Delphine: Our research has shown that there is large untapped potential for digital solutions along the life sciences value chain. How can the tech industry play a larger role in driving patient outcomes and realize the full potential of innovative therapies?

Elena: The pharma industry is exploring many exciting frontiers with healthcare providers, data scientists, and other ecosystem partners. Top of mind for me is helping the pharma industry improve upon the success rate for new therapy development, with only around 12 percent of drugs in clinical trials making it through to regulatory approval today.²

Industry leaders are increasingly using advanced analytics to accelerate drug discovery and development—for example, use of large biomedical datasets and real-world evidence (RWE) for in-silico modeling of human biology—and we are now seeing emerging use cases in foundation models and generative AI.³ Some of these models, like PubMedBERT, could empower biologists in various scenarios of scientific discovery by helping them mine and generate biomedical text.⁴ Other foundational models encode molecule representations and have the potential to fundamentally change drug discovery not only by predicting which molecules (drug candidates) bind better to certain proteins (disease targets), but also now generating new molecules that can then be tested in the lab. There are many other advances in AI that can help across the care continuum too, such as Text Analytics for Health, which extracts and labels relevant medical information from unstructured texts such as doctor’s notes and electronic health records. This can then be fed back into the discovery and development process to improve treatments.

In addition to AI, the tech industry can help by ensuring all this data can be stored, matched, and available to be analyzed by as many researchers and companies as possible, and done in a way that upholds principles of privacy and security. Terra, a secure biomedical research platform co-developed by the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and Verily, provides this capability.

Tamara: Biopharma creates molecules that can save patient lives, but this is just one part of the journey. We need to find the right patients for therapy, monitor those patients while on therapy, and monitor post-therapy to watch for any recurrence. This calls for a continuous journey and not a point solution.

We still see too many non-adherent patients taking less than 80 percent of their prescribed medicine,⁵ or worse, patients who have delayed medical care all together. Remote patient monitoring technology can really help here. Devices like weight scales, pulse oximeters, blood glucose meters, blood pressure monitors, and wearables can offer clinical decision support by enabling providers with continuous data to better care for patients.  

There is also a significant amount of data being captured through medical images across the care continuum. At Nuance, we see AI increasingly being used to support healthcare clinicians with their clinical decision-making (for example with Precision Imaging Network). Research and development (R&D) researchers can use all of this data to improve therapeutic interventions—using AI for biomarker discovery and patient identification and monitoring in clinical trials—and ultimately accelerate time to market.

No company can do this alone. Working with partners who have the data, understand digital touchpoints, and can deploy AI models, we can help patients get what they need at every stage of the journey to achieve the best possible outcomes.

Delphine: This partnership and ecosystem theme is critical. How can biopharma companies rely more on ecosystem partners, create more flexible and resilient operating models, and overcome their preference for owning capabilities and capacity outright?

Elena: Many of the advances in science and technology go beyond the core capabilities of a pharmaceutical company. We’ll see transformational change as AI capabilities are embedded in solutions, which requires collaboration across the ecosystem. Tech players can provide secure and scalable infrastructure, such as cloud, AI, and machine learning toolboxes. Academic institutions, government bodies, and healthcare providers can provide large, curated datasets to supplement those of pharma companies.

McKinsey’s recent research¹ confirms my own experience that large talent gaps in data science and engineering can be barriers to innovation. Embedding these new technologies in core capabilities and collaboration tools across an organization will democratize the use of AI, widening the user base beyond data scientists and engineers and promoting innovation.  What we believe is going to be the real change is when these enhanced capabilities are embedded in the solutions of many, not in the hands of only a few.

At Microsoft, we value collaboration with our partners to provide the connecting glue so that pharma companies can focus on the science. For example, through our partnership with SOPHiA GENETICS, we are providing secure and scalable cloud infrastructure, coupled with the SOPHiA DDM™ Platform, enabling multimodal data-driven care across a network of more than 750 connected healthcare institutions. So far, the SOPHiA DDM™ Platform has supported the analysis of more than 1.2 million genomic profiles. With each incremental profile, SOPHiA GENETICS’ algorithms become more robust, benefiting patient outcomes.

All of the partners in our ecosystem are pushing the boundaries in different ways. The ability to collaborate and build on these capabilities will be a key driver of change in the years to come.

