diagnosed with cancer. In the United States, hospitals and specialty centers have a big challenge: giving each patient care that fits their needs. But less than 1% of cancer patients get treatment plans made by teams called multidisciplinary tumor boards. These teams have been shown to help patients do better.
One main reason for this low number is that cancer care takes a lot of time. Doctors and their teams spend between 1.5 to 2.5 hours per patient looking at different kinds of data. This includes medical images (called DICOM files), slides of tissue samples, gene sequencing results, and notes from electronic health records (EHR). This work is needed to make a treatment plan for each patient. But it also takes a lot of time and resources.
Artificial intelligence (AI) can help by organizing, analyzing, and combining all this complicated data. AI systems that use several agents can make workflows smoother. For healthcare leaders and IT managers, using AI platforms that can be changed and work with open systems is a smart way to make care faster while keeping it safe and accurate.
Modern AI platforms for cancer care often use multi-agent orchestration. This means many AI agents work together, each doing a special task. For example, one AI might make a timeline of the patient’s history. Another might look at medical images, while another checks cancer stages.
Microsoft’s Healthcare Agent Orchestrator is one example. It is available through the Azure AI Foundry Agent Catalog. It brings together different AI agents that handle many types of data for cancer care, including:
These agents talk to each other using technology like Microsoft Semantic Kernel and Magnetic-One. They share memory and context. They also work with doctors who check their suggestions, making sure everything is accurate.
One big plus of these AI platforms is that they are open and easy to change. IT teams and developers can make or change AI agents to fit their cancer care needs. Two main tools help with this:
Using these tools, hospitals can add new AI agents for special tasks or connect approved third-party agents. For example, Paige.ai’s Alba pathology agent works with Microsoft’s system using these methods. Developers can also use Microsoft Copilot Studio to build agents that use special models, unique clinical data, or hospital-specific rules.
This open design lets hospitals change AI tools quickly and grow them as needed. IT teams have more control and are not stuck with one supplier, which helps with following rules and keeping data safe.
Using AI platforms that you can change helps meet important goals in cancer care management across the U.S.:
Cancer care needs many specialists and data types working together. AI agents are now used to automate single tasks and whole parts of the workflow in cancer care:
These automated workflows depend on the agents working together. Microsoft Semantic Kernel helps coordinate communication and shared memory. The patient stays at the center, with AI supporting the healthcare team, not replacing people.
Top cancer centers in the United States are testing and improving AI orchestration to make cancer care better. Some examples include:
These centers focus on making sure AI outputs can be explained. Doctors need to follow recommendations back to original patient data. This clear reasoning builds trust and helps meet rules in important cancer care settings.
Cancer care leaders in the U.S. can benefit by using AI platforms that can be customized and built on open APIs and MCP standards. Multi-agent AI systems can reduce doctor workload, make care more uniform, speed up clinical trial matching, and keep data safe.
Administrators and IT managers should work with different teams to find workflow problems and study AI tools that fit their existing systems. Focusing on clear explanations, following rules, and easy use will help make AI successful and improve patient care.
Investing in these AI platforms can make tumor board workflows easier to handle. This lets cancer care teams spend more time on the most important work: giving patients personalized and timely treatment.
The healthcare agent orchestrator is a platform available in the Azure AI Foundry Agent Catalog designed to coordinate multiple specialized AI agents. It streamlines complex multidisciplinary healthcare workflows, such as tumor boards, by integrating multimodal clinical data, augmenting clinician tasks, and embedding AI-driven insights into existing healthcare tools like Microsoft Teams and Word.
It leverages advanced AI models that combine general reasoning with healthcare-specific modality models to analyze and reason over various data types including imaging (DICOM), pathology whole-slide images, genomics, and clinical notes from EHRs, enabling actionable insights grounded on comprehensive multimodal data.
Agents include the patient history agent organizing data chronologically, the radiology agent for second reads on images, the pathology agent linked to external platforms like Paige.ai’s Alba, the cancer staging agent referencing AJCC guidelines, clinical guidelines agent using NCCN protocols, clinical trials agent matching patient profiles, medical research agent mining medical literature, and the report creation agent automating detailed summaries.
By automating time-consuming data reviews, synthesizing medical literature, surfacing relevant clinical trials, and generating comprehensive reports efficiently, it reduces preparation time from hours to minutes, facilitates real-time AI-human collaboration, and integrates seamlessly into tools like Teams, increasing access to personalized cancer treatment planning.
The platform connects enterprise healthcare data via Microsoft Fabric and FHIR data services and integrates with Microsoft 365 productivity tools such as Teams, Word, PowerPoint, and Copilot. It supports external third-party agents via open APIs, tool wrappers, or Model Context Protocol endpoints for flexible deployment.
Explainability grounds AI outputs to source EHR data, which is critical for clinician validation, trust, and adoption especially in high-stakes healthcare environments. This transparency allows clinicians to verify AI recommendations and ensures accountability in clinical decision-making.
Leading institutions like Stanford Medicine, Johns Hopkins, Providence Genomics, Mass General Brigham, and University of Wisconsin are actively researching and refining the orchestrator. They use it to streamline workflows, improve precision medicine, integrate real-world evidence, and evaluate impacts on multidisciplinary care delivery.
Multimodal AI models integrate diverse data types — images, genomics, text — to produce holistic insights. This comprehensive analysis supports complex clinical reasoning, enabling agents to handle sophisticated tasks such as cancer staging, trial matching, and generating clinical reports that incorporate multiple modalities.
Developers can create, fine-tune, and test agents using their own models, data sources, and instructions within a guided playground. The platform offers open-source customization, supports integration via Microsoft Copilot Studio, and allows extension using Model Context Protocol servers, fostering innovation and rapid deployment in clinical settings.
The orchestrator is intended for research and development only; it is not yet approved for clinical deployment or direct medical diagnosis and treatment. Users are responsible for verifying outputs, complying with healthcare regulations, and obtaining appropriate clearances before clinical use to ensure patient safety and legal compliance.
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