In the ever-evolving landscape of healthcare, we’re excited to see more organizations unlocking the value of their data and leaning into the possibilities that AI can offer their workforce, clinicians, and the communities they serve. As AI becomes more woven into society, its impact will be meaningful, and more organizations are only starting to understand the extent of what’s possible. With a steadfast commitment to empower meaningful outcomes across the entire healthcare ecosystem, we continue to invest in the power of Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare to help organizations accelerate the pace of AI adoption to make it easier to reinvent patient and member engagement, foster care team collaboration, unlock the value of their data, and enrich clinician experiences for a healthier future.

At HIMSS24, we’re looking forward to being part of the diverse group of experts and innovators from around the world who are shaping the future of healthcare, happening from March 11 to 15, 2024, in Orlando, Florida. We’ll demonstrate the newest developments in data and AI for healthcare and concentrate our efforts on helping organizations tackle some of their most pressing issues.

Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare

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• Microsoft Booth #3161 (Hall B): We’re excited to show attendees the latest in our data and AI solutions to help healthcare organizations reshape their business processes, bend the curve on innovation, and find new ways to supercharge your employees productivity.
• Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare demo showcase: Across our demo stands you’ll have an opportunity to see the latest Microsoft data and AI solutions and business productivity capabilities that will help healthcare organizations stay focused on improving patient and clinician experiences while delivering quality care more efficiently and at a lower cost. Together, these solutions offer healthcare organizations a unified, safe, and responsible approach to their data and AI strategy and enable them to take advantage of the breadth and scale of Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare technology.
• Microsoft Copilot experience zone: AI is the defining technology of our time. With Copilot, we’re democratizing our breakthroughs in AI to help make the promise of AI real for everyone. According to our latest Work Trend Index, 70% of Microsoft Copilot users said that, after just three months, they were more productive, and 68% said it improved the quality of their work. Our product experts will be on hand to help answer your copilot questions and give you hands-on experience with Microsoft Copilot for Microsoft 365, Microsoft Copilot for Dynamics 365, and Microsoft Copilot for Security. Interested in building and customizing your own copilot experiences in your organization? Microsoft Copilot Studio will help you incorporate your data with over 1,000 prebuilt connectors as plugins, connecting your business applications.
• Meet with our industry partners and startups: Together with our partner ecosystem, we are investing in creating a comprehensive set of solutions for the healthcare industry. We’re excited to be joined in booth with our ISV partners: Accenture | Avanade, Hitachi Solutions, HITRUST, Quisitive, Sectra, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), and Teladoc. Microsoft Systems Integrator partners BDO, CDW, Kyndryl, Nordic, and Vervint will be on hand to answer your questions on ways to migrate your EHR to the cloud and ensure a successful transition. Our experience would not be complete without technology innovators from our Microsoft for Startups: Beekeeper AI, Chooch, CraniumAI, Cynerio, dSiloAI, Karlsgate, Mapped, Pangaea Data, RealizedCare, and Signal 1 will be in booth ready to showcase a diverse range of solutions with demonstrated growth and impact with the potential to scale globally. 
• Nuance clinical applications in booth #2741: Follow the path to our connected booth experience with Nuance clinical applications. See live demos across the Nuance portfolio of ambient clinical intelligence, documentation capture, and radiology solutions. Walk up to the Nuance Ask the Experts bar where technology experts will be available to answer questions and give hands-on help across the Nuance product portfolio. And don’t miss the Microsoft Copilot theater experience where you can see a 20-minute curated experience of Microsoft Copilot and Nuance clinical application solutions with live demos anchored in business outcomes.

Microsoft and partner sessions at HIMSS24

It would be a mistake not to highlight the top innovations sessions that you can watch from Microsoft’s leading customers, experts, and executives.

• Industry Solution Session—Responsible AI in Healthcare: Challenges and Opportunities—AI has the potential to transform healthcare by improving diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of diseases. However, AI also poses significant ethical, social, and legal challenges that need to be addressed before it can be widely adopted and trusted. Our panel, led by Dr. David Rhew, Global Chief Medical Officer, Microsoft, will discuss how responsible and trustworthy AI health networks can provide objective and transparent evaluation of AI models using community standards and best practices.
• Industry Solution Session: Using Generative AI in Healthcare: Opportunities and Best Practices—Join Kees Hertogh, Vice President of Healthcare and Life Sciences Marketing, Microsoft and our panel of industry experts to explore the potential of generative AI technology to help improve patient experiences, streamline workflows, and enhance the overall healthcare journey. Whether you are a healthcare provider, payor, administrator, a startup innovator, or technologist, this session will provide valuable insights and practical guidance on how to leverage AI technologies to improve healthcare delivery. 
• Views from the Top: Digital Health Startups: Harnessing Innovation to Disrupt and Improve Care Delivery—To achieve true digital health transformation, stakeholders across the digital health ecosystem must adopt a posture of curiosity, wonderment, passion, and healthy skepticism to disrupt current norms of care in favor of those that are truly game changers. Join Sally Frank, Worldwide Lead Healthcare and Life Sciences, Microsoft for Startups, as she discusses the power of startups and the impact their making on responding to market forces that are influencing how we innovate. 
• Streamline Compliance to Accelerate Solution Adoption, Time to Value and Global Scale—Compliance concerns impede solution adoption, go-live, and time-to-value across provider, payer, and life sciences segments globally. Join us to hear from the frontlines of provider healthcare and compliance and cloud experts, the real-world challenges, and practical strategies to manage this complexity, accelerate achieving compliance, maintain ongoing compliance, and manage third-party risk.
• AI and the Code of Conduct: Development of Sustainable and Responsible AI—This panel conversation will address the development, deployment, and use of clinical and operational AI and predictive, intelligent solutions for the betterment of health and healthcare systems, their administrations, clinicians, and patients.
• Nursing Informatics Community Roundtable—Explore the insights of nursing informatics and technology experts as they tackle the transformative power of AI in healthcare and the irreplaceable role of clinical informaticists in harnessing this potential. Participants will gain a deeper understanding of the thrilling prospects that await in the AI-driven future of healthcare.
• Leaders of Change: Evangelizing Culture of Innovation in Nursing—This session offers a dynamic exploration of leadership strategies to cultivate a culture of nursing innovation at national and international levels. Attendees will gain expertise to create an innovative environment where diverse patient populations’ needs are met. They will be able to share examples of how to successfully bridge the gap between leaders and staff, leading to improved retention and empowered employees.

See the latest data and AI solutions for healthcare at HIMSS24

Shaping a healthier future is about helping healthcare organizations explore the power of AI to reshape employee productivity, enrich clinician experiences, deliver greater value across your business, and reinvent how we deliver care for years to come. We look forward to seeing you at HIMSS24, visit us at Booth #3161 and with Nuance in booth #2741.

• Register for HIMSS24 today 
• Explore Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare 

The post Microsoft at HIMSS24: Shaping a healthier future with data and AI appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs.

In response, providers are increasingly embracing the cloud to speed digital transformation, boosting their agility, resiliency, and ability to deliver the best care possible.

In the e-book “Enhancing healthcare delivery with cloud solutions,” discover how to create and sustain a competitive advantage in the digital era. The e-book outlines four key ways to realize better patient outcomes while increasing operational efficiencies with a cloud-first approach.

You’ll also get insights into how to:

• Equip providers and patients with innovative tools.
• Streamline care delivery with strategic solutions.
• Plan and execute strategies for implementing new healthcare solutions.
• Drive positive change with Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare.

Enhancing healthcare delivery with cloud solutions

Explore how to improve healthcare team collaboration, elevate patient engagement, and improve clinical care.

Get the e-book

What do patients expect from healthcare delivery?

