Over the past year, the pandemic fundamentally changed several industries and impacted the means of consumption and distribution for goods and services globally. With the introduction of social distancing, the decline of indoor interactions and transactions, and unparalleled strain on hospital capacity and care teams, both retailers and health providers had to transform traditional business models to meet evolving consumer and industry needs. Across these industries, COVID-19 highlighted a greater need to support frontline workers and reach underserved communities. As a result, it’s become increasingly clear that consumers today need convenient, cost-effective, and high-quality goods and services to support everyday health and wellness. To meet the needs of consumers and expand equitable access to care, we’re supporting the ongoing development of an industry convergence known as Retail+Health with our cloud capabilities designed specifically for retailers and healthcare organizations. To learn more, visit Microsoft Cloud for Retail and Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare. 

Imagine if it was convenient and cost-effective to manage your health and wellness on a daily basis. Imagine if you felt confident that you could receive high-quality care at any given moment. Imagine if it was easy to find and shop for goods and services that supported your health goals. This reality is being accelerated by the power of technology and the combined forces of Retail+Health to deliver a revolutionized model of care delivery.

At Microsoft, we see Retail+Health as a broad, encompassing opportunity that will take many forms, both physical and digital. This includes what already exists today from the convenience of retail clinics from Alpha XR, CVS, and others but will also include a growing number of digital touchpoints and smart devices.

With Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare and Microsoft Cloud for Retail, we’ve designed critical solutions to help solve the biggest challenges facing these industries. The capabilities from the clouds can be leveraged together, underpinned by a Common Data Model and an industry-leading security and compliance posture, to empower better care, everywhere, for everyone.

To learn more about how we’re supporting the future of Retail+Health, check out the following:

• Learn more about Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare and Microsoft Cloud for Retail capabilities. 
• Download our whitepaper. 
• Check out the datasheet. 
• Contact your account manager to sign up for an envisioning workshop or whiteboarding session. 

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It’s been an incredible year so far for the health industry. We’ve seen the dream and the opportunity of digital transformation and AI start to really take shape in the marketplace.

We saw many examples of this last month at HIMSS 2019, many of our partners and other cloud providers are offering commoditized access to complex healthcare algorithms and models to improve clinical and business outcomes.

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Trust

These examples show how cloud computing and AI can deliver on the promise of digital transformation. But for health organizations to realize that potential, they have to trust the technology—and their technology partner.

Microsoft has always taken the lead on providing cloud platforms and services that help health organizations protect their data and meet their rigorous security and compliance requirements. Recently, we announced the HIPAA  eligibility and HITRUST certifications of Microsoft Cognitive Services and Office 365.

It’s crucial for health organizations to feel utterly confident not only in their technology partner’s ability to help them safeguard their data and infrastructure, and comply with industry standards, but also in their partner’s commitment to help them digitally transform their way—whatever their needs or objectives are. Our mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. So whether you’re a health provider, pharmaceutical company, or retailer entering healthcare, your mission is our mission. Our business model is rooted in delivering success rather than disruption for our customers.

Interoperability

Another point of vital importance as we support the movement of healthcare as an industry—and healthcare data specifically—to the cloud is ensuring that we avoid the sins of the past, specifically data silos.

To that end, we jointly announced with other leading cloud providers that we’re committed to healthcare data interoperability among cloud platforms and supporting common data standards like Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR). And I was particularly thrilled to see the excitement in the health industry in reaction to our launch last last month with Azure API for FHIR and our commitment to develop open source FHIR servers. I hope you’ll join the huge movement behind health interoperability fueled by FHIR and encourage your technologists to start actively using the open-source project to bring diverse data sets together—and to build systems that learn from those data sets.

As my colleague, Doug Seven, recently wrote, interoperability helps you bring together data from disparate sources, apply AI to it to gain insights, and then enrich care team and patient tools with those insights to help you achieve your mission. That’s a crucial step in the digital transformation of health.

Teamwork

Another crucial step is supporting health teamwork. With the changing nature of care delivery, health services increasingly require coordination across multiple care settings and health professionals. So we launched a new set of capabilities to our Teams platform that provides workflows for first-line clinical workers such as doctors and nurses that they can use to access patient information and coordinate care in real time.

The end game

Why does all of this matter? To answer that question, I always come back to the quadruple aim, which all of us in the health industry strive for: enhancing both patient and caregivers’ experiences, improving the health of populations, and lowering the costs of healthcare.

