A powerful example comes from Poole Hospital NHS Foundation Trust in the United Kingdom, which is testing an eHealth solution that could transform treatment for epilepsy patients and make a real impact on their quality of life.

Together with Shearwater Systems and its sister company Graphnet Health—both Microsoft partners—and the University of Kent, Poole Hospital developed myCareCentric Epilepsy.

With the solution, epilepsy patients can wear a Microsoft Band to record data such as sleep patterns, exercise, heart rate, and temperature. They can also use a mobile app to note additional data about their diet, social activity, or medication, and when they suffer a seizure. The platform uses Graphnet’s CareCentric shared records software to add related data from community, social care, and clinical settings. The combined data is stored in Microsoft HealthVault, hosted in the Microsoft cloud, where it can be safeguarded and accessed in a secure manner by clinicians and patients.

Personalized health and patient engagement

Rather than only seeing an epilepsy patient a few times a year, clinicians could use myCareCentric Epilepsy to gain more of an ongoing, complete view of their patient’s condition. They could see in real time which interventions are working and which aren’t. That way, they can adjust medications when appropriate and tailor treatment for each individual patient.

The solution can also help epilepsy patients better understand any lifestyle factors that may be contributing to their seizure risk, so they can be more engaged in managing their condition.

The potential to detect—and even predict—seizures

Poole Hospital has been conducting trials of myCareCentric Epilepsy since the beginning of 2016. And as the data sets from the trials grow, the University of Kent will build intelligence about seizure patterns. They’ll use Microsoft Azure Machine Learning to develop algorithms and classifiers that could ultimately be used to detect seizures for a large proportion of patients.

That means that myCareCentric Epilepsy could help alert care teams and family members when a patient has a seizure.

Even better, the hope is that the solution could eventually help identify—through pattern recognition—when a seizure is about to occur and warn patients and their support network before it happens. Imagine the potential this could have for improving safety for epilepsy patients and helping to prevent emergency room visits.

Join me—in person or virtually

I’ll be discussing Poole Hospital’s myCareCentric Epilepsy user trails in more detail during my presentation at IOT Solutions World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, on October 25th as well as on December 2nd during Health Slam ’16, a virtual conference on IoT for healthcare. I hope you’ll join me at one or both of the events.

Learn more

In the meantime, you can watch a video to hear from not only the innovators involved in creating myCareCentric Epilepsy, but also a patient who shares what it means to him in this Microsoft News Center UK story. And for even more detail, read the Poole Hospital case study.

I look forward to seeing more of our partners take advantage of IoT and machine learning to help health providers advance precision medicine and improve quality of life for patients in other disease groups.

The post Personalizing epilepsy care with wearable + analytics appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs.

It was another successful edition of HIMSS this year. Our booth was packed, and people seemed especially interested in seeing how health organizations are furthering their mission with the scale, efficiency, and cost savings of the cloud. In case you missed HIMSS16—or, like me, you were hard-pressed to absorb everything while you were there—here are three cloud solutions for healthcare that were showcased by our partners:

MyHealthDirect

Seventy-seven percent of patients think that the ability to book, change, or cancel appointments online is important according to a recent Accenture survey. Health organizations can provide the convenience patients expect with a cloud-based MyHealthDirect scheduling solution. They can also make it easier for health professionals to schedule referrals with MyHealthDirect referral management tools. And MyHealthDirect solutions are (HIPAA) HITRUST certified to help health organizations maintain compliance.

Large health systems, providers, and payers in the US use MyHealthDirect to help connect patients with the right provider at the right time. Making it easy to schedule appointments improves patient satisfaction, care coordination, and outcomes, and it allows practices to grow.

Even if you’re not ready to move your EMR to the cloud yet, you can take advantage of MyHealthDirect to provide online scheduling convenience. MyHealthDirect’s cloud-based consumer and referral solutions allow real-time integration with any Electronic Medical Record (EMR) or Practice Management Solution (PMS).