Rapid, continuous change is unquestionably now the norm across the healthcare ecosystem. Yet while COVID-19 prompted a new period of evolution in healthcare delivery, change has always been inherent in healthcare and IT.

Even prior to COVID-19, consumers began seeking more convenient, individualized, and equitable healthcare services. Providers, in turn, began looking for ways to deliver them.

Today’s consumers expect personalized experiences across the patient journey, from initial contact to post-treatment follow-up. They’re engaged in making decisions about their health and healthcare spending, and they expect quick, easy access to their medical information. In addition, they increasingly rely on telemedicine, remote monitoring, AI-powered health bots, and other types of virtual care.

In a recent consumer survey, 80 percent of respondents indicated that they had accessed care through telemedicine. Groups traditionally underserved within healthcare showed notable increases in adoption. Also, for the first time, telemedicine surpassed in-person visits as the preferred channel for prescription refills and minor illness care.¹

These survey results speak to the fact that consumers want and expect to take advantage of new avenues for healthcare delivery. Healthcare leaders are prudent to take notice. Often, if a provider can’t meet a patient’s expectations for convenient, affordable services, the patient will seek out one that will.

Respond to patient and business needs with agility

As patient expectations continue to evolve, the onus is on providers to give patients the care they need—where, when, and how they want it. A provider’s ability to offer personalized care in healthcare builds brand trust and loyalty, which in turn drives profitability and continuity of care.

Providers must also generate useful medical insights and make them available—often at the point of care—to clinicians, patients and their families, and other stakeholders. In addition, the healthcare industry is shifting to value-based care, which links payments to patient outcomes and service quality, equity, and cost. To be reimbursed, providers need to provide metrics tracking their healthcare performance improvements.

These changes come at a time when data created, shared, and stored across healthcare ecosystems continues to grow exponentially. Providers are faced with the challenges of protecting sensitive data from cyberattacks and data theft in ways that adhere to multiple regulations and requirements.

In 2022, the United States Department of Health and Human Services received reports of more than 700 healthcare data breaches, ranking it as the second worst year ever.² Data breaches can not only threaten patient safety by delaying diagnoses and treatments because of unexpected IT system outages, they also can result in huge financial losses for healthcare organizations, including through insurance premiums increases, lawsuits, and regulatory fines.

In short, today’s providers need greater flexibility to respond to ever-changing patient and business needs. With the right cloud platform, they can:

• Quickly develop, deploy, and scale new, innovative applications.
• Streamline workflows and reduce expenses using AI and automation.
• More effectively deal with worker shortages and cost issues.
• Securely connect and analyze large volumes of disparate data.
• Minimize upfront healthcare technology investments.
• Free time for IT teams to focus on strategic business needs.

Optimize healthcare delivery and improve patient outcomes

Providers that take a cloud-first approach are better prepared to solve problems and act on opportunities for growth. This greater agility and resilience arises in large part from improved collaboration and innovation.

First, providers can support more effective collaboration by using an open, secure cloud foundation to unite information, people, and processes. By pulling clinical, demographic, behavioral, and other data from multiple sources into the cloud, they can create 360-degree, longitudinal views of patient journeys. They can also reduce time to insights with AI and advanced analytics, as well as accelerate digital access with cloud storage.

Second, providers with cloud infrastructure can drive rapid, continued innovation in healthcare. This includes launching novel solutions and tools and automating high-value workflows. In addition, healthcare organizations that innovate are more apt to sustain performance improvements and establish themselves as industry leaders. They can also more easily build strategic partnerships and make acquisitions that create competitive advantage, such as by expanding their data assets and core capabilities.

Through increased collaboration and innovation, teams across provider organizations can optimize healthcare delivery and improve patient outcomes. Consider these examples:

• Frontline clinical workers use connected, secure devices to consult with specialists at the point of care—and more quickly diagnose patient conditions.
• Care managers coordinate patient aftercare by using web portals to connect with families and payors.
• Revenue-cycle managers minimize unpaid bills by streamlining collections through automation.
• Sales and marketing professionals tap into individual and population group insights to better target—and engage with—consumers.
• IT operations work with healthcare technology vendors to build solutions tailored for specific care systems.

Most important, by offering patients more personalized, convenient, and affordable services, providers empower patients with greater control over their healthcare.

Move forward confidently with Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare

Teaming with the right cloud partner is essential to a successful digital strategy. With Microsoft, your organization can maximize the value of your existing Microsoft Cloud and other cloud investments and also add new capabilities from the Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare.

Wherever you are in evolving your legacy infrastructure and merging data across avenues of care, accelerate your transformation with Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare. It provides trusted capabilities that make it easier to overcome challenges efficiently, adapt quickly, and strengthen competitiveness.

Learn more

To discover more ways to empower healthcare team collaboration, elevate patient engagement, improve clinical and operational insights, and protect healthcare information, get the e-book “Enhancing Healthcare Delivery with Cloud Solutions.”

¹Consumer adoption of digital health in 2022: Moving at the speed of trust, Rock Health.

²2022 Healthcare Data Breach Report, The HIPAA Journal.

The post Elevate healthcare delivery with Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs.

Physician burnout isn’t just expensive—it’s also dangerous. Doctors experiencing burnout are twice as likely to be involved in patient safety incidents, including medication errors and substandard care. This, in turn, leads to a sharp decline in patient satisfaction.

Facing ever-increasing pressure to address clinician burnout, many healthcare organizations are turning to innovative AI solutions to automate tasks and reduce administrative burden. In the e-book, Breaking Down AI: Real Applications in Healthcare, discover how AI and advanced analytics offer new strategies for patient engagement and solutions to help combat physician burnout.

Breaking Down AI: Real Applications in Healthcare

Enhance patient engagement, empower health team collaboration, and improve clinical care with Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare.

Download the e-book

You’ll also find practical use cases for applying AI and data analytics to make healthcare more efficient, including how to:

• Share and analyze clinical data to deliver targeted health services and improve outcomes through predictive care.
• Use operational data to optimize your management of claims, staffing, and overall costs.
• Detect and prevent fraudulent claims and other abuses based on behavioral patterns.
• Deliver better experiences, insights, and care with Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare.

Combat clinician burnout with healthcare AI

Julias Bogdan, Vice President and General Manager of the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) Digital Health Advisory Team for North America, recently discussed how AI solutions can ease clinician burnout.³

“AI can help automate routine, repeatable tasks so you can deploy your human resources where they are most needed. That type of automation is the long-hanging fruit AI can provide to help address turn-over rates and help reduce burnout.“—Julias Bogdan, Vice President and General Manager, Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS).

Bogdan added that when physicians get bogged down in tedious tasks and can no longer focus on direct patient care, they often consider leaving their current job to go work elsewhere. In turn, if patients don’t receive the level of care they’ve come to expect, they’ll also seek care somewhere else. This expectation puts even more strain on clinicians to deliver quality care.

Breaking Down AI: Real Applications in Healthcare illustrates how AI can help healthcare teams automatically capture documentation at the point of care, freeing clinicians to focus on their patients. AI can also help teams predict operational issues, track safety metrics, monitor equipment inventory, maintain the integrity of the supply chain, and identify opportunities to improve process efficiency.

However, it’s important for healthcare organizations to enable AI for everyone across the entire care process. Operational and clinical analytics solutions can help health teams improve the quality of care every step of the way, throughout a patient’s experience.

Clinical analytics solutions tap into data and analytics to improve clinical treatment processes and outcomes. For example, clinicians can pull insights from data to help identify at-risk patients and deliver the best treatments. Additionally, sophisticated analytics engines, which are enhanced through machine learning and AI, can provide evidence to help health teams make informed decisions. On the other hand, operational analytics focuses on the use of data and analytics to improve the efficiency of systems used to provide and manage care processes.