Empowering care teams and patients with data insights and tools that help them coordinate care—and that they and your health organization can trust—will help bring about the desired outcomes of the quadruple aim. Not only will this systemic change improve clinical and business outcomes, but also, at an individual level, enhance the day-to-day and digital experiences of clinical workers and patients alike—creating better experiences, better insights, and better care across the delivery system.

Learn more about real-world use cases for AI in the e-book: “Breaking down AI: 10 real applications in healthcare.”

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As part of this effort, healthcare organizations are looking to leverage new technologies. The past few years have seen significant advances in technologies such as big data, artificial intelligence (AI), and the internet of things (IoT)—which promise to transform healthcare delivery and improve outcomes. While healthcare organizations are interested in adopting new technologies, many are unclear where to start. As a result, they end up trying solutions in a piecemeal way that doesn’t resolve existing data flow issues and makes it difficult to prove value.

To enable interoperability, growth, and lasting results, healthcare organizations must stop implementing siloed technology solutions and instead build a sustainable, integrated plan. Analysts at McKinsey rate this as one of the most important steps in preparing for a digital future, advising healthcare organizations to “use a comprehensive, integrated approach, not piecemeal initiatives,” to develop a long-term technology strategy.²

Step 1: Create a unified personalized care strategy

For providers today, personalized care provides a useful framework to unify disparate technology initiatives towards improving outcomes. Personalized care is a transformational approach to connecting patient data and processes across the care continuum. It enables providers to leverage data from EHRs and other critical sources to create a streamlined care model that combines genomics, clinical analytics, care coordination, care team collaboration, and patient engagement to provide patients with a seamless, tailored care experience.

This new way of thinking about patient care represents a paradigm shift from today’s reactive, disconnected approach.

Today, care doesn’t begin until the patient first starts feeling symptoms. Only then will the patient reach out to their care provider, who then must deliver a diagnosis and treatment plan based on limited records and information from the patient. With little to no engagement between in-person visits to ensure ongoing patient compliance and confirm treatment efficacy, the cycle restarts itself. This system is frustrating for patients and caregivers alike—patients must go through redundant steps with multiple caregivers to receive effective treatment, and caregivers must react quickly, with limited insights from patient data, to provide a diagnosis and prescribe a treatment.

Personalized care, on the other hand, enables providers to leverage data to make intelligent treatment decisions, eliminate gaps in health team collaboration and communication, and maintain ongoing connections with patients beyond the clinical setting. Together, these capabilities are a powerful force with the potential to improve and accelerate outcomes, as well as eliminate unnecessary ER visits and readmissions.

Step 2: Deliver a personalized patient experience with the right care at the right time

Let’s consider how a unified personalized care approach transforms the treatment of a typical type 2 diabetes patient.

Ty Welker manages his diabetes by tracking his blood sugar using a wearable continuous glucose monitor that transmits data to an app connected to his electronic health record. When his blood sugar is rising, he doesn’t have to wait to experience symptoms to find out. The app sends an automatic alert to his doctor before his blood sugar reaches critical levels.

When Ty’s nurse views the alert, she’s taken to a clinical analytics dashboard and sees that Ty is at low risk for critical hyperglycemia and that he does not need to be seen right away as long as he sticks to the diet restrictions they have discussed in the past.

Members of Ty’s care team share ideas and best practices with each other through a compliant and secure cloud-based communication and collaboration app that’s accessible across devices. A nurse who works with diabetic patients like Ty notes that she has found that patients who are prescribed exercise as part of their care plans have a lower rate of hyperglycemia. Her colleagues agree that this should be added to their standard protocol for treating diabetic patients.

The next week, when Ty goes to his doctor for a checkup, his doctor consults Ty’s genome report to determine alternate treatment options. He determines that the medication Ty is currently taking is the only one recommended based on his genome.

Equipped with knowledge from his colleagues, Ty’s doctor recommends that Ty should try a higher dose of his medication in combination with regular exercise. Ty agrees, and his doctor modifies his care plan to ensure that Ty’s full care team has the most up-to-date information. 

A few days later, Ty’s nurse reviews his care plan and sees it’s time to send him an exercise reminder. Ty receives a message on his phone that reminds him to meet today’s exercise goal.

