Our Microsoft for Healthcare team and partners are excited to join health organizations, leaders, and experts to build a brighter future for the global health ecosystem so that everyone, everywhere has access to care that works.

The rate of disruption for health continues to accelerate. Healthcare organizations worldwide have implemented a breadth of technology solutions to transform how they enable personalized care for their patients, empower care teams and employees, secure and protect health information and use data insights to improve operational outcomes.

At Microsoft, we refer to that as tech intensity and believe that it’s not only about what technology health organizations want, but also what capabilities they can build to support access to value-based care into the future. The focus is the move from using the cloud to increase economies of scale to extracting insights from data that can encourage innovation and create an informed and empowered community of providers, payors, innovators, and individuals that will enable an ever-improving state of health throughout the world.

In the healthcare industry, we’re beginning to see steps to make that possible with the establishment of interoperability standards like Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR), the rise of data-driven technologies like AI, machine learning, and the Internet of Things (IoT), as well as ways of promoting data transparency, such as blockchain. At Microsoft, we’ve made investments like Azure API for FHIR to enable health system interoperability and sharing data in the cloud. This year we reaffirmed an interoperability commitment along with leading cloud providers to enable the frictionless exchange of health care data for patients and the industry. We continue to accelerate the ability to integrate health care data from medical devices and the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT)  to empower those working with data from medical devices to securely ingest and transform that data into the FHIR standard. Finally, we are committed to enabling our partners and customers to create new use cases and workflows using an FHIR-based data model.

The ability to unlock data is foundational to any healthcare organization’s digital transformation. Organizations achieving the greatest success are doing more than just implementing existing tech, they are developing their own digital capabilities and proprietary solutions that use data and AI to address the challenges faced by their communities, and seizing new opportunities to reimagine healthcare throughout the patient care journey. In essence, they are becoming change agents and, in the process, placing themselves at the forefront of innovation in this industry.

Examples of change leaders can be seen through customer stories, such as Providence St. Joseph Health creating personalized patient experiences; Northwell Health using data insights to improve operational outcomes; St. Luke’s University Health Network transforming clinical collaboration through their secure, cloud-connected workforce; Humana who’s using AI and predictive care solutions to reimagine health for aging populations and their care teams; and Alpha XR Boots Alliance (WBA), who’s reimagining the delivery of health care services by delivering innovative platforms that enable next-generation health networks, integrated digital and physical health care experiences and new care management solutions.

Healthcare organizations looking to drive change in their health ecosystem have turned to Microsoft and our vast partner ecosystem to help them transform. We believe it’s not just about what technology they want from Microsoft, but also what culture and unique capabilities they are building to take their healthcare organization into the future. It’s about having a technology partner you can trust to make you independent with your own technology. Our mission as a company to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more is fundamentally centered on how we increase the tech intensity of every organization that we work with. At Microsoft, we are honored to be a partner in this exciting transformation.

This post has been updated on March 4, 2020, to reflect changes in Microsoft’s involvement with HIMSS 2020.

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Every year, the banking industry’s brightest innovators come to Sibos to educate and inspire attendees with fresh ideas and creative solutions to some of the most common and constant challenges in modern banking. We’re excited to see what new advancements and transformations our customers have made since last year! Microsoft’s value as a trusted thought leader and strategic partner will be on full display focusing on helping banks reimagine how they modernize payments and core banking, manage risk, and combat financial crime.​ Join us for 15 minute Fin Talks in our booth (Z131) delivered by subject matter experts on a variety of topics, like how to deliver on innovation through cultural transformation, exploring the latest in payments in the cloud, fraud protection, and so much more. Additionally, you can sign up for a one-on-one meeting with Microsoft executives, or Envisioning sessions that are designed to help you imagine the possibilities in your transformation journey available on the 2019 Microsoft at Sibos event page.

Modernize payments and core banking

While payments are the backbone of every bank, the payments playing field is no longer level for banks processing on batch-oriented legacy mainframe systems. The rise of fintech, the shift in consumer demands and habits, the democratization of data, and the arrival of multiple new fintech companies have altered the landscape. Keeping pace with these challenges is forcing banks to modernize their platform to improve agility and significantly lower the costs of managing old systems. These new systems—modern data centers and cloud-based technologies—empower banks to meet customer expectations for fast, anytime and anywhere service, while enabling banks to be well positioned to accommodate the increasing pace of new regulatory requirements. Anglo-Gulf Trade Bank (AGTB) aims to deliver a modern, sophisticated digital corporate trade finance and banking solution that facilitates the required access to trade-related banking to underserved businesses, and helps bridge the trade finance deficit. While Microsoft technology powered the bank’s vision, Publicis Sapient, working with the AGTB team, made it happen. As consulting and integration partner, Publicis Sapient worked with Microsoft cloud architects to bring the robust vision and architectural design to life.

Manage risk across the organization

Banks are seeking to deepen risk insights, adapt to a volatile geopolitical environment, and comply with ever-changing regulatory requirements. They’re facing looming regulation implementation deadlines, outdated on-premise systems, and rising compliance costs to meet their required risk management assessments. Leveraging cloud-based tools, infusing processes with AI, and improving data management practices can enable banks to enhance and improve risk insights across lines of business. These insights offer what’s needed to maintain compliance, reduce costs, and improve capital efficiency. As more banks turn to the cloud, there is a lot we can learn from those at the forefront. UBS, the world’s largest wealth manager, is leading the industry in public cloud adoption by using Microsoft Azure for global scale, security, to improve business agility, reduce costs, and gain a competitive edge. The key to UBS’s move to Azure was a significant focus on regulatory compliance.

