Microsoft for Healthcare: technology and collaboration for better experiences

The healthcare industry’s leading minds are getting ready to educate, intrigue, and inspire attendees next week at the HIMSS19 conference—a leading healthcare IT event in the US. We expect to see many innovative ideas and solutions to the most prevalent and persistent challenges in modern health, and we are excited to show new technologies making a real difference in people’s lives and demonstrate Microsoft’s commitment to transforming how healthcare is experienced and delivered.

Over the last few years, we have been learning alongside industry experts and making steady progress in helping health organizations navigate complex technology transformations. We have been so pleased by the enthusiastic response of the providers, payors, software developers, device manufacturers and pharmaceutical companies we’ve been working with.

But what drives us most is the profound impact on people. As we all look for more personalized and transparent approaches for healthcare services, technology transformation will help providers deliver modern patient experiences that promote patient engagement, satisfaction, and well-being while increasing the chances of more successful treatment.

This year at HIMSS, we will talk about how Microsoft’s technology and partnerships are helping empower care teams, improve clinical and operational outcomes and advance precision healthcare, with a specific focus on putting people’s privacy at the center. To kick things off, today we’re announcing several new innovations supporting the industry’s transformation:

• Microsoft 365 for health organizations: New capabilities in Microsoft Teams that enable healthcare teams to communicate and collaborate in a secure hub for teamwork.
• Microsoft Healthcare Bot: Now generally available, this service helps organizations create AI-powered, compliant virtual assistants and chatbots for a variety of healthcare experiences.
• Azure API for FHIR®: A new tool to help health systems interoperate and share data in the cloud.

Empowering health organizations with secure messaging and AI-powered tools

People are at the heart of healthcare – physicians, nurses, clinicians and of course, their patients. We are committed to empowering care teams with the tools they need to deliver their best care as well as empowering people as they interact with various aspects of the healthcare system.

When it comes to secure communications, many clinicians report having to choose between convenience and compliance. Adhering to compliance has often meant having to wait for critical information at the point of care. Conversely, many clinicians have turned to consumer messaging apps that facilitate communication but can compromise security.

Microsoft is working hard to ensure convenience and compliance are no longer a zero-sum equation. Today, we are announcing new capabilities in Microsoft Teams, a secure hub for teamwork that enables secure messaging and collaboration workflows that tap the wealth of patient information housed in electronic medical records.

Enable secure workflows in Microsoft Teams: The new priority notifications feature in Teams alerts a recipient of an urgent message on their mobile and desktop devices until a response is received, every two minutes for up to 20 minutes; message delegation enables clinical staff members to delegate their messages to another recipient when they are in surgery or otherwise unavailable. We are also announcing the ability to integrate FHIR-enabled electronic health records (EHR) data with Teams. The ability to view EHR data is enabled through partnerships with leading interoperability providers, including Dapasoft, Datica, Infor Cloverleaf, Kno2 and Redox. Clinical or hospital staff can securely access patient records in the same app where they can take notes, message with other team members, and start a video meeting, all in a single place to coordinate care.

For health organizations looking to optimize operational processes or create new experiences for their people and patients, we are also announcing the Microsoft Healthcare Bot general availability.

Microsoft Healthcare Bot: The Microsoft Healthcare Bot service is now generally available after first being introduced as a research project in 2017. It is designed to empower healthcare organizations to build and deploy compliant, AI-powered virtual health assistants and chatbots, and includes important features like healthcare intelligence, medical content and terminology, and a built-in symptom checker. The Microsoft Healthcare Bot service is fully extensible to help organizations adjust the bot to solve their own business problems, and can connect to health systems, like EHRs. In addition to partners like Premera, today we are announcing bots available, or available soon, from Quest Diagnostics, Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta and Clalit Health Services.

Securely connecting data for better clinical and operational outcomes

Our bodies are a lot like complex computers, and each interaction with today’s health system creates a new data point. These data points are often spread across multiple records, with valuable insights somewhat hidden in siloes. Microsoft is committed to helping address this opportunity by developing technology that connects data and surfaces important insights at exactly the right time, with privacy and security at the core.

A better-connected healthcare system would provide clinicians with more complete profiles of their patients, researchers with more complete data to study, and individuals with more information to take ownership over their health. I hear this often from leading experts in the research and care delivery communities.

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