There is nothing more personal or important than our health. These last two years have exacerbated an already fragile healthcare ecosystem, taxed our essential services, and put unimaginable strain on frontline workers. In response to these mounting pressures, the healthcare industry has embarked on a digital transformation that has laid the foundation for a new era of innovation and collaboration. The opportunity to reimagine care has never been greater, and the stakes have never been higher.

Today, Microsoft and Nuance officially join forces to support the resilience of healthcare.

By combining Nuance’s deep domain expertise with the scale, security, and power of the Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare, we have an opportunity to put outcomes-focused AI solutions into the hands of health organizations everywhere. Together, Microsoft and Nuance will help our customers drive better decision-making, create more personalized experiences for both patients and providers, and tackle some of the toughest challenges in healthcare.

Enabling the best healthcare outcomes

Health organizations are applying AI across every aspect of the care continuum—from informing precision diagnostics and therapeutics to modernizing the digital front door for patient engagement to increasing clinician efficiency. But this is only the beginning of AI’s potential for transforming care delivery experiences and improving health outcomes for patients.

Microsoft and Nuance envision a future where technology helps drive more personal, affordable, effective, and accessible healthcare while improving the patient, care team, and administrator experience. To accomplish this, we are connecting Microsoft’s advanced cloud and AI capabilities—including human-level performance in a range of cognitive services—with Nuance’s industry-leading conversational AI, ambient clinical intelligence, and integration into the existing clinical workflows. This will support health systems to deliver real-world results and timely insights for practitioners, patients, and administrators.

Alleviating clinician burnout

The frontline healthcare worker “great resignation” and clinician burnout epidemic are two of the biggest challenges we have faced as an industry this decade. In collaboration with our trusted electronic healthcare record (EHR) partners and the broader healthcare ecosystem, Microsoft and Nuance will continue to bring the most advanced capabilities into the workflow of clinicians, radiologists, and frontline workers to help reduce the overwhelming burden of administrative tasks that have made it so difficult for them to do what inspired them to go into medicine in the first place.

It’s been almost two years since Nuance and Microsoft announced the integration of the Dragon Ambient eXperience (Nuance DAX) and Microsoft Teams. Innovated by Nuance and Microsoft, the integration of Nuance DAX and Microsoft Teams for telehealth is part of the ongoing strategic partnership to accelerate the adoption of ambient clinical intelligence solutions to improve healthcare experiences by reducing administrative workloads that lead to clinician burnout. Health systems across the United States are leveraging Nuance DAX to dramatically reduce clinicians’ administrative workloads, improve clinical documentation quality, enhance patient experiences, and produce better patient and financial outcomes. The response we’ve seen from both physicians and their patients has been overwhelmingly positive as it helps to restore the trusted doctor-patient relationship. In some cases, we’ve had the honor of seeing tears of joy from doctors when they realize they can turn their focus from the computer back to their patients—and this is only one example of what Microsoft and Nuance can achieve together.

Making healthcare experience more personal

Digital transformation is not only revolutionizing the provider experience, but also changing patient expectations for how they interact with their care teams, access important health information and resources, and receive care. Bringing together the depth and breadth of our combined organizations and portfolios, Microsoft and Nuance will apply the technology, talent, industry expertise, and a partner mindset to build even better, more empowering patient-physician experiences, whether it’s:

• Combating clinician and radiologist burnout by delivering superior clinical documentation solutions, digital work experiences, and collaboration tools.
• Understanding shifting patient preferences and demands, and how technology can help meet them.
• Streamlining workflows to help care providers focus on patient outcomes.
• Bridging the silos of medical information to inform precision diagnostics and therapeutics.
• Expanding access to care by mastering virtual health solutions and developing new best practices for remote, or hospital at home, care delivery.

