The innovations bridging health sciences and business in 2020

The decade’s first global health crisis has placed the spotlight on the need for healthcare technology that can prevent and solve the world’s critical health challenges. This last week, Microsoft shared progress on innovations helping to meet these objectives.

Today, we’re spotlighting intelligent health and business solutions from Microsoft Business Applications that empower health providers to help transform operations and deliver better patient experiences, better insights, and better care.

Healthcare organizations are leveraging Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform to improve both provider operations and patient outcomes. These customers are prime examples of our focus to enable tech intensity across healthcare, empowering organizations to develop their own digital capabilities that use data and AI to address challenges and tackle new opportunities.

Improving operational performance for healthcare nonprofits

Across healthcare, quality of care is increasingly dependent on synchronizing operations across staff to gain greater efficiencies and accelerate decision-making.

Partners In Health, a Boston-based social justice and health care nonprofit, serves impoverished communities in 10 countries, striving to bring modern medical science to those most in need. The team lacked a defined process to manage the more than 1,000 individual donors. Donor lists and reports were stored in various formats and places, and the aging customer relationship management system (CRM) provided limited insights into data stored in multiple siloed systems.

The team turned to Microsoft Power Platform, championed by one individual. In just one training session, Bella Chih-Ning, a manager on the Partners In Health Analytics and Applications team, felt empowered to create a Power App that let the gift officers manage many aspects of donations, and Microsoft Power BI reports to gain insights.  As a result, Partners In Health has the tools needed to raise the funds needed to bring world-class health care to those most in need.

Read the full story about how Partners In Health transformed the gift review process with Microsoft Power Apps and Power BI.

Personalizing healthcare on a single member-engagement platform

Another way Dynamics 365 is helping to improve operational outcomes is by helping make health insurance more convenient, supportive, and personal. MVP Health Care is using Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform to improve quality of care while lowering costs for its members.

Like other healthcare payors, MVP Health Care strives to provide high value care and seamless coordination by monitoring and managing members with programs designed to capture early diagnoses, prevent complications, and drive better patient results. Fully understanding members’ needs, however, was challenged by a customer relationship management environment that was pieced together from multiple siloed data sources and technologies.

MVP Health Care chose Dynamics 365 to build a comprehensive, centralized, and fully integrated member-engagement platform with a single view into each of its 700,000 members. MVP Health Care has tied everything together to centralize data streams, streamline processes, scale elastically, and promote member value, giving them a holistic view that will ultimately improve the overall health and wellbeing of the populations they serve.

Empowering more effective care teams for children with autism

To meet patient needs, care teams need the ability to rapidly analyze and obtain insights from patient data so clinicians and patients can coordinate effectively on treatment plans.

Encore Support Services, a behavioral health provider servicing children with autism, witnessed first-hand the challenges applied behavior analysis (ABA) providers face when utilizing inadequate solutions. With as many as ten individuals on a care team for a single child, coordination beyond what was possible with current fragmented solutions was necessary. Cumbersome documentation systems needed to be done away with to minimize practitioner burnout.

Encore partnered with Chorus Software Solutions to lay the foundation for what would become AutismCare, the first and only Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) compliant ABA solution. This cloud-based technology is built on Dynamics 365, Microsoft Power Platform, and Microsoft 365. The solution brings together previously siloed data to enable teams to coordinate care plans and patient data in real-time, empowering teams to deliver a more personalized, human experience to the autistic community at scale—a big step to ensure patients and families get the support and care they deserve.

In addition to AutismCare, Encore Support Services has worked with Chorus to develop several other solutions leveraging the full gamut of Dynamics 365 applications, including Dynamics 365 Sales and Dynamics 365 Marketing as part of an end-to-end practice management solution that empowers care teams and streamlines operations.

According to Encore Support Services, behavioral health is just the start. The platform can be tailored to a range of solution areas that can benefit from the proven improvements in clinical quality and outcomes.

Learn more about Microsoft’s focus on healthcare

These stories are just a few examples of how Microsoft Business Applications are helping transform patient and provider experiences. I encourage you to read more about our healthcare initiatives below and stay tuned to our blog for updates in the near future.