Tamara: To win in a modern ecosystem, pharma companies will need a different approach to capability building. Two century-old companies come to mind—one medtech that believed it needed to create its own digital capabilities to protect its intellectual property, contrasted to a pharma company that joined a partnership ecosystem to augment digital and AI tooling beyond its core capabilities. The better model is to co-create new solutions to ensure that patients achieve the right outcomes with the molecules biopharma has created and is continuing to create.

Tech players are investing more than pharma companies in tech-related healthcare deals. This underscores what Elena described—to drive innovation, there needs to be a symbiotic relationship between players in the ecosystem: tech players who provide the infrastructure and the intelligence toolkit, pharma companies who push the boundaries in developing innovative therapies, and providers and payors who engage with patients and provide the data to advance science across patient populations, care settings, and patient journeys.

Too often, real-world data is siloed in individual databases. It is often said that there are medicines waiting to be discovered in the rainforest. Well, many innovative therapies are waiting to be discovered in data that we can access today. By leveraging this real-world evidence along with the capabilities of our ecosystem partners—medication adherence players, AI developers, and data companies who are experts at “making the molecule”—allows biopharma to leverage the best of external expertise.

Figuring out what we can do together is relatively easy; deciding how to work together is harder. But we’re truly excited about the advances we’ll make together.

Learn more

You can always get the latest on Microsoft Life Sciences Solutions at our website, and stay informed about Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare by signing up for news and updates.

Life Sciences Solutions

Discover how the Microsoft Cloud is helping life sciences organizations accelerate innovation.

Explore resources today

Note: Microsoft and McKinsey & Company share ownership and publication rights of this blog post.

¹The Helix report: Is biopharma wired for future success? McKinsey & Company.

²Research and Development in the Pharmaceutical Industry, Congressional Budget Office.

³How Foundation Models Can Advance AI in Healthcare, Stanford University.

⁴Medication Adherence: Improve Patient Outcomes and Reduce Costs, AMA Ed Hub.

⁵BioGPT: generative pre-trained transformer for biomedical text generation and mining, Oxford Academic.

The post Examining the next wave of biopharma appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs.

The COVID-19 pandemic has negatively impacted our health, economy, and psychosocial well-being. Public health mitigation measures such as wearing masks, social distancing, avoiding large gatherings, and washing hands have demonstrated benefit in curbing the spread of infection, but have been implemented inconsistently and unevenly throughout the world, which has limited their effectiveness. Unfortunately, as we start a new year, we have seen the same daunting challenges that marked the end of last year, with the virus continuing to spread, hospitals in many places are becoming overwhelmed. Fortunately, the new year ushers in the arrival of recently approved vaccines, providing hope of light at the end of the tunnel. This hope, however, comes with a new challenge—accelerating the secure, safe, and equitable distribution of vaccines that can immunize the community and help restore a sense of normalcy in our lives.

The steps may be daunting, but vaccinations provide the safest and most effective path forward. The goal needs to be to vaccinate as many persons as possible, starting with the highest risk populations, and as quickly as possible. Technology plays an essential role in accelerating the distribution of the vaccine and evaluating, using global real-world data, how long the immunity lasts after vaccination to assess reinfection risks and determine if and when revaccination is necessary. It can also help facilitate cross-agency collaboration, enable remote work, improve data insights, and deliver trusted services without interruption.

The Microsoft Vaccination Management platform includes a growing collection of vaccination specific solutions from Microsoft and our partner ecosystem. They are designed to enable and extend an organization’s vaccination management capabilities and create end-to-end experiences for citizens, front-line vaccine administrators, and healthcare providers. Those offers can enable registration and prioritized scheduling of appointments, optimize material management by streamlining automatic replenishment of supplies, track-and-trace monitoring of prescriptions and medical supply deliveries, and streamline reporting to help public health systems stay focused on getting the vaccines, resources, and services where and when they’re needed. Using data and artificial intelligence (AI) solutions can provide actionable insights that enable public health and government officials to make informed policy decisions, improve vaccination education, and help avoid supply disruption. Most recently, The National Covid Vaccination Registration Platform for the 45 million eligible citizens in the U.K. is built via an Azure web form and hosted on Azure. As part of the overall service, System C, hosted and managed the National Immunisation Management System (NIMS) on Azure, also integrating with Primary Care and National Health Systems (NHS) nationally, using Power BI for reporting.

Embracing the power of digital, along with the power of human innovation and strategic partnerships, can help support the continuity and stability of public health and safety in every country as we work to stop the pandemic and prepare for any future public health risks.