In this example, it’s easy to see how a personalized approach to Ty’s care enabled his team to treat him more effectively. By receiving the right care at the right time, Ty is more likely to adhere to his plan and maintain engagement, reducing the risk of complications or hospital admission.

Step 3: Bring in a proven solution with Microsoft and its partners

Only Microsoft provides a comprehensive, integrated, and personalized care approach, enabling providers to focus on improving outcomes without worrying about whether their technology will deliver the support they need. Microsoft solutions are open and extensible, enabling organizations to easily, efficiently, and cost-effectively integrate existing devices and systems. They also empower providers to seamlessly scale their capabilities quickly with cloud solutions.

Personalized Care is a suite of SaaS apps from Microsoft and industry-leading partners that employs artificial intelligence across the care continuum to increase automation and efficiency. It enhances the value of existing EHR investments by using intelligent, EHR-friendly solutions. It’s also flexible and highly secure, with a flexible infrastructure that supports your regulatory and compliance needs.

Learn more about Personalized Care from Microsoft and check out the demo.

To explore the SaaS solutions, visit AppSource:

• GeneVision for Precision Medicine (BC Platforms)
• KenSci Clinical Analytics (KenSci)
• DXC Health360 Care Coordination (Tribridge, a DXC Technology company)
• Health Team Collaboration (Microsoft)
• Ellie Patient Engagement and Care Management (Get Real Health)

^{[2] McKinsey}

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Command and control solutions that take advantage of modern technology such as hybrid cloud capabilities can help you answer these questions. They can help you connect information, processes, and communications across disparate sources and systems.

That way, you can enable the exchange of accurate and timely information to extend your capabilities on the ground, in the air, in the water, and in cyberspace. Your commanders can be empowered with integrated data insights to make effective decisions and your troops and officers in the field can communicate and share real-time information to help them complete their mission.

Using command and control solutions based on our trusted technologies, you can enable all that, while also helping to protect your confidential information and operations from cyber threats with a modern, secure platform.

What’s more, you can scale and pay as you go for cloud services that work with your onsite datacenter and other systems as an operating expense—rather than a major capital expenditure—which can help you get the digital resources you need within budget constraints.

Digitally transforming your command and control capabilities can help your defense organization:

• Empower your people with better situational and operational awareness. You can enable a Common Operation Picture that provides a single view of the battlefield or operational theater.
• Connect process, protocol, information sources, and legacy systems with an open digital technology architecture and reduce complexity and operational costs.
• Address cybersecurity gaps that threaten confidential information and operations. Command and control solutions built on trusted Microsoft technologies provide the platform resilience you need in your mission-critical environments.
• Enable the interoperability of different communication networks to provide an integrated and secure communications environment.
• More cost-effectively acquire, operate, and maintain the digital services you need to support your missions. You can take advantage of open platforms and modular command and control solutions that provide you with the security, scalability, and operational flexibility you need.

With these capabilities, your teams can share awareness and visualization of unfolding events. They can harness and validate new and existing sources of data to unlock key patterns and insights. Your agency can align and modernize systems for improved anytime, anywhere command and operations communication. And you can improve your operational readiness and effectiveness through the use of devices and apps tailored to specific roles and missions.

The above are just a few examples of how you can digitally transform your command and control capabilities to help your defense organization achieve its mission. Learn more by going to our Command and Control solution page, where you can get more information, read our customer success stories, and find partners to help you get started.

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HIMSS gets bigger every year. It’s a reflection of our industry: The number of systems and amount of data in healthcare also keeps growing. That’s why it’s so important that organizations like Microsoft bring solutions to bear that make use of the innovative technologies encompassed by the term artificial intelligence (AI). That way, health organizations can move beyond having technology that just helps them digitize information to technology that empowers them with systems of insight.

At HIMSS17, many interesting discussions were had about the value and applicability of cognitive computing in health. Spurred on by the article in Forbes that came out right before the conference, “MD Anderson Benches IBM Watson In Setback For Artificial Intelligence In Medicine,” people were asking the question: Is the promise of AI in health artificial or real?

Amongst all the debate, however, there were many examples at HIMSS17 that proved the value of AI in health is very real.

Indeed, the five winners of the Microsoft Health Innovation Awards this year are already using systems of intelligence to digitally transform healthcare and improve people’s health. As just two examples: Children’s Mercy Kansas City is using machine learning to help them triage signs coming from pediatric cardiac patients who are at home between surgeries. And CoxHealth is using an Intelligent Retinal Imaging Systems (IRIS) solution to diagnose diabetic retinopathy cases faster and at a greater scale than previously possible.