Looking ahead, we know that healthcare will continue to be an ever-evolving industry with changing needs and requirements. But one thing will always remain true: healthcare is about people caring for people. The healthcare organizations we serve have earned their patients’ trust through the quality of the care and caring they provide. If technology companies are going to make a difference, it will only be through deep partnerships with the full care ecosystem and by earning their trust and the trust of the people they serve. Every solution we build, every partnership we forge, every innovation and advancement we bring to the market will be designed with that powerful vision in mind. 

As we enter a new era of innovation and partnership with our customers, we believe Microsoft and Nuance will continue to deliver technology that helps healthcare organizations deliver better experiences, insights, and care. We look forward to empowering practitioners and administrators to be adaptable and agile in this rapidly changing environment while building resiliency that helps us weather today’s challenges, address new ones, and build a better, healthier future for everyone.

Learn more

• Explore Microsoft and Nuance.
• Read the announcement blog.
• Explore Nuance in Healthcare.

The post Microsoft and Nuance joining forces to support the resilience of healthcare appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs.

Today marks the start of RSNA 2020, the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America. I participated in my first RSNA 35 years ago and I am super excited—as I am every year—to reconnect with my radiology colleagues and friends and learn about the latest medical and scientific advances in our field. Of course, RSNA will be very different this year. Instead of traveling to Chicago to attend sessions and presentations, and wander the exhibits, I’ll experience it all online. While I will miss the fun, excitement, and opportunities to connect that come with being there in person, I am amazed by what a rich and comprehensive conference the organizers of RSNA 2020 have put together using the advanced digital tools that we have at hand now.

It would be an understatement to say that this has been a year in which nearly everything is very different. From the tragic loss of life and rampant sickness to the economic disruption and the impact on our professions and our children’s education, so much of what we have been through because of COVID-19 has been extremely difficult. But the resilience of the response that so many people and institutions have shown in the face of all these challenges has been remarkable. And if it is possible to say there has been some good in all this, it would have to be the unprecedented transformation of the global healthcare ecosystem as hospitals, clinicians, and researchers have embraced a new generation of advanced digital health technologies that have helped them respond to the coronavirus crisis and laid the foundation for a more effective, affordable, and equitable future for healthcare.

Trends

As we move forward and the digital transformation of healthcare continues to accelerate, I see three significant trends that will influence the future of health and wellness.

One is the rapid emergence of virtual care through digital tools such as telehealth and remote monitoring that have made it safer and more convenient for patients to connect with their doctors during the pandemic, and that is empowering individuals to take charge of their health in entirely new ways. Virtual care has the capacity to personalize, accelerate, and augment treatment and prevention, saving time and money while improving outcomes. The ability to engage patients without requiring an in-person visit to a clinic will help ensure that they receive the right level of care and enable healthcare facilities to better manage the flow of patients into clinics and emergency rooms.

The second trend is the growing clarity of the promise of AI-driven precision medicine to serve as a major catalyst for improving health outcomes. As platforms for precision medicine and real-world evidence mature, we’ll see exciting opportunities to improve treatment and prevention as we personalize patient care and transform how we diagnose infectious disease, cancer, and autoimmune disorders.

And, finally, where healthcare organizations have long been reluctant to move data offsite due to security, trust, and privacy concerns, we have seen a historic shift to the cloud over the last nine months. Now, driven by regulatory changes, the massive increase in medical data, and the critical need to access and analyze all that data by providers, payers, public health agencies, and researchers, it’s clear to everyone that moving to the cloud is both essential and hugely beneficial, both to providers and to patients.

Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare

As part of Microsoft’s ongoing commitment to help healthcare customers and partners continue to make progress toward recovery and build more resilient and effective systems of care, in late October we announced the general availability of Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare. This powerful industry-specific solution provides integrated capabilities for automated and efficient high-value workflows, and advanced data analysis functionally for structured and unstructured data so that healthcare organizations can truly transform information into insight and insight into action.