Vaccination campaign management 

The promising news is that COVID-19 vaccinations have started. Many of the cold-chain logistical issues of delivering the vaccine to hospitals and clinics have been addressed. One example of this kind of problem-solving is FedEx and Microsoft’s collaboration on FedEx Surround, a platform that uses data to manage and track inventory in real-time originally built for businesses, now being used to help support vaccine distribution.  

However, as public health and healthcare organizations plan ahead, we should expect a new set of challenges. One of those is how to educate, inform, and encourage vaccinations for the broader population, several of whom may be unaware, unsure, or unconvinced about the safety and merits of the vaccine. Just as we have seen with prior vaccination campaigns, the active involvement of respected healthcare providers and community leaders will be central to the success of this effort. Technology can amplify these messages and also help deliver individualized recommendations. 

As states and local communities begin to vaccinate their populations, keeping the public informed about the status of the vaccine distribution will be important for maintaining trust. Public organizations are launching public-facing dashboards that track available doses, the number of residents vaccinated, both first and second doses, among other key data points. The state of Minnesota, for example, is leveraging Microsoft Power BI in its comprehensive public vaccine data dashboard.   

Early in the pandemic, we observed how AI-based chatbot technology could deliver personalized responses for individuals seeking answers to their questions about COVID-19. Individuals who screened at-risk based on their responses were then directed to a telehealth visit and/or to receive a COVID-19 test. This enabled streamlined screening and triage for large populations, which increased the availability of healthcare professionals and other resources to focus on the delivery of care. Azure Health Bot recently released new capabilities and templates for vaccinations to enable checking eligibility for COVID-19 vaccines and providing answers to related questions. Trinity Health, one of the largest healthcare systems in the nation, caring for more than 30 million people across 22 states, has effectively utilized AI chatbots to make it easier for patients to quickly connect to the care they need. From answering questions to routing patients to the appropriate avenue of care or service, the technology provided an improved experience.

As health organizations and public health services explore how to answer specific questions and provide individualized recommendations about the COVID-19 vaccine to large diverse populations, AI chatbot technology may again serve as a powerful tool. It can be used to help answer questions based on specific concerns that the person has and at the same time facilitate the registration for the vaccination.

Pre-registration and phased scheduling

Unlike the flu shot where individuals can simply request and receive one, the COVID-19 vaccine is in limited supply. COVID-19 vaccinations need to be prioritized. While several prioritization models have been proposed, such as the Fair Priority Model and recommendations from the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, adoption of these and other guidelines has been highly variable and subject to local interpretation.

However, one thing that remains constant is the need for all organizations to move quickly and not lose valuable time. Now is the time to embark on large scale campaigns to educate the public about the vaccine, address individual concerns, identify pockets of those who require targeted interventions, and most notably pre-register people for the vaccine. Individuals can be notified in an automated manner at a later time when they are eligible to schedule the vaccination. For example, the Oklahoma State Department of Health is partnering with Microsoft to develop a mobile app to help residents confirm vaccine eligibility and help schedule vaccination appointments.  

Pre-registration is not a new concept. It involves registering individuals prior to them fulfilling eligibility criteria. The same principle can be applied to COVID-19 vaccinations. Currently, registration and scheduling of individuals for vaccinations occur at the same time. By separating these two processes and enabling pre-registration to take place in advance of scheduling analytics and AI can then be applied to the pre-registration results to help predict which populations require further attention, where they are located, and the types of outreach most likely to increase vaccine registration rates in those communities.

Throughput efficiency

To increase the vaccination rates, we also need to consider how many individuals can be vaccinated per clinic per day. This is influenced by several factors, including the number of vaccines available in the clinic, vaccine storage capabilities, the number of staff available for patient intake and vaccine administration, access to personal protective equipment, and the size and configuration of the clinic. Each of these factors needs to be tracked and managed. Moreover, given that we are in the midst of a pandemic, we need to ensure that patient lines are short and socially distant, and rooms are uncrowded. To do this, scheduling and throughput need to be highly efficient. Scheduling blocks, automated reminders with appointment confirmations, rescheduling options when necessary, standby lists in case of no-shows and cancellations, and reporting of wait times are helpful approaches that can be enabled through technology. Cities like El Paso, TX have leveraged Microsoft’s Vaccine Registration and Administration Solution capabilities to support this effort establishing a public site for residents to register for a COVID-19 vaccine and schedule appointments and to enable effective management of vaccine dosages, vaccination phases, and other key logistical tasks. 