Discover strategies for patient engagement and better health outcomes

Not only does AI reduce administrative burden—but it also helps healthcare teams enhance patient engagement and deliver better care. While patients have always appreciated good bedside manners from doctors and nurses, in today’s era of near-instant gratification, people seeking healthcare now think like consumers. They expect the highest level of personalized care whenever they want it, wherever they are.

In an effort to enhance patient engagement, some healthcare organizations are deploying AI-powered health bots that offer patients personalized access to health-related information through a natural conversation experience. Created with built-in medical knowledge bases, triage protocols, and language models trained to understand clinical terminology, these bots trigger seamless handoff from a bot interaction to a doctor, nurse, or support agent. Not only does this improve patient experiences, but it also helps reduce physician burden.    

If healthcare organizations want to provide top-quality care and meet patient expectations, the use of AI-powered technologies is essential. However, healthcare leaders must find trustworthy, ethical AI partners who understand the complexities of HIPAA compliance, data protection, and privacy.

Build a resilient future with Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare

In a rapidly evolving industry, healthcare leaders are looking to maximize the value of their investments with technology that does more. In other words, they want to do more with less—more speed, more productivity, and more time to focus on what matters. That’s exactly what Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare delivers.

Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare provides trusted, integrated capabilities that make it easier to enhance patient engagement, empower health team collaboration, and improve clinician experiences. These capabilities also give clinicians connected tools and help them adopt important healthcare data standards. With our acquisition of Nuance Communications in the Spring of 2022, Microsoft now delivers new ways to overcome your greatest healthcare challenges with trusted AI solutions.

With powerful AI backed by decades of domain expertise—combined with the scale, security, and power of the Microsoft Cloud—Nuance has an opportunity to put advanced AI solutions into the hands of professionals everywhere. Today, Nuance solutions are used by more than 55 percent of physicians and 75 percent of radiologists in the United States.

These innovative solutions can help drive better decisions, create more meaningful connections, and produce tangible outcomes. For instance, Nuance Dragon Medical One, the top-rated conversational workflow assistant and documentation companion, enables every clinician to automate the tasks that slow them down. Using just their voice, physicians can create documentation in all clinical settings with this solution. Nuance Dragon Ambient eXperience (DAX) extends the power of Dragon Medical One to dramatically reduce clinicians’ administrative workloads and improve the quality of their documentation—which results in better patient experiences and outcomes.

“Nuance DAX is a prime example of how we are using innovation to deliver excellent patient experiences and improve provider satisfaction with technology that allows providers to focus on patient care.”—Craig Richardville, Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer, Intermountain Healthcare.

By helping healthcare organizations improve their quality of care, we can help make physician and patient experiences more personal, more engaging, and most importantly, more accurate.

Learn more

To read stories from real-world customers and explore more ways to enhance patient engagement, reduce clinician burnout, and drive operational efficiency, get the e-book, Breaking Down AI: Real Applications in Healthcare.

¹ Half of health workers report burnout amid COVID-19 | American Medical Association (ama-assn.org)

² Doctor burnout costs health care system $4.6 billion a year, Harvard study says—Harvard Gazette

³ VIDEO: AI can help prevent clinician burnout (healthexec.com)

The post Reduce clinician burnout and improve care with AI in healthcare appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs.

Mental health is an incredibly important part of a person’s overall health, especially how psychological and physical well-being play a role in every aspect of wellness. With a growing number of individuals experiencing mental health symptoms, technology can play a role to support patients, encouraging those with potential mental issues to seek professional help, and someday could help to reduce the stigma associated with mental health.   

Improving patient experiences through virtual health

Driven by the COVID-19 crisis, the healthcare sector has had to quickly find new ways of safely providing quality care to patients. For many, the solution was to go digital—typically in the form of virtual health services, like virtual appointments or utilizing AI-powered chat assistants. Recent research has reflected the virtual trend as well: a RAND study found that the significant rise in telehealth use during the height of COVID-19 was driven more by people looking for mental health services than care for physical conditions. During COVID-19, Calgary Counselling Centre’s (CCC) needed a secure, easy-to-use solution to help them continue serving high-quality care to their patients. When in-office consultations were ruled out, staff already had ideas for best practices that could help keep services available, especially in light of heightened demand during these difficult times. The organization deployed Microsoft Teams Virtual Visits as an easy tool for clients and counselors from all cultural and economic backgrounds to use. Now a key tool in the Centre’s counseling and education practice, Teams helps CCC achieve successful treatment rates—higher than those measured during its pre-pandemic, in-person practice.

On March 23, 2020, the United Kingdom government announced a lockdown in response to COVID-19. The need to limit face-to-face contact for infection prevention and control was uppermost in the minds of senior leaders at Greater Manchester Mental Health NHS Foundation Trust (GMMH). Yet the needs of service users had to be met. Psychological therapy (IAPT) is GMMH’s largest service and it was most eager for remote working capabilities. It delivers talking therapy support for people with mild, moderate, and moderate to severe symptoms of anxiety or depression. Around 5,000 people were accessing face-to-face IAPT meetings in March when, almost overnight, the Trust found itself no longer able to offer those services. They moved from 10,000 in-person appointments per month to holding them all remotely via Microsoft Teams in two weeks. Even today, the Trust is able to offer more choices to its clients. The ability to access care without having to traverse the busy city region to reach a clinical location will make accessing support more comfortable for many service users battling anxiety-related issues, avoidance, or depression. 

AI has the ability to increase equity and access to mental health services, eliminating barriers to convenience, access, or privacy. This allows healthcare systems to offer services available every day on demand, on different platforms and gives patients the space to have sensitive conversations—even more so for ones that might not feel comfortable having out loud in a face-to-face environment.  

The rise of digital mental healthcare has also brought up the use of AI to triage patients, broaden access to, and availability of mental health services. If there is one chief benefit of using AI in clinical care, it’s the technology’s ability to obtain insights from massive amounts of data. Austrian mental health provider Anima Mentis has developed a ground-breaking solution that uses data and AI to prevent and treat mental illnesses. The idea is that by studying how a person reacts to different events and occasions, it’s possible to anticipate how they’ll react to similar events in the future—and therefore prepare them for any circumstance. Anima Mentis is doing this by collecting a broad range of biometric, medical, and contextual data both at and outside its center. With the help of innovation service provider Zühlke Austria, the organization is realizing a cloud-based AI platform that analyzes information to produce tailored recommendations for patients, who can use them to avoid burnout and train their mental strength. 

Burnout and mental health among frontline healthcare workers 

Workplace surveys and reports from the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics continue to signal a burnout-fueled professional exodus from healthcare.³ Frontline healthcare worker burnout has swelled to impact 55 percent of frontline healthcare workers at any given point in time.⁴ A recent survey⁵ found that nearly a third of frontline healthcare workers in the United States are now considering not simply moving on from their institution, but leaving the field altogether. But if the pandemic has overwhelmed these workers, it has also spurred a wealth of research into the causes of burnout and the ensuing fallout, from mental health impacts to national turnover rates clinicians. These studies and surveys also point toward concrete solutions—positive ways that the smart implementation of technology can help reduce clinician burnout.

Integrating AI and machine learning into the healthcare frontline processes allows for a variety of benefits, including easing workflows, and analyzing large data sets to deliver better healthcare faster, and at a lower cost. But it also has the power to help significantly reduce the overwhelming burden of administrative tasks that have made it so difficult for healthcare workers to do what inspired them to go into medicine in the first place. 

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 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.

The right tools can centralize communication, surface insights, facilitate file sharing, streamline workforce management, and integrate partner applications. And the right purpose-built devices can streamline engagement and boost productivity, keeping teams connected whether they’re several feet or many miles apart, and even track and support wellbeing.