Built on the trusted capabilities of Microsoft 365, Microsoft Azure, Microsoft Dynamics 365, and Microsoft Power Platform, Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare is designed to enhance patient engagement to make it easier for patients to interact with caregivers, empower health team collaboration to facilitate more efficient and rich real-time communication and collaboration across the care continuum, and improve clinical and operational data insights with the ability of healthcare organizations to connect data from across their systems to predict risk and help improve patient care and operational efficiencies. Our robust partner ecosystem extends the power of Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare by building and extending advanced health solutions to meet the most demanding challenges in healthcare.

Radiology

All of this makes it a particularly exciting time to be a radiologist. In many ways, our field has always been at the forefront of advances in the technologies that improve the movement, management, and analysis of large amounts of health data. This shouldn’t really be a surprise, given that medical imaging accounts for nearly three-quarters of all health data, and analyzing 3D medical images can require up to 50 GB of bandwidth a day.

At Microsoft, streamlining the flow of health data, including medical imaging data, has been a significant focus of our work over the past few years. With the release of the Medical Imaging Server for DICOM (Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine) in September, we offer developers powerful tools to ingest and persist medical imaging data in the cloud. Elevating interoperability, this is the first cloud technology to bring together DICOM data standard and FHIR (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources) which allows for persisting medical imaging metadata alongside other clinical data and sets the stage for multiple scenarios in research and diagnosis which may be too difficult or expensive to execute today.

Now, with Project InnerEye and the open-source InnerEye Deep Learning Toolkit, we’re making machine learning techniques available to developers, researchers, and partners that they can use to pioneer new approaches by training their own ML models, with the aim of augmenting clinician productivity, helping to improve patient outcomes, and refining our understanding of how medical imaging can be combined with other types of data to advance personalized medicine.

Learn more about our latest medical imaging offerings at the RSNA industry hour lunch and learn on December 3, 12:30 PM – 1:30 PM Central Time.

Partners

Reimagining an industry that is as complex and touches as many lives as healthcare is a massive undertaking and at Microsoft, we have the privilege of working with amazing partners who stand at the forefront of innovation and progress in medical imaging technology.

Our partners are building transformative solutions to address some of the most difficult challenges in medical imaging. The amount of data generated by medical diagnostic imaging and connected devices is growing exponentially. Healthcare stakeholders, therefore, need effective ways of handling these data at scale.

This prompted Siemens Healthineers to build a dedicated cloud environment for Healthcare: The teamplay digital health platform. Through a certified gateway, the teamplay receiver, health data from connected medical devices can be aggregated. The teamplay cloud infrastructure is based on Azure, allowing secured processing of data within or outside a hospital’s network.

GE Healthcare’s Centricity™ Universal Viewer Zero Footprint (ZFP) connects advanced diagnostic tools and system-wide image management platforms across the care continuum to help healthcare organizations improve diagnostic speed and confidence. ZFP users can now open Microsoft Teams with one click and share studies with other clinicians via the secure and compliant channels.¹

SOPHiA GENETICS, the company pioneering the Data-Driven Medicine movement—trusted by over 1000 healthcare institutions in 85 countries—is highlighting their radiomics capabilities through the universal SOPHiA Platform for oncology and COVID CT imaging. Radiomics transforms standard medical imaging into mineable data assets that can be analyzed and combined with genomic data for improved decision support of precision medicine. SOPHiA Radiomics Solutions offer comprehensive workflows for multiple research and disease indication needs. SOPHiA multimodal platform is deployed on Microsoft Azure Cloud.

Microsoft and Sectra are partnering on cloud-based enterprise imaging and AI. In our joint RSNA webinar, Reap the benefits of enterprise imaging in the cloud with Microsoft & Sectra on December 3, we will introduce the brand new all-Azure and hybrid Microsoft Azure Stack offering as well as a demo of how Teams integration will help radiologists to cope in the new virtual world. We will hear Judy Bartlett from our joint customer John Muir share her experiences about moving from on-prem to running the Sectra Enterprise Imaging Solution as a Service on Azure.

