Keeping patients data safe with Office 365
Empower your Care teams and stay Secure and compliant
“At least you have your health.” It’s a common platitude, but it underlies a more important truth when it comes to data: regardless of what else you hold dear as an individual, nothing is as precious as your health. This value on health – more than money or your day to day activity – carries through when talking about data.
Microsoft understands that for you—our healthcare customer—to realise the benefits of the cloud, you must be willing to entrust your cloud provider with one of your most valuable assets—your data. If you invest in a cloud service, you must be able to trust that your customer data is safe, that the privacy of your data is protected, and that you retain ownership of and control over your data—that it will only be used in a way that is consistent with your expectations.
Microsoft strives to earn your trust in Microsoft Azure. Our long experience running online services has involved extensive investment in foundational technology that builds security and privacy into the development process. Over time, we’ve developed industry-leading security measures and privacy policies, and participated in international compliance programs with independent verification of how we measure up.
Earning the trust with O365 in the NHS
An example of Microsoft striving to earn and keep your trust is our relationship with the NHS and its implementation of Microsoft Office 365, which is accredited under ISB1596 to store patient data. For healthcare organisations, trust is essential as you move clinical applications and datasets containing protected health information (PHI), including patient demographics and treatment information, to the public cloud. And Now that the UK data centres have opened, Microsoft can also provide data residency in the UK.
See how SLAM are taking advantage of cloud services:
It is critical as you share data across the health ecosystem, and expand how and where health professionals and patients access confidential information, to work with a service provider that you can trust. You must trust that confidential information is protected, that it’s held and managed securely and in compliance with regulations and laws, and that its privacy is protected. Microsoft Health Accreditations include:
- The NHS ISB1596 secured email standard to hold patient data in email.
- ISO27001 (a pre-requisite to meet the ISB1596 accreditation)
- ISO27018 the first cloud supplier to meet the international accreditation for data privacy
In addition, we support HIPAA and the HITECH Act, as well as the Minimum Acceptable Risk Standards for Exchanges (MARS-E). For more information about our commitment to security, compliance, and privacy to protect health information in Microsoft business cloud services, please click here.
Beyond trust: broader benefits of Office 365
What IT savings can be made? And is migration to O365 free? Microsoft is one of very few hyper-cloud suppliers, providing services to millions of users 24×7. The services provided are also ‘evergreen’ meaning that patching an Exchange or SharePoint server is a thing of the past, freeing up expensive IT resources to focus on added value activities rather than maintenance.
Microsoft also provides FastTrack: a free resource that comes with the Office 365 licences designed to help you, see value from the cloud as soon as possible. FastTrack centres provide remote support for customer IT teams and/or Microsoft partners to migrate and adopt cloud technology, including migrating your email into O365. They are a specialist team made up from Engineering, Support Services and the Consulting practice to help set up the tenant, migrate data (whether that be network drives to OneDrive or email to Exchange Online). They will also provide resources to help users adopt the service.
Take a closer look at FastTrack
Supporting Digital Transformation in the NHS through Office 365 services
Microsoft is committed to helping NHS organisations move to more digitally enabled healthcare. We have entered into an agreement with NHS Digital to offer special pricing tailored to the specific functionality requirements of the varied user profiles of people working in in the NHS.
The agreement includes dedicated pricing for organisations using NHSmail who may also want to take advantage of additional cloud services from Microsoft.
To find out more about these offers, and how you can benefit, please email NHS_O365@microsoft.com.