Modernize operations against financial crime

Security threats and financial crime operations, such as cyber-attacks and money laundering, are becoming more sophisticated so new strategies must be adopted to the fullest. Failure to prevent and protect customers against financial crime is costly and has real-world consequences that extend beyond traditional banks. Verifying suspicious activity with customers is also an increasingly important part of this experience. Recent technology advances from Microsoft and our partners are helping banks improve outcomes on both sides of the trade-off equation—deploying enhanced data analytics to identify outliers faster and conduct near-real-time risk scoring while protecting web and mobile users from cybersecurity threats without compromising the customer experience. Read more on why banks are adopting a modern approach to cybersecurity, and at Sibos check out the Open Theater Session, Protecting Sensitive Information from Insider Risks.

Deliver differentiated customer experiences

To better serve consumers now and in the future, financial institutions are recognizing the rapidly changing needs and expectations of consumers. To better serve these digitally-minded consumers, there are several game-changing technology innovations that can help financial services organizations drive differentiated and personalized experiences. At their core is the ability to tap into the volumes of available data, from transactions, life-events, marketing, social, mobile and more, and use it in meaningful ways. In June we public previewed a new Microsoft Banking Accelerator targeting both Retail and Commercial Banking. At Sibos we’ll showcase how customers can use the Banking Accelerator blueprints and common data models for banking-specific data elements (Know Your Customers, loans, mortgages, referrals, branch details, collateral, and service throughput) and help them take customer engagement to new levels.

Empowering intelligent banking

Leading with trust and innovation in everything we do, Microsoft is looking forward to working with organizations to empower their intelligent banking digital transformation and help them thrive in the hyper-connected world. We want to help organizations become more agile and make smarter decisions by providing a trusted, highly secure and compliant cloud that is embedded with pervasive intelligence, and supported by the largest ecosystem of technology partners. At Sibos, Microsoft will showcase our customer’s digital transformation journeys, highlight developments from key partnerships and engage with leading financial services organization from around the world.

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The upside artificial intelligence (AI) opportunity is undeniable for every health ecosystem stakeholder. You can feel the anticipation. By 2020, Gartner predicts that 70% of healthcare provider CIOs will cite advanced analytics as their top priority. By now, nearly every senior leader is evangelizing the value of a comprehensive, enterprise-wide AI strategy to accelerate their digital transformation.

It feels like AI is on the verge of going mainstream with 50% reporting AI as a top strategic priority to improve performance and cost effectiveness, yet only 4% of CIOs in their survey consider it a top priority for funding.  So what exactly are these AI leaders doing that is substantially different and putting them ahead of the pack?

Foundation first

A recent HIMSS Media Report pinpoints what these AI leaders are doing to create a culture of innovation.  In short, AI leaders start their AI journey by first building an AI foundation of innovation readiness and processes. To become “innovation ready”, Chief Data Officers will tell you that a critical piece of AI work is the groundwork for data preparation. It’s hard to imagine building a house without first preparing the foundation, and most organizations start construction on their AI house before doing the foundational data preparation work needed for AI to succeed.

Preparing data to be AI-ready involves more than just correcting errors, duplicates, or reformatting. Data needs to be extracted, organized, and labeled in ways that allow machine learning tools to generate the kind of enterprise-grade AI models that can drive transformative business or clinical process change.

Microsoft is reducing the time, cost, and complexity of laying your AI foundation

Very few health organizations are equipped with the tools, skills, and resources they need to do the data preparation groundwork that AI needs to succeed. That’s why Microsoft chose to host HL7® FHIR® DevDays 2019 in the Microsoft Conference Center in Redmond, WA earlier in June.  HL7 FHIR, or Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources, is an open interoperability standard that can extract and organize siloed data from disparate sources (20 or more databases for many organizations) into AI-ready data sets.  Collaborating with HL7 and industry experts, we hosted over 100 hands-on tutorials and hackathons, as well as keynotes to upskill our customers and partners to be able to install their AI foundation. We also joined top interoperability and AI experts from around the world to find ways to further improve the HL7 FHIR standard.

Beyond preparing data for AI, health systems also need a simple and safe way to protect, control, and track access to protected health data at scale. Open cloud platforms coupled with new AI dev tools are making it easier for developers to create innovative applications and to collaborate in powerful ways at scale.  At Microsoft, we share the same commitment and challenges to deliver better care so we we’re taking the same approach with healthcare development to help improve operational outcomes. For example, we first developed our Azure API for FHIR®as an open source project, and we’re doing the same with our recent FHIR® R4 and our SQL persistence provider projects.

We are also growing our open source healthcare team at Microsoft Healthcare with a focus on high-impact approaches to health data interoperability, working with stakeholders across the ecosystem of hospitals, care providers, insurers, electronic health record system developers. With an open source project backed by an in-house engineering team, the gang has been able to add features at an impressive rate.

Get started on your AI foundation

Check out AI Business School for a leadership crash course on AI strategy, culture, and responsibility.