With the imminent release of a new version of iConnect Enterprise Archive, IBM Watson Health will start to bring to market solutions that support a containerized deployment, in addition to VMWare, on both the IBM Cloud and Azure. The containerization of this portfolio is one of IBM Watson Health’s key initiatives, starting with their VNA foundation and leveraging IBM’s Red Hat OpenShift technology to ensure build once and deploy anywhere to be cloud native and agnostic.

With NVIDIA Clara Imaging, developers and researchers have the ability to accelerate data annotation, build domain-specialized AI models, and deploy intelligent imaging workflows with state-of-the-art pre-trained models and reference applications. Working closely with Azure, these innovators can jumpstart their development in the cloud and also address tough medical imaging challenges faster. During the current pandemic, our partnership is heavily accelerating progress Research in drug discovery (UC, Riverside; UCB Covid Moonshot) using GPUs on Azure for quantum mechanics model as well as using AI for SARS COVID-19 risk evaluation in Italy (Hospital San Raffaele, Milan). This partnership also enables the development and deployment of smart hospital solutions, running on NVIDIA Clara Guardian and Azure.

And finally, Flywheel is a cloud-scale informatics platform for biomedical research and collaboration. What is exciting about their differentiated work is the ability to securely leverage cloud at the edge with Microsoft Azure Stack Hub and transform these image analytics with Microsoft AI enabling tools and Flywheel’s depth in medical imaging data management and automated workflows.

Microsoft is the only cloud that extends to the edge from Microsoft Azure Edge Zone for 5G to Microsoft Azure Sphere for security. We’re removing all barriers by covering all security and data sovereignty concerns in the cloud. With over 168,000 partners around the world, the network for innovation and collaboration runs deep. We cannot wait to see how together we will build solutions that transform healthcare around the world.

For more information on Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare, AI imaging tools, or to learn more about partnership visit the Microsoft virtual booth at RSNA or connect with us at our featured demo on November 29, 2:00 PM – 2:30 PM Central Time.

[1] Technology in development that represents ongoing research and development efforts. These technologies are not products and may never become products. Not for sale. Not cleared or approved by the U.S. FDA or any other global regulator for commercial availability.

The post Medical imaging, AI, and the cloud: what’s next? appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs.

The world after this pandemic will not be the same as the one that came before it.

From remote teamwork and telehealth, to supply management and customer service, to critical cloud infrastructure and security—we are working alongside customers every day to help manage through a world of remote everything.

The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted nearly every aspect of people’s lives and every aspect of the healthcare system. It’s preventing healthcare delivery practices from operating at normal business levels, it’s disrupting patient access to high-quality medical care, and it’s forcing everyone to think about how to continue pushing forward in new and different ways. Our commitment has always been to ensure the tools we provide are up to the task of supporting our customers in their time of need. Hear CEO Satya Nadella’s words for more on Microsoft’s thoughts for our healthcare workers.

In that same spirit, Microsoft is announcing its first industry-specific cloud offering, Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare, now available in public preview and through a free trial for the next six months. The offer brings together existing and future capabilities that deliver automation and efficiency on high-value workflows, as well as deep data analytics for both structured and unstructured data, that enable customers to turn insight into action. A robust partner ecosystem extends the value of the platform with additional solutions to address the most pressing challenges the healthcare industry is facing today. Healthcare will be the first industry served with additional industry-specific clouds to follow.

Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare brings together trusted and integrated capabilities for customers and partners that enrich patient engagement and connects health teams to help improve collaboration, decision-making, and operational efficiencies. Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare will support accelerated health transformation into the future, with capabilities for customers spanning the most important needs for healthcare organizations:

• Enhancing patient engagement
• Empowering health team collaboration
• Improving operational and clinical data insights
• Cloud built on interoperability, security, and trust
• Extensible healthcare partner ecosystem

Enhance patient engagement

More than ever, being connected is critical to creating an individualized patient experience. Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare helps healthcare organizations to engage in more proactive ways with their patients, allows caregivers to improve the efficiency of their workflows and streamline interactions with patients with more actionable results. Organizations can use Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare to extend the value of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing, Dynamics 365 Customer Service, and Azure IoT to deploy:

• Consumer-friendly patient experience: healthcare organizations can create individualized care plans for patients, or groups of patients, that allows providers to publicize relevant content and proactive outreach to patients on any device when they need it. Deploy secure virtual visits, chatbot assessments, and remote health monitoring to create a connected health experience. One of those tools is our Microsoft Healthcare Bot Service. Since March, more than 1,600 instances of COVID-19 bots based on our service have gone live impacting more than 31 million people across 23 countries. The CDC and healthcare systems from Seattle to Copenhagen, and from Rome to Tel Aviv, are using this service to create COVID-19 self-assessment tools to reduce some of the strain on their emergency hotlines.
• Connected physician and referral management: care teams can easily create referrals, search for providers, and understand physician spend, satisfaction, and enhanced analytics on referral categories.
• Enhanced patient engagement portals: patients and providers can easily interact through this self-service portal which enables various healthcare tasks such as online appointment booking, reminders, bill pay, and much more. This also allows providers the ability to engage with patients easily through the device of their choice.
• Intelligent patient outreach: enables healthcare organizations to design interactive patient journeys to nurture leads, publicize relevant events, and contact patients with preventative and care management programs that help promote better health outcomes.
• Continuous patient monitoring through IoT: generate secure, scalable data ingestion from medical devices to allow care teams to monitor patients in and outside of clinical facilities. With real-time insights, care teams can provide timely escalations of care, reduce readmissions, and provide personalized, predictive care.

Empower health team collaboration

Even before the current global pandemic, the healthcare industry has been in the midst of a massive shift marked by the rise of team-based care due to increased medical specialization, exponential growth in the volume of digital patient data, and increasingly demanding data protection requirements. Too often, the tools providers use to coordinate patient care are fragmented and impede the collaborative workflows required in a complex care environment.

To address these challenges, we have been building capabilities in Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Teams that streamline healthcare workflows and provide a secure platform for connected care coordination. Teams, which supports HIPAA compliance and is HITRUST certified, brings together chat, voice and video meetings, and offers recording and transcription, as well as secure messaging features, available across devices.

As we’ve seen during the COVID-19 pandemic, clinicians also need greater flexibility and convenience in how they are able to connect with patients. Today we are announcing general availability of the Bookings app in Teams, which enables healthcare providers to schedule, manage, and conduct provider-to-patient virtual visits within Teams.

In an effort to protect patients and providers while maintaining continuity of ambulatory care, healthcare providers including St. Luke’s University Health Network, Stony Brook Medicine, and Calderdale  & Huddersfield NHS Foundation Trust in the U.K. have been using teams to conduct virtual patient visits and provide continuity of care while protecting providers and patients. Patients receive a customized email and can join their appointment in one click on a desktop, or in the Microsoft Teams iOS or Android Mobile apps.

Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare brings together existing and future capabilities important to how care teams communicate, collaborate, coordinate care, and generate insights that help improve patient outcomes and workflow effectiveness.

Improve clinical and operational data insights

Healthcare organizations are taking advantage of building virtual agents, automating workflows, analyzing data, and sharing insights in real-time. COVID-19 has accelerated the urgent need for healthcare organizations to create no-code/low-code apps and workflows in hours or days, not weeks or months. Thousands of organizations are relying on new integration between Microsoft Teams and Power Apps to share timely information.

In just two weeks, Swedish Health Services, the largest non-profit health provider in the Seattle area, used Power Apps to build a solution to track critical supplies.