BC Platforms

The cloud offers computing performance, data storage and analytics, and cost efficiencies never before possible—and these capabilities are enabling unprecedented opportunities to advance medicine. Case in point: BC Platforms, a pioneer in bioinformatics and genome data management, offers cloud services that can help provide answers to today’s most groundbreaking research questions in next-generation sequencing (NGS) and genome-wide association studies (GWAS). Its technology transforms data into scientific discoveries.

BC Platforms develops enabling technology that can integrate proprietary genomic data, molecular data, and clinical information from individual patients and population studies in novel and useful ways—in both academia and industry. Its platform can combine data from a variety of internal, partner, and public sources to help further the field of personalized, predictive medicine. Check out some of the exciting use cases.

Nasuni

Health organizations face an ever-increasing need for medical imaging data storage. For example, at Austin Radiological Association (ARA), mammograms took up about 7 terabytes of storage, but that footprint was expected to double within a year. Not only are there more imaging files but files are getting much larger as imaging moves from 2D to 3D. The average file size for a standard mammography image is 19 MB, while the average file size for a 3D tomography image is 392 MB.

To keep up with the exponential growth in medical imaging data, ARA turned to a HIPAA- compliant cloud solution from Nasuni. It’s helping ARA scale data storage at lower costs—with the right security and redundancy.

Health organizations can have the accessibility and flexibility of public cloud storage with the local performance and security of on-site storage with Nasuni Cloud NAS. It combines local appliances with cloud storage to provide unlimited capacity and on-demand scalability. Health organizations also benefit from automatic protection, centralized management of files across all office locations, and more.

Watch this webinar to hear how ARA addressed its file growth problem, while also delivering local performance and mobile access to end users through Nasuni Cloud NAS.

If you’d like to take advantage of cloud services for online scheduling, genome analysis, medical imaging storage or analysis, or any of the other exciting possibilities brought about by the cloud, feel free to drop us a line via email, Facebook, or Twitter.

The post Three examples of the cloud empowering healthcare from HIMSS appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs.

Optolexia aims to help schools identify students at risk for dyslexia earlier with a cloud tool that analyzes reading eye movements

One of the things I love about my job is seeing how today’s technologies can enable new ways of doing things that make a real impact on people’s lives.

Case in point: The dyslexia-screening tool developed by Optolexia, which was named a “Future Swedish Innovator” by SvD, one of the largest newspapers in Sweden. Taking advantage of the cloud computing and machine learning Optolexia aims to help schools identify students at risk for dyslexia significantly earlier than current screening tests. Its solution is a great example of a project that falls into the upper left quadrant of the four-block diagram tool I covered in a previous blog, which is to say that it’s a project that benefits tremendously from being in the cloud with relatively low risk and it was able to be implemented quickly.

As many as 10–15 percent of school-age children are dyslexic, and the International Dyslexia Association estimates there are 1 billion people with dyslexia worldwide. Dyslexia affects a person’s life in many ways. The sooner children are diagnosed with dyslexia, the sooner they can begin learning coping strategies to improve their reading skills and academic performance.

Using the computing power, storage capabilities, data security, and ease of access of the cloud, Optolexia built a portable screening tool that schools can use for quick and easy dyslexia assessments. The solution uses the Microsoft Azure cloud platform and Microsoft Azure Machine Learning predictive analytics. As a student reads text on the screen of a laptop, tablet, or desktop computer with an eye tracker mounted at the bottom, the tool captures the student’s eye movements. The data is sent to the Machine Learning engine in the cloud, which returns a numerical result that identifies the likelihood that the student has dyslexia.

The screening tool is being used in schools in the Municipality of Järfälla in Sweden. “Because Optolexia screening is such an easy process, we may be able to reliably identify dyslexic students earlier in school and provide the educational support that they need for academic success,” says Karin Tosteberg, Literacy Development Coordinator, Municipality of Järfälla.