Looking ahead

Mental Health Awareness Month is an observance meant to bring awareness to mental health issues and bring awareness to the issues faced by so many. While mental health will continue to be an evolving crisis, one thing remains true: mental health and well-being are about people caring for people. While technology may not be able to solve every problem, we can help ease the burden on the people who provide such vital care for patients and find new ways to extend mental health care to the people who need it most. If technology is going to make a difference, it will only be through deep partnerships across the care ecosystem, and by earning their trust and the trust of the people they serve. As part of our ongoing commitment to health and well-being, I know that every solution and advancement we bring to the market will be designed to create better experiences, insights, and care for all.

Resources

• Learn more about Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare from our website. 
• Read the Microsoft WorkLab article, “How healthcare industry leaders can help fight burnout.”

¹Covid has made it harder to be a health-care worker. Now, many are thinking of quitting, CNBC.

²There is a global shortage of nurses. COVID-19 is making it worse, Clinton Health Access.

³Why health-care workers are quitting in droves, The Atlantic.

⁴ KFF/The Washington Post Frontline Health Care Workers Survey, Kaiser Family Foundation. 

⁵The Toll Of The Coronavirus Pandemic On Health Care Workers, KFF.

The post Learn how technology and mental health meet in the future appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs.

We heard many stories of resilience and organizations mobilizing their resources to adopt digital technologies that helped them move forward in their data interoperability journey, gain insights from their data, and unlock cloud-based innovation. During our HIMSS Views from the Top session, Strategies for Creating a Sustainable Healthcare Future, leaders from Microsoft, Nuance, Providence, and Novant Health discussed how healthcare organizations recognized the power technology can have in unlocking an organization’s potential—for frontline workers, patients, employees, and even society more broadly.  

There were countless examples of how organizations have reimagined care delivery and process access to critical services using telehealth and AI. They found new ways to secure their digital environments to scale and maintain business operations while extending frontline worker productivity and encouraging new forms of care management and engagement. If you couldn’t attend in person, we recommend exploring some of the engaging sessions at Microsoft at HIMSS 2022.

Improving patient experiences  

Many at the conference shared that the consumer can be and should be at the center of how healthcare is experienced and delivered. I had the privilege to moderate a panel of experts consisting of Micky Tripathi (Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology [ONC]), Rebecca Coyle (American Immunization Registry Association), Sandra Beattie (New York State), and Dr. Neelima Karipinemi (MITRE). We discussed how SMART Health Cards enable consumers to gain access to their health records by leveraging the same Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) standard being used today to promote healthcare interoperability. We also discussed how more than 200 million United States residents have adopted SMART Health Cards, with over half of the state Immunization Information Systems (IIS) registries and all the major nationwide pharmacies embracing them.  

We were excited to showcase the next wave of innovation for Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare and how it continues to reshape the connected care journey. Customers could explore our guided tours to learn how Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare provides an upgraded holistic patient view to help organizations better understand and elevate patient experiences—complete with a new enhanced 360-degree view of a patient’s journey in a clear and intuitive way. We previewed new enhancements to Patient Insights which enable care managers, patient representatives, outreach specialists, and population health analysts to efficiently deliver and capture useful patient insights. Analytics from patient insights can potentially help organizations improve clinical processes and care management experiences. 

Health organizations are also applying AI across every aspect of the care continuum—informing precision diagnostics and therapeutics, modernizing the digital front door for patient engagement, and increasing clinician efficiency. But this is only the beginning of AI’s potential for transforming care delivery experiences and improving health outcomes for patients. AI is being increasingly used to improve the depth of data analytics capabilities, in addition to automating key healthcare-related tasks. Recent research shared that healthcare AI technologies and services will surpass $34 billion worldwide by 2025.  

In early March, we announced the closing of the Nuance acquisition and at HIMSS, both companies joined together to showcase how AI has the power to reshape the connected care journey. Microsoft and Nuance joined together on stage to discuss where AI and ambient clinical intelligence technology help drive more personal, affordable, effective, and accessible healthcare while improving the patient, care team, and administrator experience.  

Empowering frontline healthcare workers 

Healthcare continues to undergo transformation—it’s facing unprecedented challenges, new and complex expectations, and remarkable opportunities for innovation and growth. At the heart of this transformation are frontline healthcare workers—the doctors, nurses, and care team members that work to help keep us safe and healthy. Touching nearly every step of the patient journey and maintaining the foundation of our healthcare system, healthcare workers require the latest tools to stay engaged, connected, and empowered to provide the best possible care. The adoption of technology to support frontline healthcare workers is increasing, and we’ve seen monthly usage of Microsoft Teams grow over 560 percent in this industry between March 2020 and November 2021. 

Virtual appointments are now commonplace in healthcare. For many providers, however, deploying and learning new systems to support this care modality has been more stressful than necessary. A smooth transition to remote patient care requires long-term virtual health and a remote collaboration strategy. This must include technology tools that span the entire lifecycle of a virtual appointment. You can read the recent blog post, “Empower frontline healthcare workers with Microsoft Teams,” from our Modern Work Transformation team to learn about our announcements like the Microsoft Teams EHR connector for Cerner, on-demand virtual appointments and queue view, Teladoc Health Solo™ with Microsoft Teams, and more. You can discover how digital tools can empower frontline healthcare workers through our recent Becker’s Hospital Review article.  

Alleviating clinician burnout 

Over the last two years, the pandemic has created enormous pressure on the nation’s healthcare system. It has also placed a considerable burden on a shorthanded healthcare workforce. Unfortunately, many don’t see a light at the end of the tunnel. A recent Microsoft Workforce Trend Index special report found that 58 percent of healthcare frontline workers worldwide are concerned that stress at work will stay the same or worsen in the year ahead. 

It’s clear that the current crisis calls for health industry leaders to increase their focus on employee wellbeing. A recent study in Nursing Administration Quarterly showed that workplaces that provided wellness support—such as offering access to mental health support and maintaining appropriate staffing levels—were at least three times more likely to have their staff experience better mental and physical health, less burnout, and a higher quality of life. 

In our lunch and learn discussion at HIMSS we shared that during the pandemic, shared stresses bonded frontline workers to each other. More broadly, surveys regularly show that employees who feel supported and heard are less likely to experience burnout. In addition to facilitating communication and teamwork, technologies can help strengthen the bonds between co-workers. Remote workers communicating largely through video, emails, and chat, say they felt more connected before switching to hybrid work. 

“People want to feel like they have colleagues in arms,” says Robert Groves, chief medical officer of Banner/Aetna. “If you take away the human connection and focus exclusively on throughput, then you have just eliminated the reason that most people get into healthcare.” 

Unleashing the power of data 

Another challenge facing the health industry is the sheer volume of data it produces, which is too often unstructured and inaccessible. By some estimates, 80 percent of healthcare data is unstructured, including clinical notes of diverse types, medical imaging reports, medical publications, and more. This not only wastes valuable time on processing but also means that the data is unusable for analysis, AI, and machine learning at scale. The cloud is becoming increasingly important in healthcare as organizations’ interest in data analytics and AI continues to grow. 

The 21st Century Cures Act was passed in an effort to promote innovation in healthcare and requires, among other things, the support of health information technology interoperability. The key to achieving full interoperability is the representation of health data in the FHIR format. 

While FHIR is rapidly being adopted across the globe, there are several gaps in how to represent unstructured information in clinical narratives. Specifically, unstructured text typically cannot be easily ingested, normalized, structured, and analyzed by healthcare stakeholders in resources generated per the United States Core FHIR Guidelines. Organizations adhere to the FHIR standard in the pursuit of interoperability but lose the deep context and relationships from the clinical narrative. 