Microsoft’s newest releases that support FHIR technology enabled the Chicago Dept of Public Health (CDPH) and Rush Hospital with an end to end solution to bring together clinical, lab and capacity data analysis in just a few days to support the COVID crisis. Using the C-CDA converter to FHIR converter, the API for FHIR—a cloud-based FHIR Server, and the Power BI FHIR connector, CDPH was able to ingest data in different formats with a simple API call, convert it to FHIR and add visualizations and downstream analytics that enabled rapid connectivity of data and interoperability across multiple hospitals.

Cloud built on interoperability, security, and trust

Underpinning all these great capabilities is our focus and commitment to interoperability, security, and compliance. We know that to provide the best care, healthcare organizations need to be able to consume, access, and share information rapidly and securely.

The future of highly secure data agility in the cloud– and the interoperability tools that healthcare organizations need to organize their health data in the cloud around FHIR – are integrated into Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare. Last year Microsoft was the first cloud to offer a generally available Azure FHIR service—which allows healthcare organizations to ingest and persist data in the FHIR format.

Healthcare organizations that are already underway with open standards like FHIR have been able to collaborate in rapid time, and it’s given their teams the ability to care for patients with a high level of agility. We’re seeing examples all around the globe and it’s been both humbling and inspiring to see the FHIR technology we’ve built specifically for health workloads in Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare support these efforts.

Security and compliance remain a strategic priority for healthcare organizations, and the shift to remote work only increases the need for integrated, end-to-end security architecture that reduces both cost and complexity. Microsoft has the highest levels of commitment to trust, security, and meeting industry compliance standards and certifications in the industry.

Extensible healthcare partner ecosystem

Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare also enables healthcare systems to take advantage of our robust ecosystem of healthcare partners who can provide solutions that complement and extend core cloud capabilities. Using these partners’ expertise will help organizations through EHR and platform integrations, implementation services, and healthcare SaaS offerings. Microsoft is proud to work closely with the leading providers of health systems, from organizations like Accenture, Adaptive Biotechnologies, Allscripts, DXC Technology, Innovaccer, KPMG, and Nuance to co-develop new solutions with leaders in their respective sectors like Humana, Providence, Novartis, and Alpha XR Boots Alliance.

What’s powerful about these tools is that they’re being used not just by providers in the delivery of healthcare but by ISVs, pharmaceutical and life sciences companies, and government systems. We’ve seen companies like KenSci—a healthcare AI & data management platform—launch their Mobile Command Center with Real Time Bed Management, Ventilator Utilization, and Capacity Planning for COVID-19. In just 48 hours they can create a hospital solution—even those using legacy data systems—and help manage their data in the Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare using the open standard of FHIR.

Commitment to industry

We know that technology has a role to play in accelerating progress for solutions to the pandemic and other pressing healthcare concerns and challenges. Looking ahead, we expect to see healthcare organizations continue to use newly implemented technology tools throughout the recovery period and into the new normal. Companies that need to accelerate their digital transformation during this time will continue to rely on trusted partners who can support their trust, security, and technology adoption into the future.

Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare will make it easier for them to remain agile and focus on what they do best – delivering better experiences, insights, and care.

Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare is available for a free trial over the next 6 months. Click to see the launch during the Microsoft Healthcare Summit, view a demo, or learn more about public preview.

The post Deliver better experiences, insights, and care with Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs.

This unique opportunity to make a lasting, positive impact on healthcare is one of the reasons I joined Microsoft. For decades, Microsoft has built a reputation as a trusted partner, now counting more than 168,000 healthcare organizations around the world who rely on us. As we’ve built out platforms for cloud infrastructure, productivity and collaboration, and artificial intelligence, we’ve developed an ecosystem of hundreds of thousands of partners who are building on our technologies and bringing added value to our mutual customers.

Innovation in medical imaging

Being new to Microsoft and a neuroradiologist, one of the areas I am most excited about is how we are helping our customers and partners reimagine healthcare and specifically explore the possibilities in medical imaging. In this area that is so critical to healthcare overall, we’re fortunate to work with some of the leaders in the industry.