Mattias Blomgren, Head of Children and Student Health for the Municipality of Järfälla, adds, “By helping children do better in school, we improve their chance of having a good job and a good life and contributing positively to society. For children with dyslexia, early intervention is key to making that happen.”

Optolexia ultimately plans to make the screening tool more widely available with the scalability of the cloud. It is also looking into the possibility of adapting the tool to use eye-movement tracking to help identify people at risk for other conditions such as Parkinson’s disease, ADHD, autism, and possibly even schizophrenia.

See how the dyslexia-screening solution works and hear the forward-thinkers at Optolexia discuss how they were able to move their analytical models to Azure in a matter of hours in this two-minute video.

Optolexia’s solution is a great example of how a cloud-based clinical decision support system can enable innovative ways of doing things that are efficient, accessible, and beneficial to society.

Please let us know if you have any questions or feedback via email, Facebook, or Twitter

The post Early screening for dyslexia with eye-tracking, cloud-based tool from Optolexia appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs.

So how can IoT solutions help your health organization achieve its goals? Here are just a few examples:

Optimize patient flow
Provide more timely medical services and reduce wait times to improve care quality, efficiency, and patient satisfaction. IoT solutions can help you make sure the right people and things are at the right place at the right time. For instance, you can provide patients in the ER—or those who are going through pre-operation procedures—with wearables so you know where they are in the clinical workflow. You can also track medical equipment and devices. That means you can streamline getting the patient and necessary equipment in the right exam or operating room at the right time. Privacy concerns must be taken into consideration when developing such a use case.

Enable care without walls
With IoT solutions, readings from medical devices—such as glucose monitors, asthma monitoring devices, or pulse oximeters—in patients’ homes can be monitored. When a reading is out of a preset range, an alert can be sent to the patient’s care team for early intervention. This can reduce clinic and hospital visits or can prevent readmissions. Your health organization can transform how you provide care and help patients better manage their conditions. Check out a great example in a recent blog about how a hospital in Norway is helping patients better manage COPD and reduce the need for them to travel to doctor visits.

Proactively track and maintain devices and equipment
Whether it’s medical devices and tablets you’ve sent home with patients, or beds, wheelchairs, IV pumps and the like in your clinic or hospital, IoT solutions can help you track and maintain your devices and equipment. No more wasted time searching for missing inventory or being surprised by maintenance issues. You can predict servicing and replacement needs to increase uptime and better manage inventory. The Aerocrine case study is a great example of how predictive maintenance can help increase the reliability of medical devices and improve user satisfaction. Predictive maintenance is one of the first preconfigured solutions for common IoT scenarios offered by the Azure IoT Suite.

You can start now
You don’t need to wait to start taking advantage of IoT until you have a big-bang strategy for connecting everything, everywhere. You can start small and organically. Just connect a few devices that you already have and go from there. We’ve designed our solutions so your health organization can take a step-by-step approach and start harnessing IoT right away to achieve your goals. 

Please let us know if you have any questions or feedback via email, Facebook, or Twitter.

The post 3 ways your health organization can harness IoT — starting now appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs.

One is the Department of Health in England and the other is a small startup company in Luxembourg. They are two very different types of organizations but they shared the same requirement: to achieve their mission, they both needed to scale fast and cost-effectively.

Department of Health in England
There are few websites in England bigger than the National Health Service’s NHS Choices-and even fewer that are more important to their visitors. So, supporting site traffic is a must-and controlling costs is also imperative. To meet that prescription, the website’s managers decided to adopt Microsoft Azure. And they were able to beat their own deadline to implement it by a month.