We were excited to announce new investments in Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare to support healthcare organizations in their data interoperability journey. The general availability of Azure Health Data Services is a critical next step to help health and life sciences organizations harness and unlock the power of health data.  

We were also excited to share a breakthrough solution to simultaneously accelerate unstructured data insights and supercharge interoperability between health organizations: Text Analytics for health structuring to FHIR. Now in preview, this feature of text analytics for health enables health organizations to transform unstructured clinical documents into FHIR resource bundles, to deliver better health insights to more people, faster. 

Text analytics for health is a generally available natural language processing (NLP) service within Microsoft Azure Cognitive Services that was purpose-built to extract information from biomedical and clinical free-text documents. In our newest release of this service, Microsoft allows customers to formalize their NLP output as bundles of interconnected hierarchical FHIR resources, in adherence with the United States Core standards. 

Partnering to reimagine healthcare 

Now more than ever, the healthcare industry needs innovative, diverse, and transformative solutions to deliver equitable and high-quality healthcare, provide better patient outcomes, and extend both with global scale and cost-effectiveness. We are honored that so many partners trust Microsoft to be their platform partner and joined us at HIMSS 2022.  

It was equally exciting to see the innovative technology from our booth partners Efferent, EPAM, KPMG, Quisitive, PwC, Tegria, and Teladoc. If you missed the show, you can watch an overview of their organization’s offer within our virtual booth tour. You’ll experience firsthand how our partners accelerate the delivery of value to our customers by leveraging Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare capabilities. 

Reimagining the future of healthcare  

Our interactions with customers continue to inspire us to keep enhancing the capabilities of Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare. Our work to innovate, reshape, and reimagine healthcare will only continue to grow. Microsoft is committed to innovating new and cutting-edge solutions that help make healthcare more personal, affordable, effective, and accessible while continuing to improve the patient and clinician experience. We’re excited to see what the next innovation will be at HIMSS 2023 in Chicago. 

Resources 

• Access our HIMSS content at Microsoft at HIMSS 2022. 
• Learn more about Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare from our website. 
• Read the blog to learn more about outcomes-focused AI from Microsoft + Nuance. 

The post Reflecting on HIMSS 2022: Reimagining healthcare for the future   appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs.

Microsoft will focus its innovation on helping organizations reimagine healthcare through speaking sessions, lunch and learn programming, partner engagements, customer meetings, and both in-person and virtual booth tours. We will demonstrate the unique capabilities of Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare, built on top of the secure, compliant Microsoft cloud that offers healthcare organizations the scale and performance they need for managing their specific workflows, accelerating access to data insights, and unifying data governance that helps their organization manage and govern their data, wherever it resides.  

We’re excited for what’s in store—both in person and virtually at HIMSS22! Here are my top 9 highlights that I recommend:

1. Microsoft booth #2300

Join us at the Microsoft Booth, Level 2 of the West Hall of the OCCC. The booth will feature space for exclusive one-to-one meetings, immersive customer demos, and opportunities for our partners and customers to showcase their industry and world impact. Guided tours and live demonstrations of Microsoft healthcare innovation make it easier for organizations to create personalized patient experiences, gives health teams connected collaboration tools, and adopt data standards that are important to healthcare.

Live demonstrations from our Microsoft partners, including Efferent, EPAM, KPMG, Quisitive, Nuance, PwC, Tegria, and Teladoc. You’ll also experience how our partners accelerate the delivery of value to our customers by leveraging Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare capabilities.

2. Views from the top: Strategies for creating a sustainable healthcare future

Join this 60-minute panel conversation with Alysa Taylor, CVP, Business Applications and Industry, Microsoft, and leading healthcare experts as they explore the factors that led healthcare leaders to accelerate their organization’s path to modernization, addressing the entire healthcare value chain and patient care journey.

3. Nursing informatics roundtable: Is digital transformation the path to resilience

HIMSS Nursing Informatics Community Roundtable gathers a diverse group of informatics nursing leaders to share their views. Explore innovative ways to empower nursing informaticists at the individual, team, and advocate levels.

4. Ambient clinical intelligence: What’s next for ambient AI in patient care

A growing number of health systems are using ambient technology to capture the provider-patient encounter. Learn ways in which Ambient Clinical Intelligence can enable a real-time understanding of the patient encounter and support physicians at the point of care. Hosted by: Greg Moore, M.D., Ph.D., CVP Microsoft Health and Life Sciences and Joe Petro, MS, EVP, and Chief Technology Officer, Nuance Communications.

5. AI and machine learning: How implicit bias affects AI in healthcare

The development and use of machine learning algorithms have significant promise. Despite these promises, the risk of coded bias in healthcare algorithms remains a concern. This session will explore these risks and ways to mitigate them.

6. Lunch and learn sessions

Lunch and learn sessions are the best way to get up close with technology and uncover stories from healthcare partners and customers. Bonus: Lunch is included. Space is limited, so register early for these fan favorites! Here is a list of my top favorites:

• Empower care teams on the frontline with tools to help reduce their burnout and provide the best possible care.
• From free text to FHIR: Accelerating Health Data Insights and Interoperability with AI.
• Addressing provider and administrative burnout with automation.
• Harnessing healthcare data: A bold future for virtual care.

If you’re not able to attend HIMSS in person. Don’t worry, we still have opportunities to connect with Microsoft and our partners in the following ways below.

7. Microsoft for startups

Increasingly, health tech startups are aligning themselves with Microsoft, bringing innovation, diverse perspectives, and digital transformation to the healthcare industry. We are honored that so many of the new generation of innovators trust Microsoft to be their platform partner. And we’re thrilled to offer the opportunity to set up meetings with the following health and life sciences innovators: Aisera, Bayesian Health, Equideum Health, Gynisus, Hyro, Notable, RxLightning, SciMar One, Structural, Warrior Centric Health, and Well-Beat.

If you’re interested in meeting with health tech startup organizations, please email us at mfshls@microsoft.com to set up a one-to-one meeting.

8. Virtual booth tours

New this year, we are partnering with the IEC team to bring their ‘Experience LIVE program’ to HIMSS to provide a dynamic way for customers to experience our demos at the Orange Country Convention Center in the booth through a live stream. This experience will be a guided tour by a host who will do a walkthrough of the booth and highlight select demo stations to bring to life the riches of the content. This will also enable attendees to ask questions at the moment, allowing for immediate answers resulting in deeper engagement. ​

We are offering two sessions on Wednesday, March 16 at times to enable attendees for different time zones: Tuesday, March 15, 6:00 PM – 7:00 PM Eastern Time and Wednesday, March 16, 8:30 AM – 9:30 AM Eastern Time. Sign up for your virtual tour today.

9. Microsoft digital content

We’ve made sure we still have great content for your own self-service experience. Visit our Microsoft at HIMSS22 page on March 15, 2022, where you can see Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare guided tours, read our announcement blogs, and see even more virtual content from the show.

We are excited to share our vision for innovation around healthcare at HIMSS22 and encourage you to visit with us at booth #2300, Level 2 of the West Hall of the OCCC.

• Register for HIMSS today.
• Explore Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare.

The post Microsoft brings leading healthcare solutions to HIMSS 2022 appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs.

In a post-pandemic world, where quarantining and social distancing may no longer be the norm, the emerging hybrid model of patient care will empower access to care for all and the changes will likely accelerate into the years ahead. Healthcare systems using an omnichannel approach are adjusting the way they triage, evaluate, and care for patients using methods that do not rely on in-person services. While telehealth technology and its use are not new, widespread adoption by health consumers, providers, and payors during the pandemic have reduced the barriers to access and have promoted the use of virtual health services as a way to deliver acute, chronic, primary and specialty care.