• Explore healthcare use case for AI
• Accelerate your AI in healthcare initiatives
• See how Ochner Health Systems integrated AI into patient care (need link directly to the video)
• Learn more about FHIR service for health data solutions
• Lighting up healthcare data with FHIR®: Announcing the Azure API for FHIR

FHIR® is the registered trademark of HL7 and is used with the permission of HL7 

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The US National Nurses Week kicks off today and ends on nursing and health statistics pioneer Florence Nightingale’s birthday, May 12 (this year would be her one hundred ninety-ninth). At four million strong in the United States, nurses care and advocate for patients and families from the bedside to the boardroom.

When we talk about using our Microsoft technology and solutions to improve care and assist clinicians, it’s those four million nurses we want to empower. On the front lines of healthcare, nurses are the first to know whether technology helps or hinders their communication, workflow, procedures, and delivers what it promises.

That means they’re guiding the healthcare technology conversation in our ranks. They’re on our teams for every phase of advancing innovations: design, development, and deployment. They provide essential thought leadership and input on everything from technology builds to accessibility challenges.

Nurses are leaders of many technology solutions to improve patient care for better outcomes.

With the massive amounts of clinical and operational data nurses interact with daily, we cannot underestimate the impact of artificial intelligence, machine learning and our roles as nurses in its evolution.  Nurses are already involved with the design and development of solutions including those from our partners, KenSci and Evergreen Health.

The Cardiac High Acuity Monitoring Program, or CHAMP, assists families at home care for their newborns born with congenital heart disease, such as hypoplastic left heart syndrome (HLHS).  The family will use a tablet device between a baby’s surgeries to enter pulse oximetry, weight, and other vital statistics such a short video clips of breathing and color.  The information is sent via Azure Cloud Services to nurses and doctors for review.  The program, created at Children’s Mercy in Kansas, is currently implemented at seven (and growing) children’s hospitals across the United States.

Another innovative example of nurses and technology is the use of HoloLens in education and the work of Marion Leary, Director of Innovation and Research from the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing.  She recently shared her work around HoloLens during a video blog with the National League for Nursing and myself.  This application is just one example of how nurses are integral to the advancement of innovations.

We celebrate and appreciate why nurses are integral to our design, development and deployment of health information technology. Microsoft is committed to empowering nurses as they are vital to the future of health transformation.

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Microsoft Health is proud to announce its Corporate Membership in the Health Businesswomen’s Association (HBA), a global nonprofit organization comprised of individuals and organizations from across the healthcare industry.

This membership is part of Microsoft’s outreach to include and support women in healthcare, from those at the beginning of their careers through the C-Suite.

Earlier this month, we engaged with more than 800+ HBA members at the HBA Annual Conference in Washington, DC.

Key Takeaways from the HBA Annual Conference

• Women made history on Election Day. It was empowering to be with 800+ women in DC and hear NPR National Political Correspondent, Mara Liasson, deliver the event keynote and discuss her views on what the mid-term elections mean for women in the workplace as well as gender parity in politics and drove this message home. Regardless of the outcome or your political affiliation, this year’s election felt extra special because a record number of women across the country were running in for office. Let’s look at the numbers, 390 women ran for the House of Representatives, a figure that’s higher than at any point in American history. Twenty-two of the candidates are non-incumbent black women — for scale, there are only 18 black women in the House right now. Meanwhile, 49 women ran for the Senate, more than 68 percent higher than the number who’d announced at the same point in 2014.
• Gender Parity is an important topic, and one that the HBA is driving for its members every day. This year’s event included a session on Gender Bias in the Workplace, and the topic was hot with attendees throughout the day, including from those who visited our booth. Organizations pursuing gender parity and diversity will reap the benefits of increased revenue, decreased costs, maximized profits, as well as more effective employee recruitment, improved employee retention, and an enhanced corporate image.
• AI can be a game changer for healthcare. AI is everywhere. The question is how do we use it to help reduce costs, create better healthcare solutions for patients, empower our clinicians to do more, and improve health outcomes? At Microsoft, we believe AI and the secure cloud have the power to transform health organizations. Steward Health Care, the largest privately-held health care network in the US, recently used AI to predict how long a patient would stay in a hospital and develop potential treatment plans to accelerate care and treatment, saving the organization $48 million a year. As we continue to evolve our work in AI, our partnership with our customers, HBA and our partners will continue to help us identify new and exciting ways to apply technology to help solve some tough problems in healthcare.

HBA’s Mission for Women in Healthcare

The Healthcare Businesswomen’s Association (HBA) is a global not-for-profit organization dedicated to furthering the advancement and impact of women in the business of healthcare. HBA supports initiatives including achieving gender parity in leadership positions, facilitating career and business connections, and providing effective practices that enable organizations to realize the full potential of their female talent. The HBA accomplishes its mission through strong business networks, education, research, advocacy, and recognition for individuals and companies.

The HBA serves nearly 10,000 members in diverse sectors of the healthcare industry including pharmaceuticals, biotechnology, medical devices, marketing, contract research, payer organizations, consulting and other firms.  The association offers award programs for Rising Stars through Woman of the Year, reflecting the importance of women in the field no matter where they are on their career path.

Follow Microsoft in Health on social media to get live updates from us at the event.

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In the last decade, the healthcare industry has accomplished a significant transformation with the digitization of health data. As we look to the next ten years, our challenge will be to connect and leverage that digitized data to power innovation and AI.

Healthcare developers are tasked with the challenge to bring diverse data sets together and develop machine learning across those data sets. We believe the best way to support developers working with health data is to offer tools that allow them to come together – for collaboration, creation, sharing, and building on each other’s work.

Today I’m excited to announce the release of an open source project on GitHub from Microsoft Healthcare: FHIR Server for Azure. FHIR Server for Azure empowers developers with software that fully supports exchange and management of data in the cloud via the FHIR specification.

FHIR Server for Azure provides support infrastructure for immediate provisioning in the cloud, including mapping to Azure Active Directory (Azure AD), and the ability to enable role-based access controls (RBAC). Developers can save time when it’s required to integrate a FHIR server into an application or use it as a foundation to customize a unique FHIR service.

Microsoft is contributing this open source project to make it easier for all organizations working with healthcare data to leverage the power of the cloud for clinical data processing and machine learning workloads.

We believe in FHIR
Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) is rapidly gaining support in the healthcare community as the next generation standards framework for interoperability, and it’s clear why. FHIR provides a simpler, easier-to-learn, and pragmatic framework. Building on the shared experience of healthcare standards communities, FHIR offers an extensible data model and a REST API to simplify the implementation and interoperability of health data.

In August 2018, Microsoft joined with Amazon, Google, IBM, and other companies in a commitment to remove barriers for the adoption of technologies that support healthcare interoperability, particularly those that are enabled through the cloud and AI. Supporting the FHIR standard and investing in open source to enable FHIR is core to that commitment.

We want to make it easier and more secure for organizations working with healthcare data. We’re starting with FHIR Server for Azure, and we plan to enable a broad set of core services in the Microsoft Cloud to support healthcare interoperability standards like FHIR.

AI in healthcare, starting with FHIR in the cloud environment
In almost every facet of healthcare, the ambition to create and deliver AI exceeds the tools available to deliver it. FHIR Server for Azure provides a foundation to address that problem. Working with data in the FHIR format, developers can use the server to quickly ingest and manage FHIR datasets in a cloud environment, track and manage data access, and begin to normalize data for machine learning workloads.

This open source release includes support infrastructure for easy deployment:

• Scripts and ARM templates are available for immediate provisioning in the Microsoft Cloud
• Scripts are available to map to Azure AD and enable RBAC
• The GitHub documentation includes an “easy button” that deploys FHIR Server for Azure into nearly any Azure public region.

As an open source project, FHIR Server for Azure is built with logical separation, enabling developers with flexibility to modify how it is implemented, and extend its capabilities as needed. The logical layers of the FHIR Server are:

• Hosting Layer – Supports hosting in different environments, with custom configuration of Inversion of Control (IoC) containers
• RESTful API Layer – The implementation of the APIs defined by the HL7 FHIR specification
• Core Logic Layer – The implementation of the core FHIR logic
• Persistence Layer – A pluggable persistence provider enabling the FHIR server to connect to virtually any data persistence utility. FHIR Server for Azure includes a ready-to-use data persistence provider for Azure Cosmos DB (a globally replicated database service that offers rich querying over data).

In our initial release of FHIR Server for Azure, we are supporting FHIR STU3, which is the current version of the FHIR API. We have been actively engaged with HL7 and the FHIR community to support the standards development process for FHIR R4 and are excited about the forthcoming publication of FHIR R4. We plan to support FHIR R4 in a future version of FHIR Server for Azure, once the R4 specification has been finalized and published by HL7.

Playing with FHIR
Lighting up AI and innovation with data normalized in FHIR is our passion, but we developed the FHIR Service for Azure with a focus on data security first. The requirements for HIPAA, HITRUST, GDPR and maintaining security between existing health systems can often stagnate innovation. That’s why Microsoft Healthcare has been working closely with healthcare organizations, government policymakers and other technology leaders to ensure we deliver trusted FHIR technology. When deployed in the Microsoft Cloud, all Azure services used to support the FHIR Server for Azure are ISO 27001 certified and meet all the compliance requirements for HIPAA and GDPR.

We want to help you play with FHIR! The future of cloud scenarios you can create with FHIR are unlimited, but some of the best cloud scenarios for implementation are:

• Interoperability: Health systems can facilitate interoperability and normalization of data between disparate systems through FHIR APIs and a FHIR service
• Internet of Medical Things (IoMT): Startups and new device/app developers can document and share data in the FHIR format, facilitating faster integration with provider and payer ecosystems (e.g. sending data to EHRs via FHIR APIs)
• Research: Leveraging data in FHIR formats can help to expedite normalization of data for data scientists and researchers and allow for more granular control of data that needs to be shared across groups. By enabling RBAC and audit logs, the use of a FHIR service allows data owners more control over data sharing.

Get started today
This open source project is fully backed by the Microsoft Healthcare engineering team, but we know that this project will only get better with your feedback and contributions. We are actively driving the development of this code base and test builds and deployments daily. You can learn more about the architecture of the FHIR server and how to contribute to the project at the FHIR server site.

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Today’s consumers are used to engaging with businesses on their own terms, whether that’s online banking or shopping via an app or mobile device with a few clicks. While this consumerization may have started in other industries such as retail and financial services, it’s quickly extending into healthcare.

Patients expect a similar ease of use with their healthcare and are pushing for more digitization. A recent survey found 64% of patients use a digital device to manage their health, forcing providers to rethink their strategy for patient engagement.