GE Healthcare customers in the United States can take advantage of solutions running on Microsoft Azure such as the newly developed Edison™ Datalogue™ Connect, which was designed to provide secure image and data exchange to physicians working in their care settings.

Philips’ Azurion image-guided therapy platform empowers providers through image-guided minimally invasive therapies. Built for HoloLens 2, the work-in-progress Azurion mixed reality platform brings live imaging and other sources of vital data — currently displayed on large external 2D screens — into a 3D holographic environment that can be controlled by the physician.

Nuance, a leader in radiology reporting solutions with its PowerScribe platform, continues to lead the way in bringing ambient technologies to healthcare. We recently announced a strategic partnership with Nuance to accelerate that innovation, bringing together Nuance’s healthcare-optimized AI powered clinical documentation and decision support solutions and Microsoft Azure, advanced conversational AI, and natural language understanding.

Working together with researchers and industry partners, we’re also moving forward to create a broad range of cloud-based tools and solutions that touch many aspects of the development and delivery of effective care, including:

• Azure Quantum solutions at work with Case Western Reserve University to accelerate and improve the accuracy of MRI scanners.
• New opportunities to accelerate medical imagining with GraphCore and the Intelligence Processing Unit (IPU).
• Empowering health team collaboration with Microsoft 365. Intelligent meetings and modern collaboration in a secure platform that integrates with clinical systems, from electronic health records to imaging software.
• Research projects in registration and segmentation. Two of the fundamental problems that clinical researchers and practitioners are dealing with when working with 3D medical imaging modalities.
• The Azure Stack Edge, a new Azure-managed appliance that brings the compute, storage, and intelligence of Azure to the edge for new healthcare scenarios including hardware acceleration with FPGA and GPU.

As part of our ongoing commitment to making health data easier to manage, in October we announced the general availability of the Azure API for FHIR. FHIR is quickly becoming the preferred standard for exchanging electronic health information and enabling the management of PHI data in the cloud. A rapidly growing number of healthcare delivery and healthcare technology companies are already using the Azure API for FHIR to improve interoperability within their own IT systems, including Great Ormond Street Hospital (GOSH) of the NHS, Darena Solutions, Northwell Health, and Humana. With the release of the Azure API for FHIR, Microsoft now provides a fully managed, enterprise-grade service for health data in the FHIR format. Building on this announcement, a few weeks ago we announced the IoMT FHIR Connector for Azure – an open-source tool enabling our customers to more easily ingest data from health and medical devices, including a FHIR framework for Apple HealthKit.

This investment in innovation with our partners and customers puts us on a path to make a meaningful impact in medical imaging. Together we can empower providers with an enterprise imaging platform that enables reliability and security, manages growing patient data with strong controls for privacy and compliance, and provides insights from the data to improve patient care.

[msce_cta layout=”link_only” align=”center” linktype=”blue” linkurl=”https://rsna2019.mapyourshow.com/8_0/exhibitor/exhibitor-details.cfm?exhid=00467889″ linkscreenreadertext=”Connect with us at RSNA” linktext=”Connect with us at RSNA” ][/msce_cta]

Learn more at RSNA

We will be engaging with more than 50,000 clinicians in radiology at the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA) conference in Chicago. Stop by our Microsoft Booth #10745 in the AI Showcase to learn more about our work and see how we are collaborating with partners and customers to reimagine healthcare. Our partners: Agfa HealthCare, Lunit, NucleusHealth, RamSoft, SOPHiA GENETICS, Volpara, 7 Medical and others will be on hand to share their innovative work. In a special session, I’ll be sharing Microsoft’s view on the opportunities to reimagine healthcare and specifically medical imaging. Several of our partners will join to share how they’re using technology, from the cloud to quantum computing to mixed reality and teleradiology, to help radiologists today.

The post Reimagining healthcare: Partnering for a better future appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs.