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Microsoft for Healthcare: Driving healthcare change by empowering tech intensity

Health professionals sitting around a table looking at clipboards and tablets

Our Microsoft for Healthcare team and partners are excited to join health organizations, leaders, and experts to build a brighter future for the global health ecosystem so that everyone, everywhere has access to care that works.

The rate of disruption for health continues to accelerate. Healthcare organizations worldwide have implemented a breadth of technology solutions to transform how they enable personalized care for their patients, empower care teams and employees, secure and protect health information and use data insights to improve operational outcomes.

At Microsoft, we refer to that as tech intensity and believe that it’s not only about what technology health organizations want, but also what capabilities they can build to support access to value-based care into the future. The focus is the move from using the cloud to increase economies of scale to extracting insights from data that can encourage innovation and create an informed and empowered community of providers, payors, innovators, and individuals that will enable an ever-improving state of health throughout the world.

In the healthcare industry, we’re beginning to see steps to make that possible with the establishment of interoperability standards like Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR), the rise of data-driven technologies like AI, machine learning, and the Internet of Things (IoT), as well as ways of promoting data transparency, such as blockchain. At Microsoft, we’ve made investments like Azure API for FHIR to enable health system interoperability and sharing data in the cloud. This year we reaffirmed an interoperability commitment along with leading cloud providers to enable the frictionless exchange of health care data for patients and the industry. We continue to accelerate the ability to integrate health care data from medical devices and the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT)  to empower those working with data from medical devices to securely ingest and transform that data into the FHIR standard. Finally, we are committed to enabling our partners and customers to create new use cases and workflows using an FHIR-based data model.

The ability to unlock data is foundational to any healthcare organization’s digital transformation. Organizations achieving the greatest success are doing more than just implementing existing tech, they are developing their own digital capabilities and proprietary solutions that use data and AI to address the challenges faced by their communities, and seizing new opportunities to reimagine healthcare throughout the patient care journey. In essence, they are becoming change agents and, in the process, placing themselves at the forefront of innovation in this industry.

Examples of change leaders can be seen through customer stories, such as Providence St. Joseph Health creating personalized patient experiences; Northwell Health using data insights to improve operational outcomes; St. Luke’s University Health Network transforming clinical collaboration through their secure, cloud-connected workforce; Humana who’s using AI and predictive care solutions to reimagine health for aging populations and their care teams; and Walgreens Boots Alliance (WBA), who’s reimagining the delivery of health care services by delivering innovative platforms that enable next-generation health networks, integrated digital and physical health care experiences and new care management solutions.

Healthcare organizations looking to drive change in their health ecosystem have turned to Microsoft and our vast partner ecosystem to help them transform. We believe it’s not just about what technology they want from Microsoft, but also what culture and unique capabilities they are building to take their healthcare organization into the future. It’s about having a technology partner you can trust to make you independent with your own technology. Our mission as a company to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more is fundamentally centered on how we increase the tech intensity of every organization that we work with. At Microsoft, we are honored to be a partner in this exciting transformation.

 


This post has been updated on March 4, 2020, to reflect changes in Microsoft’s involvement with HIMSS 2020.