The next chapter of healthcare delivery will not treat virtual health as a separate system, but as part of a broader omnichannel health care delivery model that balances virtual and in-person care. You can view our recent webinar, where virtual health leaders from Geisinger, and clinical leaders from Teladoc and Microsoft explored the challenges and opportunities care providers face in realizing this hybrid approach. The presentation will also dive into how the Teladoc Health Solo virtual care platform—now integrated with Microsoft Teams—enables connected experiences across physical and virtual points of care.

Improving patient outreach

Technology advances have already begun to reshape the way patients engage with their healthcare providers. An omnichannel approach to healthcare allows individuals to take control of their health and communicate with their providers on their own terms via email, text, web, chat, and mobile phone. For providers, once these capabilities are established, healthcare organizations should be able to identify unique member needs in the moments that matter, develop interventions tailored to each individual, and continuously optimize engagement through agile, digital capabilities.

Healthcare organizations are building and deploying artificial intelligence (AI)-powered, compliant, conversational healthcare experiences at scale to take over patient screening process and input data in real-time. This leads to an increase in support team productivity and allows them to direct their energy elsewhere. Providence, a healthcare systems with 51 hospitals and more than 1,085 clinics in the Western United States, has effectively utilized Azure Health Bot to triage patients and answer their questions specifically about COVID-19 symptoms, freeing providers to attend to the patients who needed it most. From answering questions to routing patients to the appropriate avenue of care or service, the technology provided an improved experience for patients and allowed Providence to dramatically increase capacity of the healthcare system. Providence also contributed a template to the Azure Health Bot gallery that other organizations can use to rapidly design and deploy Azure Health Bots to fight influenza. The scenario template for flu combines information from multiple sources with FAQs and directs users to a vaccine location finder.

Minimizing risk to healthcare workers and patients

Virtual visits are being used extensively in the “forward triage” of patients long before the need to arrive in primary care clinics and have become the lifeline providing routine care for patients with chronic diseases. By deploying virtual health solutions and programs, patients can receive care from home, without entering medical facilities, minimizing their risk of exposure or transmission to COVID-19 or other viruses.

The benefits to medical staff using telehealth solutions for non-urgent communication helps to reduce the pressures facing emergency rooms, clinics, and already overwhelmed waiting rooms. It can allow clinicians the opportunity to seamlessly transition between patients and clinical operations while freeing them of administrative tasks and maximizing their time spent with patients.

Walsall Healthcare National Health Service (NHS) Trust, part of the NHS in the United Kingdom provides local hospital and community services to about 300,000 people in the borough of Walsall and surrounding areas. When COVID-19 hit, the hospital’s emergency department was flooded by patients. It needed to continue providing other necessary care, but the Trust also had to keep employees healthy and safe. . But the Trust also had to keep employees healthy and safe. Their organization and ability to care for the population have remained intact through the use of Microsoft Teams for virtual health visits with patients, and the use of Microsoft Teams Rooms to run their entire command structure, engage with partners across wards, and look after the whole borough.

Increasing communication between clinicians, caregivers, and patients

Doctors, nurses, and caregivers cannot watch all patients at all times for health problems. However, with devices like Wi-Fi-enabled blood pressure and blood sugar monitors, and sensors that detect a fall, they can better monitor their patient’s health and wellbeing. As devices record vital statistics, the healthcare team gets a better idea of an individual’s health throughout the day and has early warning of impending health issues. With a virtual visit available, the nurse, personal support worker or caregiver can consult a doctor, or just check in remotely to ask the patient how they are feeling.

Remotely-monitoring patients not only helps care for more patients, but also provides a higher level of care. Nurses can focus on their most critical patients knowing they will receive an alert if there is a direct issue with the patient. Doctors and health workers see if a patient is following their prescribed care plan, taking action if needed. Nursing homes can reduce costly hospital visits and access a remote doctor. With an aging population and looming healthcare worker shortage, virtual health is an effective way to build resilience into the healthcare system.

Rx.Health is confronting the challenges of twenty-first century healthcare head on by finding ways for healthcare providers to use technology to provide visibility into a patient’s day-to-day life without interrupting it. While skilled medical professionals can’t be everywhere, apps can. Rx.Health created a collection of digital health solutions that make care navigation, patient monitoring, and engagement faster and more automated than ever before—and on a much greater scale across patient populations.

Adopting a composable, hybrid approach to care improves agility and enables the organization to pivot rapidly in response to changing health environments. By investing in omnichannel consumer support capabilities, health providers will soon be able to realize measurable value from next-generation patient engagement. With ready access to the right patient information, care teams will be empowered to leverage the right care setting, whether virtual or in-person, at the right time for each patient, without navigating many fragmented systems. Watch the webinar to gain more insights about the journey to omnichannel care delivery, from rethinking care delivery and administrative workflows, to building patient trust in quality of virtual care.

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It’s hard to believe another year of HIMSS is upon us and given the impact of COVID-19 on our society, we’ve all had to rethink how we approach connecting with community and engaging with audiences this past year. So, we are delighted that HIMSS21 will be offered both in-person and digitally—so everyone, everywhere can join together.

As a sponsor of HIMSS Digital 2021, within a best-in-class digital environment, we’re tailoring digital first experiences with the convenience you need, as healthcare’s brightest innovators across the globe—to explore new ideas, hear from thought leaders and urgently apply innovation that paves a digital path forward, as we all recover from the pandemic.

One thing we continue to hear from our healthcare customers is that disruptions stemming from the pandemic are here to stay, and every business needs to be on a digital journey. Those who have embraced digital resilience are creating dramatic gains in terms of agility, sustainability, and productivity. They are resetting benchmarks. They are investing for the long term—from the patient experience, care coordination and virtual health tools to data interoperability, and beyond.

Microsoft is proud to be a strategic partner to these companies, helping them accelerate their journeys by connecting and scaling care team collaboration, driving operational efficiency and the freedom to query health data on their terms with Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare solutions.

In October 2020, we announced Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare and our vision: to create a resilient patient-centered healthcare journey. Since then, we’ve been hearing great feedback and releasing more enhanced capabilities that help organizations adapt to the disruption, and build scalable modalities of care while safeguarding patients, care teams, and assets—the keys to making healthcare more accessible, efficient, and affordable—for all.

Connecting data to care transformation

When communities have access to better data, they can make better decisions. However, progress has not been equal across the globe, and there is a great need to focus on societal issues such as reducing health inequity and improving access to care for underserved populations. While researchers work to unlock lifesaving discoveries and develop new approaches to urgent health issues, advancements in technology can help accelerate and scale new solutions.

Data interoperability issues, poor care coordination, and a lack of funding may deter social determinants of health data integration, leading to gaps in care and health disparities for individuals and whole communities. With the pandemic crisis, these gaps and disparities have only grown wider. Individuals living with chronic disease, people in underserved areas, and minority populations have been hit the hardest during the pandemic, highlighting underlying issues that have plagued the industry for years.

End to end pipelines for managing PHI in the cloud

Microsoft wants to empower you with the right tools so that you can do more with your data once it’s in the cloud. With Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) being adopted by healthcare organizations around the world and becoming a regulatory requirement in the United States, we are at a critical point where we can ensure the smooth and quick migration of data from on premises systems to the cloud, all while making it interoperable and ready for exchange. This becomes even more important as paradigms of care are changing and information is required to be shared, accessed and researched across payors, providers and patients. To be able to provide the best and personalized care to patients and to reduce the cost burden, we need to look beyond just clinical data—we need to consider its intersectionality across all types of healthcare data that impacts an individual patient. We’re excited to showcase technology at HIMSS21 which will help organizations achieve this very goal.

Transforming healthcare through virtual health

The next chapter of healthcare delivery won’t treat virtual health as a separate system, and instead will incorporate it as part of the broader omni-channel health care delivery model. Care teams will offer virtual care at the right time for each patient and will seamlessly have the right information for each patient encounter at their fingertips while artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language processing (NLP) have an increasingly bigger role in revolutionizing care.

The pandemic supercharged the urgency to apply AI and NLP technologies to every medical discussion, decision, and diagnosis. Virtual health quickly became perhaps the most obvious example of the need for healthcare and technology to speak more fluently to each other. Providers and patients meeting on the digital screen moved from an emerging possibility to a necessity. AI empowered many of these human interactions. To cite just one example, AI-assisted health bots analyzed patient symptoms with unprecedented speed and precision, harnessing and clarifying data across towns, cities and even continents, making it possible for physicians and other caregivers to do the work of healing with new effectiveness, in a new world.

In July 2021, Text Analytics for Health, an NLP service within Microsoft Azure Cognitive Services, became generally available, and it’s a game changer. Words and phrases within unstructured text can be associated with identified healthcare and biomedical language and semantic types to unlock understanding, like the meaning of a symptom, a drug and dosing interval, linking the concepts to common clinical coding systems, understanding certainty, and even establishing relations between the entities. A whole new level of connection is created among medical professionals, researchers, data analysts, even software vendors. The entire ecosystem connects, becomes holistic, not walled off, leading to more efficient healthcare ecosystems and better care.

To enable connected experiences across physical and virtual points of care, we are collaborating closely with Teladoc Health, the global leader in whole-person virtual care. As a first step in our collaboration, we are working together to integrate Teladoc Health’s Solo platform for hospitals and health systems with Microsoft Teams. The combination of communications, collaboration, and workflows in Microsoft Teams with Teladoc Health’s medical-grade whole-person virtual care delivery solutions will simplify the way healthcare organizations and clinicians work by streamlining the technology and administrative processes associated with providing virtual care. As virtual care becomes more integrated into the broader healthcare delivery model, health systems are able to strengthen physician and patient access to best-in-class virtual health and enable a heightened focus on high quality care.

Connect with us at HIMSS Digital 2021

Given the challenges COVID-19 has created for many, we’re continuing to embrace digital-first experiences so that everyone can join in and participate—whether you’re back at your work office or in your home office or going to HIMSS21 in Las Vegas.

If you’re registered for HIMSS21, we invite you to join Ramin Davidoff, MD, co-CEO of The Permanente Federation and Julie Brill, Microsoft’s CVP for Global Privacy & Regulatory Affairs to learn how to evolve resilient models of care, improve health equity and ensure lasting structural change. Tune in to their digital conversation on Tuesday, August 10th. Watch our UpNext virtual demo where we’ll show how Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare enables you to transform the healthcare journey while helping support security, compliance, and interoperability of health data. Explore our digital booth to learn about Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare capabilities which make it easier to improve the patient engagement, empower health team collaboration, and improve clinical and operational insights.

You can also join us in-person at the Nursing Informatics Roundtable and Reception on Wednesday, August 11, where we’ll host a lively discussion with a diverse group of informatics and innovation nursing leaders about individual and collective advances transforming healthcare through the use of analytics and AI.

Microsoft, along with our partners, are committed to supporting your business, no matter where you are on your digital transformation journey. Stay informed about Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare to learn how you can deliver better experiences, insights, and care.

The post Explore the new wave of cloud innovation at HIMSS21 appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs.

When communities have access to better data, they can make better decisions. However, progress has not been equal across the globe, and there is a great need to focus on societal issues such as reducing health inequity and improving access to care for underserved populations. While researchers work to unlock lifesaving discoveries and develop new approaches to urgent health issues, advancements in technology can help accelerate and scale new solutions. In May’s upcoming Healthcare Innovation Forum, our panel of industry experts will discuss how AI and machine learning is revolutionizing the way healthcare data is analyzed and delivered, and how organizations can implement positive change to solve problems that plague the health system.

Integrating AI and machine learning into the healthcare ecosystem allows for a variety of benefits, including automating administrative tasks, easing workflows, and analyzing large data sets to deliver better healthcare faster, and at a lower cost. Insider Intelligence reported that spending on AI in medicine is projected to grow at an annualized 48 percent between 2017 and 2023.¹

According to Business Insider, 30 percent of healthcare costs are associated with administrative tasks. AI can automate some of these tasks, like pre-authorizing insurance, following up on unpaid bills, and maintaining records, to ease the workload of healthcare professionals and ultimately save them money.¹

The US healthcare system generates approximately one trillion gigabytes of data annually.² These massive quantities of data have been accompanied by an increase in large-scale computing power. Together, they raise the possibility that both machine learning, and AI, can generate insights both to improve the discovery of new therapeutics, create more personalized treatment delivery, and enable the ability to extract actionable data to help improve operational outcomes for healthcare systems.

The NHS Business Services Authority (NHS BSA) is a Special Health Authority and an arm’s length body of the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC). Amongst its activities, NHS BSA operates the NHS prescription service, including processing more than 54 million prescriptions per month. Of these, 30 million are paper forms, and data from many of these forms would need to be manually keyed in by an operator. NHS BSA decided to explore the opportunities to streamline this process through greater automation using Microsoft AI, machine learning technologies, and a machine vision solution. After the first pilot with one handwritten form, they were able to apply machine learning and AI to digitize the content and not only get above 90 percent of confidence from that data but use the data to drive further intelligence-led improvements.

Healthcare business group Ribera Salud, and its technological division FutuRS, have implemented a predictive AI model, which analyzes and processes the variables of each patient to predict their evolution, based on objective data analyzed by Microsoft Azure and machine learning (ML) tools. By including both technologists and healthcare professionals within the same team, Ribera Salud began to predict certain adverse effects using ML techniques and including this type of prediction within the day-to-day operations and care practices. The AI and ML supported tool has allowed Ribera Salud to have greater control over patient risks without incurring a greater workload for health professionals. Their model facilitates what is known as “Right Care, Right Now,” that is, providing the right care at the right time to achieve optimal results for the patient. In the last year, this model—supported by the Microsoft cloud platform and Azure Machine Learning tools—has helped reduce the number of patients who developed a pressure ulcer (PU) in ICU, up to 19 percent (11 percent cumulative incidence).

Adaptive Biotechnologies is a commercial-stage biotechnology company focused on harnessing the inherent biology of the adaptive immune system to transform the diagnosis and treatment of disease. Adaptive was built on the premise that the adaptive immune system can detect and treat most diseases in the exact same way, but the inability to understand precisely how that system works has prevented the medical community from fully leveraging its capabilities.

Building on the foundation of its immunosequencing technology, Adaptive built a proprietary immune medicine platform over the last decade that is uniquely capable of decoding the genetic language of the adaptive immune system at scale to understand exactly how it works. Adaptive needed to synthesize this huge system of biology and tap into the full value of the massive clinical immunomics database generated, so the company turned to Microsoft Azure for compute, storage, and machine learning capabilities. Adaptive worked with Microsoft to explore the cloud and create a roadmap for the company’s technology needs. Adaptive adopted Microsoft Azure to apply machine learning to exponentially accelerate the company’s ability to apply its proprietary immune medicine platform to gain novel insights from its clinical immunomics database. With a scalable immune medicine platform, researchers could begin computationally mapping trillions of TCRs to millions of disease-specific antigens that they are specifically targeted to attach to—called the TCR-Antigen Map—potentially enabling new approaches to diagnosing disease more precisely and earlier than is currently possible for many diseases.