As COVID-19 vaccinations are extended to the broader population beyond healthcare providers and nursing home residents, health organizations need an efficient and reliable process to verify age, occupation, and presence of high-risk conditions. Verification of vaccine eligibility presents a major bottleneck in the vaccination process unless it is performed in advance of the visit. Pre-verification can be performed through automated or semi-automated matching of credentials using established databases. Secure, authorized access to these databases will need to be established in advance. Partnerships with health insurers and public health agencies, who have access to these types of data sets for large populations, may help facilitate auto-verification.  

Vaccination sites

Vaccine credentials

Going beyond the vaccination process, some individuals may want to have a convenient electronic verification such as a QR code that they received the vaccine, instead of carrying, and potentially misplacing, the paper records usually received with vaccinations. Any such electronic verification must preserve patient privacy and be universally accepted to be successful. To achieve this, any electronic health card should be built on international open standards (e.g., HL7 FHIR) with a decentralized infrastructure (see SMART Health Cards Framework). Already, there are a number of efforts aligning to bring broad-scale consensus around such an approach.  

One such effort is the recently announced Vaccine Credential Initiative (VCI), which is a coalition of public and private partners committed to empowering individuals with digital access to their vaccination records based on interoperable, privacy-preserving standards. Such a credential, based on the open industry standards of a distributed digital identity requires a secure, scalable foundation for vetting identity. Microsoft is helping organizations and governments around the world create a citizen decentralized-digital identity hub, which can be used not only for the pre-registration process but can form a component of the future digital identity wallet, while still giving citizens control over data access, and preserving privacy. 

Now there is a need to continue to re-evaluate the current processes for distributing and administering the vaccine. By exploring innovative approaches and leveraging technology health organizations can impact the timelines for delivering vaccines securely, equitably, and with speed which will ultimately save lives and help end the pandemic. Microsoft and its partners are committed to doing our part to help the global community deliver vaccinations in a safe, efficient, and prioritized manner.

We want to help enable your COVID-19 recovery through platform tools that support your vaccination management and administration. Contact your Microsoft representative or email MSFTCOVIDSolutions@microsoft.com to learn more.

The post Improving the pace of vaccine distribution through technology appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs.

There is a moral and economic imperative for European health leaders and policy makers to extract value from the ever-growing amount of health data, as it holds the potential to empower a healthier, more sustainable future for all. As health authorities and leaders gather in Malta for the eHealth Week, Microsoft and the Cloud in Health Advisory Council release a Call to Action on Health Data to ensure that Europe’s new privacy framework best serves Europe’s citizens – starting with its patients. With the digitization of everything in our lives, the idea that data and intelligence empowers better health is our new technology normal. Massive amounts of data can be stored and processed cost-effectively thanks to secure and privacy enhanced cloud services.  With artificial intelligence applied to health, more data can be analyzed faster than ever and turned into insights that care teams can use to enable better health outcomes for individuals and populations. And with today’s cybersecurity technologies, all of this can be done in a way that upholds timeless values around protecting patient security and privacy. So, what is holding us back? Reality shows that many health systems aren’t yet realizing the full potential of secondary use of health data – i.e data used in research to improve health care and services of the population or cohorts of patients. There is the lack of clarity around how secondary data can bring positive impact on people’s health. More generally, evidence shows that there is low awareness of how this goes hand in hand with patient privacy and security. The discussion of how data for better health can go hand in hand with data protection, is especially important at a time when the EU and European Economic Area (EEA) Member States progress towards implementation of the new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) by May 2018. To help health organizations prepare for GDPR and take a patient-centric approach to usage of health data, on May 10^th we published a Call to Action on “Health Data: Saving Lives and Protecting Patients’ Rights,” leading with the following recommendations:

• Regulators and policy makers should be sensitive to differences between “primary” and “secondary” uses of health data. 
• “Cloud-first” policies should be promoted to improve primary care across Europe.
• All stakeholders should engage in dialogue and awareness raising that drive a better understanding of the value, safeguards and ethics of “secondary use” of data.
• Member States should ensure that their GDPR implementation enables privacy and security and improves health outcomes.
• Stakeholders should support research on a new ethical framework for health data and “data donation”.