So how do you build a patient-centered experience that doesn’t disappoint? It certainly isn’t easy, but here are four steps that can help you build an effective patient engagement experience for your organization.

Get a full picture of your patient touchpoints

Patients currently interact with health systems through numerous communication points. They might start searching a website to find a care location or look up a doctor in a specific specialty. They could interact with a call center to get more information or schedule an appointment. More digitally-inclined patients might use mobile health apps to search for specialists, check if their doctor has privileges at a certain hospital, or read health tips via a curated feed.

Take a closer look at all the ways patients are using these channels to interact with your organization. This will give you a comprehensive picture you can use for the next steps.

Next, it’s time to zero in on the patient perspective by analyzing what their experiences are today and how might they need to be redesigned.

Map common patient journeys to pave the way for more streamlined experiences

Now that you have a full picture of all the ways patients could engage with your organization, the next stage involves connecting these into paths a patient could take, and then isolating the most common journeys.

It’s true that every patient is unique, but you’ll find there are common reasons why patients engage with a healthcare organization. They may be trying to make appointments, get lab results, or renew a prescription, for instance.

By identifying the most common reasons patients engage and conducting a gap analysis to determine the distance between your existing approach, you can optimize those journeys to improve satisfaction, as well as surprise and delight patients with excellent customer service.

This approach is consistent with how other industries improve customer experience. For example, travel websites consistently look at how travelers research and book flights, examining the path from initial research to travel booking and preparation.

This way the organization can learn what positive and negative experiences a customer encounters along the way. The results can improve the customer experience and identify opportunities to improve efficiencies.

This step is an important foundation for redesigning key experiences to make them friction-free for patients and scalable for providers. And don’t forget, the patient journey doesn’t end with your organization. Design for the broader patient experience and any other providers involved.

Delivering a consistent, frictionless experience across channels and throughout common patient journeys requires a data-driven view of the patient.

Assess your data environment to find gaps and create a comprehensive view

In the third step, evaluate each patient journey to determine what information is needed where, when, and by whom. In this stage, organizations should be asking: What data do we have today and where is it stored? Where are the gaps?

Patient data typically resides in a disparate network of systems that don’t interact. In addition to clinical data, additional information must also be gathered from a broad spectrum of sources. This might include non-clinical data such as the patient’s access to transportation, preferential data like communication preferences, or historical data from patient interactions across channels. The challenge is making this data accessible, connected, and consumable by the right people at the right time—while maintaining strict privacy and permissions. This assessment is the first step towards building the unified view that supports an exceptional patient experience across the organization.

Options for this include: surfacing siloed information on a single, unified platform, consolidating applications, or using intelligent systems to automate data movement between systems. This will help providers achieve greater transparency and collaboration at points along the patient journey.

Learn from other organizations that are making the shift to modern patient engagement

After you’ve inventoried touchpoints, mapped patient journeys and analyzed your data environment, it’s helpful to understand how other organizations are approaching similar challenges.

Inspira Health Network of New Jersey transformed their patient experience with a diverse group of solutions called the Inspira Innovation Center. First, they conducted a thorough assessment, following the steps outlined above to develop solutions that were compelling, intuitive and easy to use. Whether a patient engaged via chatbot, mobile health apps or the customer care center, Inspira endeavored to not only provide the right care, but ensure that each channel offered a seamless experience every time.

For example, patients who needed urgent care could find the closest clinic with the shortest wait time, contact the facility, and provide their information in advance to  minimize time spent in the waiting room. They could also interact directly with their clinicians between visits through a mobile app or web portal. As a result, call center volume is up while abandoned calls are down, and urgent care visits are up while wait times have decreased.

Inspira’s strategic approach to patient engagement provides a more cohesive experience, enabling them to provide care where it’s needed, keep patients out of emergency rooms, reduce unnecessary clinical visits, and bring healthcare costs under control. They’ve also increased access to healthcare in their community and helped promote better patient outcomes.

Craft an exceptional patient experience with a unified approach

Developing an effective patient engagement strategy may seem daunting, but by understanding patient touchpoints, mapping common journeys, building a clearer picture of existing data, and learning from others, health organizations can take the first steps towards building a new approach. Read our patient engagement eBook to discover how Microsoft can help you deliver a tailored, frictionless experience that exceeds patient expectations, strengthens patient relationships and helps them gain more control over their health.

The post Your cheat sheet to next-gen patient experience appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs.

Throughout history, the progress of innovation has created an endless cycle of disruption. From horse-drawn carriages to trains, steamships, automobiles, and airplanes, the next big thing seems to always be around the corner, driven by those looking to give consumers an experience they didn’t even know they wanted.

As a result, technology has emerged as a significant source of recent disruption, thanks to innovators with an idea of doing things differently. Consumers are also changing the game, demanding friction-free, personalized experiences that fit their lifestyle.

In healthcare, today’s system still operates under an unsustainable, reactive care model. Now that consumers know what’s possible, disruption is inevitable. Since 90% of patients want to manage their own healthcare via technology, the industry needs a new system—one that proactively engages patients on their terms to avoid chronic disease and enable holistic health and wellness.

To explore what this model could look like in your organization, let’s turn to three companies outside healthcare and consider how we could take advantage of their innovation to craft a new approach.