To discuss the humanistic application of AI may seem almost anathema. But the reality of AI is that it’s scaling and adding to the art and insight of medical practitioners, not replacing it, and it’s doing so in very human and pragmatic ways—as evidenced by our Innovation Awards winners who are saving babies’ lives through better home monitoring and improving diabetic’s quality of life by catching preventable eye disease earlier.

It’s practical, real-world applications of cognitive computing like those showcased at HIMSS that are helping to democratize AI for the greater good. In order to realize the potential of AI to empower better health we need to make systems of intelligence accessible for all.  At Microsoft, we believe that AI is the underpinning of digital transformation for healthcare and we’re infusing intelligence into all of our products, applications, services, and experiences. We’re also making these same intelligent capabilities available to every application developer in the world. And we’re collaborating with health technology vendors through our AI in Health Partners Alliance.

A healthier, more sustainable future for societies depends on scaling the insight and art of medicine. No matter the technical and ethical challenges that will certainly scatter our pathway forward—which we’ll need to navigate carefully and thoughtfully—all of us in the health industry need to stay the course and continue to dream big about AI.

I hope you’ll check out our HIMSS17 recap page to see videos from the show floor and learn more about solutions that are already fulfilling the promise of AI in health.

You can also read about our latest initiatives intended to help transform healthcare and empower people to lead healthier lives—such as our Healthcare NExT initiative which is focused on strategic research partnerships that apply AI to some of the biggest problems in health—in this blog.

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In the United States, the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees enforcement of the country’s Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), recently released a document “Guidance on HIPAA & Cloud Computing” which embraces two of the recommendations. The guidance leverages existing standards (for example, referencing the nearly universal NIST Definition of Cloud Computing) and it clarifies that HIPAA does not impose a “data localization” requirement (which would prohibit protected health information from leaving the US).

In France, long known for a complex approval process that must be followed prior to hosting PHI in the cloud, the government body for responsible for the process has just released for public consultation a draft of a significantly revised (and we think improved) process. The draft invokes increasingly common global standards, such as ISO 27001, and veers away from a cumbersome approval process toward a more pragmatic certification regime that will rely on existing third party audits to demonstrate compliance with various requirements.

Finally, in New Zealand, we engaged with the Ministry of Health to help shape guidance and create a more streamlined process for our health customers, resulting in an outcome where we could get across the board approval for hosting health information in our services for all customers, as opposed to requiring a separate approval for each customer.
We are delighted to see policy makers and regulators around the world taking on these pragmatic recommendations. We look forward to continuing to work with them to ensure customers and patients can get the benefits of modern cloud technologies, but also be assured that their sensitive information is being properly protected.

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Technology is peer to policy for creating a healthier future

It’s something I hear not just in Europe, but everywhere I go. Health leaders the world over are looking for ways to meet the ever-increasing need for health services and improve population wellness, while reining in costs. And they’re realizing that health IT is now a full-fledged peer to policy when it comes to addressing their challenges and creating a healthier, more sustainable future.

Four steps to healthcare transformation

So during the eHealth week plenary session, I was honored to discuss how Microsoft works with our partners to bring solutions to bear that can help health customers achieve the four core pillars of healthcare transformation:

1. Engage patients. People need to be connected to their health information and care system. Increasing transparency and creating high levels of knowledge for those who can make the biggest difference to healthcare—the patients themselves—is essential.
2. Empower care teams. Health is no longer a solo sport with the doctor at the head of a hierarchical pyramid. It’s a team game. Healthcare has to be delivered in a collaborative way, which means that care teams need to be able to coordinate easily to provide cohesive, connected care for patients. And people who are making decisions along the care continuum need to be empowered with not just data, but actionable insight for more preventive and proactive approaches to health.
3. Optimize clinical and operational effectiveness. To provide better care to more people at lower costs, health organizations have to be more efficient and effective than ever. They must connect information, people, and processes across the health ecosystem to streamline processes. And they need to empower health professionals and patients with quick, convenient access to insight and resources.
4. Transform the care continuum. Healthcare must evolve from a “sickness system,” where care is reactive and episodic, to become a true “health system,” where the focus is prevention and wellness management.