As we think about how to delineate between primary and secondary uses of data and the kinds of storage, security, and privacy controls that may be appropriate in the different use cases, my colleague Andreas Ebert (Regional Technology Officer EU) introduced the idea of a “data re-use maturity model”. Promoting policies that advance secondary use of data could help shift the focus of health systems to preventing illness, rather than just treating it. As your health organization digitally transforms to innovate with health data, please let us know if you have any questions or need any help via email, Facebook, or Twitter. And stay tuned for detailed guidance in the upcoming whitepaper. In the meantime, we encourage you as health leader and stakeholder, to raise awareness and join forces to promote secondary use of health data for better health. You can read previous blogs by me and Neil Jordan to find out how health organizations are already using AI to promote better health. And you can learn about key privacy, security, and compliance considerations for health organizations and their use of the cloud. Learn more:

• Building Rigor into Cybersecurity: A Blueprint for Healthcare Organizations

The post Harnessing health data for better outcomes: a call to action appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs.

The goals of the Alliance are to drive broad public awareness of how AI can empower better clinical and operational outcomes and to help ensure everyone has the competencies and the tools they need to build intelligence into health solutions and bring them to market. Alliance partners are also committed to advancing policy conversation around the use of health data in AI scenarios— and helping frame the debate on ethical considerations that these new technologies will bring about.

Thanks to the application of AI, health professionals will do a quantum leap in the journey towards value-based health care. They may increase the rate of discharge combined with lower re-admissions. They may succeed in keeping patients out of hospitals, in helping early diagnosis of patients with rare diseases and in supporting citizens with epilepsy or chronic conditions to live normal lives being monitored from their living-room instead of having to wait for hours in the emergency room. They can also succeed in triaging patients more effectively thanks to the support of health bots, and in supporting patients through companion coach bots post-surgery or through their treatment to enhance adherence. AI can identify fraudulent processes and claims that impose waste and cost to the system, or empower doctors to better prepare surgeries or get ready for complex radiotherapy treatments.

And this is just the beginning…These and many more scenarios are unfolding in front of our eyes, often being co-designed with health professionals, thinking about better outcomes and having the patient in the center.

And these AI Health solutions are available today, they are not a far off to be proven mirage.

Here are just a couple examples available today and you can discover more solution references at “Democratizing AI in Health:”

Microsoft health bot and AI technology powered by Capita Healthcare Decisions uses market-leading clinical triage content to help empower individuals to check their own healthcare symptoms online, directs patients to the right level of care the first time, and connects health professionals to one main integrated clinical hub that combines decision management and healthcare services.

By leveraging systems of intelligence in the Meliora platform, 400 neonatologists from 52 Portuguese UCIN’s (Neonatal Intensive Care Unit) will be able to better understand, predict and prevent the spread and causality of Very Low Weight Newborns and the impact of premature babies and newborn morbidity and mortality. This work supports Microsoft and Prologica’s commitment to support the Sustainable Development Goals and the targets on SDG 3 around maternal health.

Besides empowering better health, AI will also stimulate economies. Start-ups and innovative, established companies working on AI in health will benefit from an exponential compound annual growth rate of 42 percent year-over-year by 2021, delivering higher value jobs and local economic development¹.

By democratizing AI, we will see a new era emerge. Communities will grow and develop to realize both the health and economic benefits of this exciting technology. On the way, there will be questions and we are here to reflect, learn, innovate and iterate together. That’s what the AI in Health Partners Alliance is all about.

Learn more and get involved in democratizing AI in health for the greater good. Read the Official Microsoft Blog for more information on this exciting partnership.

Democratizing AI: Partners

_______________________
¹Frost & Sullivan, December 2015 – Cognitive Computing and Artificial Intelligence Systems in Healthcare

The post The time has come to democratize AI and empower better health outcomes appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs.

Having spent the last few weeks traveling across Europe – from Norway to Portugal and passing by Barcelona for the WoHIT – to talk about Digital Transformation in health; here are my reflections. It’s reassuring to see different regions undertaking their own digital transformation journey based on where they are “right now” both in terms of digital readiness and transformation goals. Digital transformation is not a “yes or no” state of being. Rather, it is an evolving destination as technology continues to progress and expectations we have of health services continue to evolve. Everyone is somewhere along the continuum to: engage patients in new ways, empower care teams with collaboration and communication, optimize clinical and operational effectiveness, and transform the care continuum.