Uber: Full transparency means no surprises

Before ridesharing came along, catching a cab meant calling a dispatcher or hoping one was nearby to hail. With fares charged incrementally by distance, it was difficult to tell what the total would be, and the rider experience was inconsistent depending on the driver, whose credit card machine never seemed to be working.

When Uber launched in 2009, everything changed. They disrupted the transportation industry almost overnight by flipping the focus to the passenger. By mapping out the end-to-end customer experience to identify customer pain points, they designed a transparent service that largely eliminated them. Their mobile-first model gives the customer constant access to information, from inputting their route and getting a cost estimate, to driver notifications, arrival times and automatic payment. They also developed a quality control system where riders could rate drivers and vice-versa.

Healthcare can learn a lot from Uber, since many existing systems weren’t built with patients (or clinicians) in mind. As patients interact with providers, they encounter similar friction that could be reduced by mapping pain points to redesign patient-first systems. For instance, Uber requires users to enter their profile information once and it flows across the app every time they use it. Imagine a healthcare system where a patient’s profile automatically flowed from their primary care doctor to each specialist and didn’t require them to re-write their health information at every stop along the way.

Consider Uber’s model of always knowing your driver’s location. What if patients had access to the same transparency, such as wait times for your provider, or easy-to-access mobile status updates for common tasks such as prescription refills or lab results? A patient-first system could even introduce quality ratings for patient experience, giving patients more control over their care as well as providing valuable feedback.

By reimagining care systems to put patients at the center of their experience, providers can achieve greater transparency and reduce key points of friction, laying the groundwork for improvements in patient engagement.

Netflix: Delivering curated content on demand

Before streaming video came along, watching television or movies required viewers to tune in each week, sift through channels for their next favorite show, scramble to make a movie before tickets sold out, or stop by a rental store and hope a copy was still available.

Over the past two decades, Netflix upended content delivery by recognizing the infrastructure for delivering entertainment wasn’t sufficient. To meet the new needs of consumers, they decided to put customers in charge of their own viewing experience.

They started small—first disrupting the Blockbusters of the world by delivering a better experience, which opened the door to even greater disruption when they moved into streaming. By delivering high-quality streaming content that could be consumed at any time, on any device, they essentially invented the idea of binge-watching. They also offered their own programming, providing new avenues for content outside of traditional television.

Healthcare can take a page from the Netflix playbook to change the current delivery model for modern needs by considering where and when patients access care and exploring how it can be tailored to individual patient preferences. The reactive care model is already giving way to preventative and chronic disease care, which requires a new infrastructure to deliver tailored experiences at scale.

For example, similar to Netflix’s “anywhere, anytime, on any device” approach, healthcare should continue implementing telehealth and telemedicine tools to deliver virtual care around the clock, not just in-person office hours. Their original content approach also offers an intriguing opportunity for providers. What if organizations could develop mobile health apps that streamed clinician-approved content on a host of topics to better engage patients in their health and deliver proactive care? They could also recommend relevant articles based on the patient’s location, specific condition or life milestones.

By creating a new, scalable infrastructure based on evolving patient needs, providers can give patients more control over their care, enable stronger engagement, and empower them to take a more active role through personalized care plans.

Spotify: Personalizing the listener experience 

Similar to video, streaming music services first shook up the industry by disrupting the delivery model—putting consumers in charge of their music on any device, and at different price points. Before streaming, music fans were at the whim of record labels and the radio.

Streaming music was just the beginning, and Spotify took it to the next level. Building off the streaming model, Spotify furthered disruption by not only providing the product, but using customers’ behavioral data to personalize the experience, benefitting both the listener and the artists. They integrated data from multiple sources to make recommendations and tailor the listener experience over time, ensuring a continuous feedback loop of relevant, actionable data.

Spotify’s methods are highly relevant to healthcare. By unifying patient data from both clinical and non-clinical sources to get a more comprehensive view of their patients, providers can apply those insights to build a modern, tailored patient experience.

For example, like Spotify’s data-driven approach, providers could examine a patient’s clinical data along with behavioral, social and environmental data using artificial intelligence (AI) to predict future health risks, enabling them to avoid or mitigate chronic disease. Using the patient’s genomic profile, they could use genomics to analyze similar profiles, determine optimal treatment options and create a more personalized plan. They can also continue to foster innovation in remote monitoring by feeding patient-generated data from wearables and other IoT-enabled devices into the broader patient picture to better inform decisions and actions.

Leveraging patient data from both inside and outside the clinical setting enables health organizations to personalize the patient experience and glean valuable insights that can be used to improve outcomes.

Empower your innovation journey

While Uber, Netflix and Spotify span multiple industries, the ripples from their disruption extend far beyond, providing valuable examples the healthcare industry can use as a blueprint to create a new infrastructure around personalized, preventative care. No matter where you are on your innovation journey, you can empower your organization to take steps toward change, paving the way for even greater disruption and better care.

Learn more about Microsoft’s intelligent cloud offerings by downloading our eBook on digital transformation in health.

The post Changing patient expectations: Learning from Uber, Netflix, and Spotify appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs.

Trupen Modi, Chris Regan and Firas Hamza believe in the power of technology to improve healthcare at lower costs. They are part of the Digital Advisory Services within Microsoft’s Office of the CTO focused on the Health and Life Sciences Industry, and below, they share insights and address common question about intelligent proactive wellness and the role of healthcare business intelligence and the patient experience.