The transformative cloud

To accomplish the four pillars of transformation, it’s vital that health organizations take advantage of cloud services. Cloud-driven solutions can dramatically reduce costs and improve efficiency by simplifying information management and sharing. They can also significantly enhance security in the modern healthcare context and allow for better data analysis to inform and improve treatment paths.

In Europe, I see some countries that are embracing the cloud, but I still see some that have yet to take that step. So my closing question to the plenary session audience was: If you’re truly dedicated to transforming healthcare, how can you not be fully dedicated to transformative technologies like the cloud that will make that possible? As my colleague Elena Bonfiglioli, Senior Director, Health Industry Europe Middle East and Africa, Public Sector, Microsoft wrote in a recent blog “Empowering health with a cloud we can trust” accelerating cloud adoption is key in delivering innovation in European healthcare.

To my readers, I pose the same question. Please reach out to us and share what’s stopping you if you haven’t fully embraced the cloud. And if you have, how are you using cloud services to transform healthcare? Let us know via email, Facebook, or Twitter. Please also contact us with any questions or comments.

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The future keeps changing fast in healthcare, which means we need to not just redo, but rethink

A big thank you to HIMSS for putting on another stellar conference this year. The energy in the conference halls and on the streets of Vegas was almost overwhelming with roughly 42,000 attendees roaming around.

When I consider what was discussed and shown at HIMSS this year as a reflection of our industry, though, I will say it felt a bit like back to the future. By that, I mean, we were back to discussing the same future we discussed last year. And the thing is, the future of healthcare keeps changing fast. For true transformation, we need to keep up. We need to not just redo what we’ve been doing, but constantly rethink our approaches.

One of the new ways Microsoft approached HIMSS this year was to organize our presence in the form of the patient journey. We wanted to show the impact of technology on the patient and were supported by many talented partners from around the world. Visitors to our booth experienced how technology and process can be joined to create a more seamless experience for the patient not only inside health organization walls, but also outside those walls.

We also had a lot of great conversations with our partners at their booths, which you may have seen on Twitter during the show. It was wonderful to walk the halls and see how the partnerships we’ve been nurturing are blossoming into technology that empowers better health.

Infosys was talking about its next-generation healthcare analytics platform, CGI about machine learning and analytics for payment fraud detection, and Allscripts about the incredible momentum of its FollowMyHealth system. And these are just a few examples. In addition, with our partner GE Healthcare, we invited people to share their viewpoint about the future of healthcare in video booths in both of our stands.

At HIMSS16, I saw some new faces: exciting health IT startups. And I saw some old faces: incumbent big health IT suppliers who, to their credit, are working to evolve as fast as healthcare is. I also noticed increased noise about the need to improve population health and some new ways to do that.

However, I was surprised that I didn’t see more focus on the growing need to defend against cyberattacks health. Because, as Leslie Sistla, Chief Information Security Officer, Worldwide Health at Microsoft, recently wrote, “It’s time for a security intervention in healthcare.”

And I didn’t see enough examples of how technology will support the new healthcare world brought about by accountable care organizations and the shift of payments from volume to value.

The expression may be what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, but not in the case of this year’s conference, where we started many conversations we get to continue away from Vegas. So let’s keep advancing our efforts ever faster to keep up with the changing future of healthcare. To tackle the challenges of health systems the world over—whether it’s proactively improving population health, adapting to new payment models, or beef up our cybersecurity—we need to not just redo, but constantly rethink.

What’s your idea for a rethink? Let us know via email, Facebook, or Twitter.

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Looking to the future innovation needs to be proactive and systemic in order to tackle the challenges in health

At the end of 2015, I had the pleasure of attending and speaking at three significant conferences, all focused on innovation in health. The first one was the Cleveland Clinic Medical Innovation Summit, which I wrote about in my last blog. The second event was Exponential Medicine, which covered both the scientific and societal innovations that have to happen for the reinvention and future of health and medicine. The third was Improving Healthcare, which focused on the whole process of improving the efficiency and effectiveness of the healthcare environment.

Reflecting on my experiences at these events, it was clear to me that innovation doesn’t happen by accident. To tackle the challenges of health systems the world over—whether it’s meeting the ever-increasing demand for health services, engaging patients in taking better care of themselves, adapting to new payment models, or getting more insight from data—now in 2016 more than ever we need to innovate systemically. By that, I mean we need proactive methodologies that make innovation inherent in everything we do. And we need the results of our innovations to benefit not just a few, but to make an impact on a broad scale.