My colleague Elena Casas’ recent blog tells the story from a Spanish perspective on how we empower each person and organization to achieve more by making it easier for health professionals to connect with each other and with their patients using cloud solutions like those from Ribera Salud.

At WoHIT, Devscope – one of our Portuguese partners – was awarded the Elsevier Award for HVITAL, a solution deployed at São João Hospital Center able to predict up to 30% of ICU admissions, seven days in advance. In the Portuguese Ministry of Health Shared Services (SPMS) Dr. Martins realizing a transformation to is to empower citizens to access health services smoothly, and health professionals to harness the power of mobility, predictive health, and advanced analytics.

When it comes to systemic innovation, it’s exciting to see how countries like Sweden are infusing modern communication and collaboration capabilities into the health system at scale. For example, Cambio Healthcare systems is integrating Skype for Business capabilities into their Cosmic EMR to offer solutions that help health organizations across Sweden provide virtual healthcare to more people seamlessly. In Germany, Vitabook is opening the way to cutting edge services and storage of patient data in the cloud. They provide a unique health-account, which enables patients to connect with their necessary instances online – every established doctor, every clinic, every pharmacy – throughout Germany.

Thinking about how we transform the care continuum, I was honored to moderate a session on how health organizations are advancing in precision medicine and how genomics is benefiting from the computing power and scalability of the public cloud—which is a powerful lever for digital transformation. We had almost 130 people in a room crackling with energy as we discussed the game-changing innovation that we’re seeing in this field such as how to provide genomics data management solution to empower innovation with BioBanks, from Finland where partner BC Platforms is working with Helsinky University Hospital; to Mexico, with Codigo46 powered by the Microsoft Azure cloud., we also discussed Microsoft’s recent announcement about a computing method that makes a key aspect of genomic sequencing seven times faster. This time gain could empower clinicians to diagnose rare diseases in four hours instead of 28 hours, empowering better health outcomes to those who most need it, like 1,400 patients suffering from the Dravet Syndromat La Paz Hospital in Madrid, Spain. Our collaboration with researchers at La Paz hospital and the Dravet Foundation – made it possible to detect mutations in more than 200 epilepsy genes and get a diagnosis in a matter of months instead of years using the Microsoft Azure cloud.

Whether it’s machine learning for better clinical outcomes, genomics or systemic care coordination across the continuum, the digital transformation journey is about taking sure steps to empower better human experiences and patient outcomes. That’s what I saw at WoHIT. And it’s what I see every day in the work that our partners and health organizations across Europe are doing. If you want to discover more, join us at the Health Innovation Summit on January 31st-Feb 1st, 2017 in Brussels.

The post Health digital transformation: It’s an empowering journey, not a destination appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs.

In my last blog post, I focused on how organizations are harnessing the potential of the Internet of Things. For this post, I will address how the application of Machine Learning, with powerful cloud-based predictive analytics, has the potential to transform health in many ways, from early detection of dyslexia in Sweden to fraud detection and management in Croatia.

Helping schools identify students at risk for dyslexia. Optolexia, founded by researchers at Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, Sweden, built a dyslexia screening tool for young children, using a repository of eye-tracking data and an analytical engine built with cloud-based Microsoft Azure Machine Learning, Optolexia aims to help schools identify students at risk for dyslexia significantly earlier than current screening tests. With early diagnosis, students can receive appropriate treatments to boost learning skills and improve academic performance. The impact of such preventive machine learning capabilities is substantial, if we consider that as many as 10 to 15 percent of school-age children are dyslexic, and the International Dyslexia Association estimates that there are 1 billion people with dyslexia worldwide.

Identifying insurance fraud. A recent report from PKF Littlejohn LLP highlights fraud as a serious and growing problem for the health sector and shows losses to average 5.6% across all sectors, but to be even higher in healthcare at 6.1% in the UK NHS across all areas of expenditures – payroll, procurement, GP, dental, optical, and pharmaceutical services, as well as losses to income from patient charges.

When it comes to fraud detection, Machine Learning finds valuable areas of application, for example by analyzing past claims data in order to identify algorithm for detection of patterns used by hospitals to up-code claims. In Croatia, Microsoft is working with a customer to analyze over 30 million historical claims data. The power of advanced analytics, Power BI visualizations and Azure Machine Learning revealed massive practices of certain hospitals inflating certain claims. Just two of the identified cases resulted in $100k of overpaid claims by CHFI.