Meet the panel

Trupen, Firas and Chris advise C-level and business leaders at some of the country’s largest payor and provider organizations on Healthcare Digital Transformation.

	Trupen Modi Senior Digital Advisor at Microsoft Healthcare Advises C-level and business leaders on Healthcare Digital Transformation topics including proactive preventative health management, personalized patient experiences, precision medicine, and improved clinical staff productivity. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/trupen/
	Firas Hamza A senior advisor to C-level executives on global digital transformation initiatives, Firas’ expertise includes guiding healthcare organizations through adoption of the latest technological advancements, including AI and machine learning, to improve patient experiences and health outcomes. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/firas-hamza/
	Chris Regan Senior Digital Advisor in Microsoft’s Office of the CTO With over thirty years of experience in innovating, planning, and enabling organizations and people through business and technology consulting, Chris  brings deep technical and business expertise across a variety of Healthcare and Life Science organizations with a focus on consumer strategies in healthcare, genomics and augmented realty for healthcare. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/csregan/

What challenges are prompting payors to adopt next-generation proactive wellness programs?

Firas Hamza: Proactive wellness is particularly valuable for payors due to their strong interest in wellness and in reducing healthcare costs. The payor really wants to reduce the cost and keep you healthy before you become a patient, so we don’t even call them patients. We call them “consumers.”

Trupen Modi: Proactive planning at the individual level can help prevent many chronic illnesses like diabetes, hypertension, obesity, etc., and contribute to healthier lifestyles. Additionally, more people leading healthy lives will reduce the overall cost burden on individuals, government, healthcare organizations, and society at large.

What’s great is that we finally have the data and healthcare business intelligence capabilities to support proactive wellness. We’re collecting all of this data with connected devices, apps, and the internet of medical things. You also have the data that payors are collecting. If you add machine learning to it and you add the cloud capabilities, all of a sudden you have all the elements to build a new, next generation wellness program. Most payors we talk to have old, static wellness programs. The programs may pay you to work out, but they have no way to track you, encourage you, or monitor your progress. We want to take it to the next level, supported by data, supported by the cloud, and build that next generation wellness program.

Chris Regan: The old adage, “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure” is more relevant in today’s healthcare market than it has ever been. The New England Journal of Medicine estimated that 40% of US mortality is from preventable causes. Payors recognize that proactive wellness has greater potential to save money versus medical intervention. They’re now faced with how to work with consumers to encourage them to adopt healthy behaviors. It’s here that technology offers new, high impact options like personal health tracking, social encouragement, and health behavior gamification.

This seems like a healthcare industry trend with huge, positive potential.  What opportunities can payors realize by embracing proactive wellness?

Chris Regan: Managing healthcare costs versus benefits is always a difficult balance. What is the appropriate amount to spend to save or extend a life or even improve the quality of life? It’s so much easier to choose to invest in preventing consumer/members from getting to that point. That is the ultimate promise of proactive wellness: saving money and resources by having consumers stay healthy and not become patients in need of costly medical interventions.

Trupen Modi: It’s the payors who have a strong interest in this because if people are well, they will have fewer medical expenses and that has a significant positive impact on profit margins.

Firas Hamza: There’s too much focus in the US on reactive healthcare. You get sick, you go the hospital or you have a procedure and your insurance company gets billed. Even if they have a wellness program, it’s static, it’s not data driven, it’s not intelligent. We want to empower the consumer and arm them with data and really create a better outcome and patient experience—before they become actual patients.

Trupen Modi: Access to data and healthcare business intelligence capabilities can provide a much deeper understanding of patient health, which lets payors and providers partner to provide much more precise treatment. That improves quality of care and timely intervention. They’re reducing the risk of the patient getting sicker, reducing the risk of higher expenses, and reducing risk of medical mistakes and ensuing lawsuits.

Firas Hamza: Additionally, I don’t think providers can afford to sit back and keep the power of all that patient data in their own hands. I think we’re headed to a new democratic healthcare system where the consumer shares power with the payor and the provider. The provider cannot just keep the status quo; they need to be part of the solution.

How does an organization begin to address this healthcare industry trend?  What are the first actions they should take as they build an intelligent proactive wellness program?

Firas Hamza: One of the first things in building a program like this is to pull data from different sources. Nine out of ten organizations are still building out the data portion, so the answer to ‘where do I start?’ is dependent on the organization’s maturity level. If they already have the data, then we start syncing the data and pulling it from different devices. The next step is to understand the data and build context so it will make sense to the user. The third level is to use machine learning to start looking for patterns. The last stage is to build the intelligent app that makes recommendations for the consumer.

Trupen Modi: There needs to be a recognition across participants in the healthcare system that post-illness intervention is not always the best approach, especially since so much chronic illness is preventable through education and lifestyle changes. Proactive wellness will require commitment, investment, simplification, and above all appropriate incentive-based plans for consumers.

Chris Regan:  Additionally, payors need to get to know their consumers without them being patients. This starts by creating a relationship with consumers “before and between the visits.” This gives you a single, complete view of the consumer the opportunity to develop a trusted communication channel with them.

What are the biggest hurdles that organizations have to overcome in making the shift to proactive wellness?

Firas Hamza: The biggest challenge is building that platform—the data convergence hub that will create healthcare business intelligence. Many organizations are working on some kind of data convergence hub and that has to be the foundation of any next generation wellness initiative.

Trupen Modi: Organizations also have to very cognizant of security, privacy and compliance rules, as well as ownership of data.

Chris Regan:  Unlike managing costs, which payors control, wellness needs consumers to voluntarily participate and actively invest themselves. The payors have to look beyond the typical patient experience and learn, develop, or create new methods to influence consumers to participate in wellness.

What would be your one last piece of advice?

Firas Hamza: Most organizations are looking into new, Digital Transformation initiatives, and sometimes it can be overwhelming—to the business managers and IT departments alike. Sometimes, they don’t know where to start or which initiative will show the highest value of return. My advice is the following: don’t try to boil the ocean. Start first with building an innovation lab and map out all processes for that.  In that environment you can learn to do rapid prototyping, fail fast, or succeed fast before building the entire solution.

Trupen Modi: For payors and providers, continuously engage with your customers. Educate, motivate and advise them about their own responsibility for their health.  The technology and tools you create should be there to empower them.

Chris Regan:  As in all good relationships, all parties have to benefit. Oddly, for consumers, living healthy and feeling better, is not always enough.  Payors and consumers need to create a mutually beneficial relationship where they both financially benefit from the consumer committing to and living a healthy life.

The post Healthcare Industry Trends: Intelligent Proactive Wellness appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs.

Kuethe: Hi Meg, can you tell me about your current STEM career?

Rowe:  Certainly. I currently work at CGI which is a global technology and system integration company. We have a portfolio of over 400 solutions and I am responsible for business development and global growth for one such solution called CGI ProperPay. Our solution uses edits and advanced analytics to identify improperly paid claims to 1) prevent those improperly paid claims from getting processed before payments go out the door and 2) to help clients review claims post payment to see if there is anything they paid inappropriately that they can recover. In business development, we work with potential clients to be review their payment integrity requirements and recommend our solutions. I also work with our development team and recommend system updates and new functionality to meet the ever changing needs of the customers in the healthcare fraud waste and abuse market.

Within my business I work with many women in technology and STEM fields. Our solution is supported by clinical coders, nurses and doctors that work with us as we develop solutions for what our clients need. I work with many women in STEM that have such roles.

Kuethe: Sounds like a really great mix of responsibilities including being customer focused while also working to improve your solution offerings, which requires a diverse background. How did you initially get your start in a STEM career path?

Rowe: Interestingly my background is in accounting. I worked in public accounting performing audits and reviews. I was offered a role early in my career in healthcare to create models on historical data for data and payments, and that was 25 years ago! It is very fascinating to see how things have changed in analytics since that time. The way we are using data today to help make business decisions is so fascinating to me. There used to be so much data that organizations didn’t know what to do, but now we are able to process in the cloud which can handle the large amounts of data and quickly organize it in a way that drives business decision.

Kuethe: What is your favorite thing about your current STEM career?

Rowe: I love how technology changes the way everything is done. This is particularly true in healthcare where technology assist in diagnostics and treatment to improve quality of life and to extend the lives of many. Now the improvements in processing data is something that I am drawn to and using the advanced analytics and machine learning to improve efficiency really excites me. Processing time and what used to take nurses and coders a week to perform, can now take minutes! It is amazing how the administrative component of nurses jobs is becoming that much more efficient. When you think about patient care and the ability to track patients’ metrics, it is incredible, you are able to quickly capture data and then use that data in ways that were never capable before.

Kuethe: CGI is doing some really interesting things in the healthcare tech space. Can you tell me what we can look forward to in the near future?

Rowe: Specifically, for CGI ProperPay we have a large event, The National Healthcare Anti-Fraud Association Conference in November 14 to 17^th in Orlando, Florida. Here we will be releasing our new ProperPay 6.0 version that uses Dynamics as a platform for case management. This platform will allow us to have increased customization and configuration to meet client needs and allow us to service customers outside the US through language compatibility and currency.  This conference is one of the largest gathering of people in the field that are responsible for identifying and combating fraud, waste and abuse. It is a great conference because these are payors that are usually competitive but here they get together to talk about what they are seeing, and they share information in a very collaborative way. Following this, we have a roundtable in Germany bringing healthcare payors together in the German market to discuss analytics to combat fraud and CGI ProperPay.

Kuethe: Sounds like a very exciting fall! One final question, what advice do you have for women looking to enter a STEM career?

Rowe: It is interesting because I am on the board of directors at an all-women’s High School in the Cleveland area and am very aware of what they are doing at the High School and primary level to encourage girls in STEM with focused curriculum and projects around STEM. With all the focus, it is crucial to get girls involved in these programs and extracurricular activities at an early age. Then they will meet other girls and women with similar interests that will hopefully encourage them to pursue STEM careers. I also believe it is important for young women to find a mentor to help break into a women in technology or STEM career because then you have someone with similar interests and background to help you navigate your way.

Thank you Meg for sharing your experience with us. For more information on the CGI ProperPay solution that Meg is responsible for, more information can be found here.

We look forward to continuing this series and look forward to hearing your thoughts. If you have additional questions you would like answered as a part of the Women in STEM series, please get in touch with us here.

Meg Rowe, Director of Business Development, Health Compliance Programs at CGI Federal Inc.

Sara Kuethe, Head of Health and Pharmaceutical Marketing at Microsoft

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