With all that in mind, it’s exciting to think about how the three bold ambitions that Microsoft is focusing on can help foster the systemic innovation needed in health:

Bold ambition 1:  Making computing more personal

Innovation needs to be personal. Only if the benefits of technology are felt personally—whether it’s an easy, highly productive user experience, better interactions between the care team and patients, or improved individual health and fitness outcomes—will its potential to transform healthcare be realized.

Bold ambition 2:  Building the intelligent cloud

Innovation needs to scale. It needs to be repeatable to make a broad impact. An intelligent cloud enables scalability of solutions so they can benefit more people. For example, Mackay Memorial Hospital in Taipei, Taiwan, built a set of cloud-based, Microsoft Power BI dashboards for clinical key performance indicators. The solution is immediately benefiting the hospital in Taipei by helping it improve care quality and efficiency. And the dashboards are being replicated and scaled via the cloud to fellow hospitals across the country—which will extend the benefits of improved healthcare to more people in Taiwan.

Bold ambition 3: Reinventing productivity and process

Innovation isn’t about technology for technology’s sake. Innovation is about how it empowers people to reinvent productivity and process. In other words, don’t be distracted by the shiny object. Think about what you can do with it. For example, Microsoft HoloLens is exciting, flashy technology, but its real value is how it’s opening up new possibilities. At Case Western Reserve University, they’re reinventing education for medical students and helping prepare the next generation of doctors for the future of healthcare with HoloLens.

As I look at the market, I’m excited by the breadth and creativity of the innovation I see around every corner in every country I travel to. I’m especially excited by examples of systemic innovation, one being the NHS Innovation Accelerator. Rather than expecting innovation to happen by accident, they’ve put in place a system that institutionalizes it. I look forward to seeing many more examples like this in 2016 and beyond.

How are you innovating systemically to transform healthcare? Let us know via email, Facebook, or Twitter. And please also reach out with any questions or comments.

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In October, I had the pleasure of speaking at the Cleveland Clinic Medical Innovation Summit. Titled “Memory. Mood. Movement,” and focusing on the future of neurosciences and the overall state of healthcare innovation, it was an incredible learning and sharing experience.

Many of the discussions during the conference were about the role of the EMR and the future direction of the health industry. The general consensus was that EMR systems are foundational, rather than transformational. They are an important step in digitizing health but they are just the beginning.

Health leaders are now thinking beyond their EMR to the next phase of health IT. This post-EMR phase is commonly being referred to as “the second race.”

So what is this second race? It’s really about moving from foundational technologies that replicate existing processes in healthcare to transformational technologies that enable entirely new ways of doing things—technologies that will help the health system evolve to a more proactive and predictive approach.

It was very satisfying to hear presenters and participants at the conference identify key areas for the second race that are in alignment with our focus here at Microsoft:

Increasing collaboration among health professionals. Caregiver teamwork has always been important, but it’s even more vital as health services delivery becomes increasingly multidisciplinary. Check out this recent blog that highlights a couple of examples of just how today’s cloud and mobile technologies are enabling healthcare professionals to work together in real time.

Gaining meaningful insight from data. Today’s advanced health analytics in the cloud can empower people to glean actionable and predictive insights from the vast amount of data in the health industry and beyond to improve the quality and efficiency of care. Read about what a Brazilian hospital is doing to reduce length of stay and how European health systems are transforming healthcare with advanced analytics.

Enabling virtual care. By virtual care, I mean not just telemedicine but a plethora of new ways that technologies can enable health organizations to provide care and follow up with patients anywhere, anytime. Health systems are evolving to provide people with personal health interactions more proactively and consistently. A couple of examples are described in this blog post.

What’s more, when all three of these key areas come together, healthcare can be approached more holistically. One of the many interesting topics of discussion at the conference was around the need to not just treat people’s conditions, but help them manage their overall health—and the interdependencies of physical health and mental health. For example, helping people prevent Alzheimer’s disease means encouraging them to exercise and meditate regularly. Finding ways to inform and empower people to take better care of themselves is part of what the next phase in health IT will involve.

I couldn’t be more excited about where we’re headed in health and technology. We’re on the threshold of incredible transformation. I look forward to seeing it unfold with innovative new ways to make a real impact for better health.

How are you using technology to transform healthcare? Let us know via email, Facebook, or Twitter. And please also reach out with any questions or comments.

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