Empowering clinicians with KPIs at their fingertips. At Sana Kliniken AG, the third largest private hospital chain in Germany, physicians use mobile solutions, Microsoft Power BI, and enhanced natural language processing capabilities to provide better care. For example, chief clinicians can access clinical KPIs anywhere, anytime, to help them make informed decisions at the point of care that align with evidence-based best practices.

Analyzing data from patient medical devices. Millions of asthma sufferers worldwide depend on Aerocrine monitoring devices to diagnose and treat their disease effectively. The devices are sensitive to small changes in ambient environment, so Aerocrine is using a Microsoft Azure cloud analytics solution to boost reliability. As a result, the company can see data from the devices in real time. This helps Aerocrine relay valuable information from their customer service team to the end users and predict when consumable sensors will need to be replenished.

A truly ubiquitous transformation of health can only happen if even more health organizations take advantage of the powerful opportunities offered by advanced analytics and machine learning powered by the cloud.

And for more health organizations to take advantage of advanced analytics, they need tools that are as easy to use as they are powerful. Microsoft delivers just that with its cloud-first, mobile-first, advanced analytics solutions, such as Cortana Analytics Suite. Our solutions are designed to empower everyone across a health organization to gain the insight they need when and where they need it.

What’s your advanced analytics and cloud story? Please share it with us via email, Facebook, or Twitter. And please let us know if you have any questions or feedback.

The post The transformation of healthcare through machine learning and cloud-based predictive analytics appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs.

The future of health includes higher-quality, personalized, preventive and predictive care that’s more accessible and efficient. Microsoft’s bold ambition to build the intelligent cloud comes to life in healthcare thanks to the power of advanced health analytics, Internet of Things (IoT) and Machine Learning. In this blog post, we will be focusing on the Internet of Things.

Advanced analytics capabilities combined with the digitization of the physical world (Internet of Things) has tremendous impact when applied to remote monitoring and better treatment of chronic diseases. According to a McKinsey Global Institute 2015 report, IoT has the potential to cut costs by as much as 50 percent in chronic diseases management, equaling to a gain of $1.1 trillion per year in 2025. Use of IoT systems could enable societal benefits worth more than $500 billion per year. Interestingly, most of the IoT data collected today are not used at all, and data that are used are not fully exploited across various sectors – not only health and wellness – as less than 1% of data is currently used, mostly for alarms or real-time control, while more can be used for optimization and prediction.

Here are just a few examples of forward-looking health systems and technology companies embracing this transformation in Europe:

Creating an intelligent bedside system. Lille Regional Teaching University Hospital in France harnesses the potential of the Internet of Things (IoT), to improve the experience of the more than 87,000 patients it serves each year while enabling greater staff efficiency. The hospital has created an intelligent bedside system that vastly improves staff’s access to information, and helps patients more easily stay in touch with loved ones. It connects bedside terminals with multiple existing data sources and a secure backend system, making critical information more easily accessible from a single bedside source. By connecting 1,928 bedside terminals and 652 Internet Protocol televisions with multiple data streams and media capabilities, Lille is saving healthcare workers countless hours spent accessing and manually updating information.

Improving population health through epidemic management. The City of Vienna, with the support of Atos, is taking advantage of the cloud and analytics for its new epidemic management solution. The Atos Epidemic and Outbreak Management solution tracks and traces incident reports in real time, analyzes patterns, and predicts the risk of a disease spreading. The fully scalable solution, which runs on Microsoft Azure, is designed to address any type of disease, condition, or pathology.

For more health organizations to move to cloud, they need cloud services they can trust. Microsoft’s commitment to cybersecurity, data privacy, compliance, and transparency are the cornerstones of what we call the Trustworthy Cloud. We recently put together a resource to help health organizations address their concerns about the cloud and map their own unique journey to trusted cloud services. Check out the European Cloud Risk Assessment Framework.

At Microsoft, we work every day with health organizations, communities, and partners around the world to help create the future of healthcare — starting now.

What’s your advanced analytics and cloud story? Please share it with us via email, Facebook, or Twitter.And please let us know if you have any questions or feedback.

The post The future of health is more predictive and preventive when powered by advance analytics and the trusted cloud appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs.