Within the fields of life sciences, healthcare providers, and med devices, understanding when and how to deploy AI and machine learning can revolutionize the way healthcare data is analyzed and delivered. On May 20, 2021, join us at the Healthcare Innovation Forum to learn where AI and machine learning can drive greater care efficiencies, and uncover deep insights and relationships in healthcare data to help reduce risk, and ultimately lead to improved health outcomes.

References:

1. “Use of AI in healthcare & medicine is booming – here’s how the medical field is benefiting from AI in 2021 and beyond”, Alicia Phaneuf, Business Insider, January 29, 2021.
2. “The fragmentation of health data”, Travis May, Medium, July 31, 2018.

The post AI and machine learning can implement positive change for the broader health ecosystem appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs.

While many organizations define population health slightly differently, its core aim is to provide an opportunity for leaders in healthcare, agencies, education, and business to work together in order to improve the health outcomes in the communities they serve, all while making an impact to reduce the total cost of care. Technology and data can help bring significant health concerns into focus and address ways that resources can be allocated to overcome the problems that drive poor health conditions in the population. We all have a stake in population health, and in our upcoming Health Innovation Forum, we’ve gathered a panel of industry healthcare and technology experts to discuss how critical data insights can transform the way we support population health strategies.

With population health management (PHM) strategies, organizations can approach improvement from a broader continuum of care perspective. Instead of focusing improvement resources on limited populations and acute care, effective PHM strategies drive transformation that addresses all levels of healthcare delivery, including prevention and care management.

Prioritizing data transformation

There are many data factors that make up the complete picture of individuals and population health which can span health behaviors (e.g., diet, exercise, tobacco use, alcohol, and drug use), clinical care (e.g., access to care and quality of care), social and economic factors (e.g., education, family and social support, and income), and the physical environment (e.g., air quality, access to clean water sources, housing and transit).

Organizations should consider prioritizing and integrating the multitude of internal and external data sources to provide better transparency into their population health journey. This transparency helps organizations better manage their risks, opportunities, and strategies to efficiently improve health outcomes. Incorporating health behavior data with captured clinical data (e.g., electronic health records) can provide critical direction on ensuring delivery of the right care at the right time in the right place.

Novant Health achieved its goal to bring siloed data in a more usable way. During the pandemic response, they built a COVID-19 tracker that captured data about who had contracted the disease and created a scoring model that helped identify patients’ risk of having a more severe response to COVID-19. Novant Health staff used these proactive data insights to provide the best possible care from the outset. They went on to use Microsoft Power BI to support its COVID-19 vaccination program, noting patient ethnicity, zip code, and other demographic information to understand which segments of the population are being vaccinated. Novant Health focused on health equity and found ways to use data to close gaps for communities that have either been underrepresented or lack access to healthcare.

Challenges of data-driven decisions

Modern healthcare organizations have data coming from a myriad of sources. In fact, up to 70 percent of the time providers spend analyzing data is wasted on ingestion and unification.¹ Unsurprisingly, with such large volumes of structured and unstructured data, providers must spend exorbitant amounts of time trying to glean any meaningful insights.

Focusing on gathering and analyzing the right data sets—clinical, social determinants, comorbidities, mental health, and claims data—healthcare organizations can identify how to get consumer behavior data to inform the most accurate recommendation on next best actions and evaluate opportunities for population health and improvement work. Thinking about the connected healthcare ecosystem, with the expressed goal of improving outcomes in the populations they serve, can lead to lowering the costs of care. It also helps to identify the opportunity to connect what’s going on with the patients when they are not in the physician’s office and helps to paint a detailed picture of the patient’s needs.

Helsinki and Uusimaa Hospital District (HUS), a joint authority formed by 24 Finnish municipalities and comprising multiple hospitals across southern Finland, used Microsoft cloud solutions to create a Virtual Hospital, which provides digital health services that improve patient access to quality care, reduce costs, and enable healthcare providers to treat more patients in less time. In Finland, patients who need secondary, or specialist, care must be referred by a primary healthcare provider. But the ability to access medical information, self-help programs, and virtual treatments via computer or mobile devices has improved access significantly for the elderly, people with disabilities, those who live in remote areas, and others who find it more convenient or affordable to pursue medical treatment from home rather than travel or take time off work to visit the hospital.

By changing how they care for patients, HUS and other hospitals can increase the efficiency of healthcare professionals and do more with the same number of resources. Because many patients access a lot of information prior to their appointments or participate in self-help exercises, they often have fewer questions and can focus on the issues they really need their doctors to address.

Connecting data to care transformation

For health systems looking to enhance the use of data, leaders should first understand what their goals are and how they plan to achieve them. However, fifty-six percent of healthcare leaders say their current population health management solution doesn’t meet their needs, according to a survey from Persivia and commissioned by Sage Growth Partners.²

Data interoperability issues, poor care coordination, and a lack of funding may deter social determinants of health data integration, leading to gaps in care and health disparities for individuals and whole communities. With the pandemic crisis, these gaps and disparities have only grown wider. Individuals living with chronic disease, people in underserved areas, and minority populations have been hit the hardest during the pandemic, highlighting underlying issues that have plagued the industry for years.

FHIR (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources) is rapidly becoming the global interoperability standard for secure and private exchange of health data. However, true interoperability in healthcare means enabling all kinds of healthcare data—not just those coming from clinical records. It makes it easier for anyone working with health data to ingest, manage, and persist protected health information in the cloud. The healthcare industry is rapidly transforming health data to the emerging standard of FHIR, which enables a robust, extensible data model with standardized semantics and data exchange that enables all systems using FHIR to work together. Transforming data to FHIR allows health care organizations to quickly connect existing data sources such as electronic health record systems or research databases. Most importantly, FHIR can simplify data ingestion and accelerate development with analytics and Machine Learning tools.

Humana is a health insurance company based out of Kentucky in the United States. The company is committed to helping millions of medical and specialty members achieve their best health. Humana works under three principles: to deliver easy and seamless customer experiences, help members achieve their best health through the five points of influence (primary care, social determinants of health, pharmacy health, home health, and behavioral health), and to gain power through integrated technology.

Humana wanted to represent all the data in one place, rather than looking at individual data in their respective silos. Humana quickly consolidated its high volume of data into a handful of columns and reduced visual load time tremendously. By doing this Humana aims to derive actionable insights and cultivate a data-driven culture to help its members achieve their best health.

Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare makes possible the electronic access, exchange, and use of electronic health information by and between patients, healthcare providers, and health plans. Personal health information (PHI) needs to be handled differently in the cloud, and when FHIR is built-in, it gives organizations the trust and control they need. We’ve innovated the way healthcare organizations can enrich, normalize, and unify protected health information (PHI) through Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR), and longitudinal data to accelerate artificial intelligence (AI), team productivity, and business process workflows.

To really reduce health disparities, it’s not enough to just identify which population groups are most at risk. Healthcare organizations must connect with patients in order to understand how they can best meet individuals’ needs. Unlocking the power of health data allows care givers to gain a holistic view of the patient with insights and actionable next steps for more informed, personalized care management. For many organizations, the ongoing shift to population health data transformation and its impact to care can be challenging—but it’s a worthwhile journey to undertake.

Our continued goal is empowering global healthcare organizations to explore how technology and data can support collaborative efforts to promote health and wellness of the population. Join us at our upcoming Health Innovation Forum on April 29, 2021, 7 AM PDT | 4 PM CEST to explore how critical data insights can transform your organization’s population health strategies.

References:

1. PwC Health Research Institute. Top health industry issues of 2020: will digital start to show ROI? 2019. Top health industry issues of 2020: Will digital start to show an ROI? – December 2019 (a51.nl)
2. Sage Growth Partners and Persivia. 2020. PHM Solutions Not Meeting Needs. https://persivia.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/0193_Persivia_MarketReportInsights_r5.pdf

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