Microsoft’s new health podcast: The future of healthcare, here today

What’s next in healthcare? We’ve got some ideas. In NextGen Health, a new podcast series launching today from Microsoft, we guide you through the future of healthcare through interviews with providers who have already begun to use groundbreaking technologies and Microsoft Healthcare industry experts. Listen to the first episode of NextGen Health podcast here, or keep reading for a sneak peek on some of the stories we cover.

Reimagining healthcare

You’re at your doctor’s office. You’re sitting casually in the exam room. Meanwhile, a surgeon is examining your brain. Thankfully, the slices and neural pathways your doctor can see from nearly every angle are on the OpenSight, a HoloLens mixed-reality headset calibrated and developed for surgical use by medical imaging company and Microsoft healthcare partner Novarad.

According to Novarad executive Chris Bijou, the OpenSight’s three-dimensional model—derived from patient scans and overlaid in real time onto the patient’s body—provides precision medicine that creates better outcomes for caregiver and patient alike.

“The biggest thing is, you’re not actually looking at the computer and then trying to calculate in your brain. ‘How far is that rib or how far is that heart where you’re trying to get into that ventricle,’” Bijou said. “You’re putting it right onto the patient, looking right down into it.”

That’s just one great example from our episode about reimagining healthcare.

Empowering care teams

It’s been a hard day. You’ve just spent a long shift as a nurse on the ER floor. You’re tired, your head’s just hit the pillow, and ding! There goes the phone. Then again. And again. How are you supposed to maintain good morale—not to mention stay in compliance with legal regulations—when you can’t sleep because your fellow caregivers are communicating via text?

“This is just not an environment that clinicians can do their best work in,” says Emma Williams, Corporate Vice President at Microsoft focused on modern workplace for healthcare.

But if all of those communiques, as well as images and information related to patients, were moved into an app like Microsoft Teams tailored specifically for healthcare organizations, you would remove the risk of privacy violations—plus you’d finally get some rest. And that makes you excited to show up for work on your next shift.

“To be able to deliver the right information, to the right people, at the right time will be a huge innovation,” Williams says. “We believe we can wrap those systems in a bubble of communication and collaboration that’s mobile first, that brings teams together, that allows them to be more highly effective.”

Listen to our podcast episode about empowering care teams to learn more.

Personalizing the Patient Experience

You’ve been experiencing some discomfort. It’s been a few weeks, so you get a referral and visit a specialist. What that doctor sees may not be a complete picture of your health, however. If all of the information about not just your illness, but your wellness, lives inside your electronic health record (EHR), your caregivers can have a much fuller picture of your needs. At the same time, clinicians can use your EHR to communicate with you in ways that work for you—like via text message—to remind you of an appointment, or to drink water, or to come in to take an A1C test because your bloodwork shows you may be at risk for diabetes, for example.

“It’s really a cultural shift and mind shift to think about, how do I offer medicine at a personal level using what I know about the consumer, all of the data I have inside my EHR,” says Andrea McGonigle, Managing Director for Microsoft’s US health and life sciences team.

That is just the start of what we cover in the third of the six episodes in the debut season of NextGen Health. Throughout the full series, we discuss genomic breakthroughs that can offer targeted, more effective cancer treatments, show how artificial intelligence in health providers’ back offices can reduce costs and increase efficiency—while continuing to put the patient first. And while these transformations are happening across the entire spectrum of healthcare organizations, learn what Microsoft, and our partners, are doing to ensure that patients’ and caregivers’ data remains secure and compliant.

This is the future of healthcare.

You can learn more about each episode on the NextGen Health website or download and listen to NextGen Health on Apple, Google or Spotify.

Jenn Roth

Director, Global Healthcare Product Marketing Microsoft Global Industry Marketing

Jenn Roth leads Microsoft’s healthcare and life sciences product marketing strategy and GTM messaging for the Global Industry Product Marketing team. She is the solution program lead for the Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare. Her experience includes hospital administration, product marketing, global communications, and commercialization across Class III medical devices and clinical SaaS applications.

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