It was an honor to host the 4th edition of the EU Health Innovation event this past December, which was attended by more than 170 health professionals, CIOs, health regional authorities, city leaders, health technology providers, and stakeholders. The focus was on the journey to Digital Health and the future of health services’ delivery.

At Microsoft, when we characterize the future, we see a mobile-first, cloud-first world. At our core, we are the productivity and platform company empowering organizations to do more and to achieve more in this mobile-first, cloud-first world.

So what does this mean for health organizations and health professionals? And what holds us back in the healthcare sector?

Innovative health organizations have started to experiment and embrace opportunities enabled by cloud and mobile solutions at scale. However, they remain the exception rather than the norm, and the health sector isn’t moving fast enough on the road to rapid transformation.

At least across Europe, our collective ability to succeed and transform is restrained by the level of confidence—or lack thereof—that organizations have in the cloud. Nonetheless, the question at hand remains not “if” but “when and how” to move to the cloud in health. We tackle some of the health organizations’ concerns in the recently released European Cloud Risk Assessment Framework.

This is yet another stepping-stone in our ongoing commitment to achieving the Trustworthy Cloud. The framework is a comprehensive resource to help health customers and partners embrace the cloud with more confidence. It features a detailed matrix of privacy and security controls, providing insight into the shared responsibilities of cloud services’ providers and cloud customers.

Complementing information from the framework with real day-to-day practice, panelists at the EU Health Innovation event demonstrated that cloud-enabled health is a reality that delivers value across countries and organizations. A few inspiring examples:

• Uwe Pöttgen, CIO at Malteser, a major charitable relief organization in Germany, spoke about how Malteser moved to a hybrid cloud platform to better serve its 48,000 volunteer workers. The organization is now more flexible and therefore more “patient oriented”—which is one step beyond being patient-centric. The mobile volunteers can easily check for the latest information on patients, schedule meetings, organize visits, and book resources from rooms to vehicles across 700 locations.

• Mark Taglietti, Head of ICT Service Delivery at University College London Hospital NHS Trust, discussed his organization’s move to the cloud, including finding the right way to undertake the required compliance and due diligence journey. He is open to sharing lessons learned with other Trusts interested in moving to the cloud.

• The City of Vienna, with the support of Atos, is taking advantage of the cloud for its new epidemics’ management solution as a service. The fully scalable solution, which runs on Microsoft Azure, is designed to address any type of disease, condition, or pathology.

• Combining mobility and the cloud is the way to achieve scalable health services’ delivery, enhance clinical research, and even empower oncology patients, as in the work led by Dr. Erard le Beau de Hemricourt, Chief Medical Officer at Esperity in Belgium. Clearly, there will be no real transformation in our sector without access to the scalable, economical computing capabilities required to unearth and process hidden patterns in an exponentially growing amount of health data.
• Health systems that take advantage of the combined power of health analytics and the cloud are poised to deliver more personalized, accessible, ubiquitous, and increasingly predictive care. Jorge Salluh, Vice President of Operations at Epimed, demonstrated how the hospital network Rede D’Or uses the cloud to analyze data from 1,000 ICU beds and cut infection rates by 20 percent. In Brazil today, 32 percent of ICUs use this solution to monitor 10,000 beds in more than 350 hospitals.
• A Microsoft health partner out of Poland, Kamsoft, showcased how the Regional Hospital in Suwałki leapfrogged to replace paper patient medical records with highly secure electronic documentation. The comprehensive computerization of the hospital has led to higher-quality patient care through 30 percent faster access to relevant medical information.
• Connecting remotely from Abu Dhabi, UAE, George Yacoub, Group CIO at SEHA, was bold about his organizational vision of a cloud solution that serves the needs of every clinician and patient.

All of the participants offered great stories about how technological advances are promoting better healthcare delivery. What our sector needs is even more pioneers from regional and city authorities, health institutions, technology platform providers and technology innovators to drive these changes at rapid pace and broad scale. One more example is the challenge met by Sláinte Healthcare, together with Microsoft and partners, in supporting Operation Smile’s recent mission to Hanoi, Vietnam.

There is no better time to be in healthcare and in the field of health technology innovation. The future of health is built around better engagement, patient empowerment, ubiquitous care team collaboration, mobile experiences, and actionable insights—all enriched by a world of sensors and data processed, stored, and analyzed through a rich ecosystem of solutions. The wealth of experiences and the exchange of ideas witnessed during this event provided even more hope that we are about to take the next leap in this transformation toward digital health.

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