Not only did Azure readily handle an all-time-high figure of 52 million visits in January of 2015 (up from 43 million in January 2014), but it supports NHS Choices at an annual cost that’s less than 40 percent as much as its previous hosting provider. Plus, Azure meets the risk and security requirements for NHS Choices by design according to Cleveland Henry, NHS Choices Delivery Director at the Department of Health’s Health & Social Care Information Center (HSCIC). The folks at HSCIC are responsible for the delivery of NHS Choices. They say that, in addition to scalability and cost savings, they’re benefiting from the agile and open development platform Azure offers-citing that their experience with Linux and Ruby on Azure is very positive.

Medihoo
As a small startup with big plans for its healthcare search website, Medihoo needed fast, powerful search capabilities that didn’t require a heavy investment in new infrastructure. The company chose to build its site on the Microsoft Azure cloud platform and take advantage of Azure Search. The solution offers fast performance and comprehensive functionality, as well as geospatial and multiple-language support. Medihoo now can help everyone-especially expatriates and travelers-find high-quality healthcare no matter where in the world they are.

In other words, this small startup company with a limited IT budget was able to immediately go global by taking advantage of the instant scalability and cost-effectiveness of the cloud. “They had limited resources, but they wanted to scale the solution globally and make sure they could continue scaling as the solution grew and added more healthcare provider information,” says Rik Delva, Project Manager at RealDolmen, Medihoo’s technology partner. “That’s why we recommended Azure. It supports the ‘start small, scale fast’ scenario Medihoo needed and helps them keep operational costs low.”

Check out both websites: NHS Choices and Medihoo. Also, check out the Medihoo app. And consider the benefits of the cloud for your own organization. If you haven’t already, you can map your journey to the cloud with the help of the four-block quadrant I shared in a previous blog. If you need further assistance charting your course or have any questions or feedback, please let us know via email, Facebook, or Twitter.

The post These health organizations scaled fast with the cloud appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs.

No matter where your health organization is on its journey to the cloud, the key to a successful path is to take a step-by-step approach. Moving to the cloud need not be an all-or-nothing proposition.

As with any technology, gaining the most value from cloud services means linking them to your health organization’s mission. In other words, moving to the cloud is a progressive journey that starts with your mission statement.

A typical mission statement of a health organization includes the following concepts: maximum quality of care; affordable healthcare; patient involvement; lower costs and streamlined operations; and innovation and research.

A mission statement normally focuses on business processes and not immediately on ICT projects. However, once you begin defining specific steps to achieve the mission statement goals, you typically end up with new or changing ICT needs, and cloud services can help you meet many of those needs.

Let us have a look at some of the mission statement items and corresponding ICT needs in more depth:

To improve quality of care, you may want to expand your usage of controlled, closed-loop processes and follow existing accreditation schemes, such as JCI. Toward that end, you could take advantage of cloud-based document management and workflow systems or business analytics. With the cloud, you could enable processes and data insights to be more easily connected and accessible across departments, organizations, and teams.

To improve patient involvement, you may consider a patient portal that enables patients to get more insight into their disease. It might be a resource for patients to find the right health organizations near them. Or, it might offer tools like a medical encyclopedia, or a chat box for asking a specialist questions. Such a portal is typically a growing project as new services are added over time and the cloud can offer the needed elasticity.

To stay competitive through leading-edge innovation and research, you might think about completely new areas, like using predictive analytics and high performance computing for research projects or taking advantage of the Internet of Things to collect data from devices. Especially in these new areas, the cloud can offer capabilities and services beyond the possibilities of a typical on-premises datacenter.

The above are just a few examples of what linking mission-critical priorities to cloud-based business processes could look like.

Why is this important? It helps you identify how the cloud can help you further your mission. The cloud offers many benefits and opportunities. It enables you to implement new systems fast, reduce costs, and take advantage of the scalability of virtually unlimited resources for storage and computing power. Plus, it offers new capabilities so you can innovate and lead in the health industry. For example, you can connect publicly available big data with your own internal data to uncover new insights. The cloud offers new and exciting ways for you to achieve your goals.

We’ll be sharing more information in the coming weeks about how to build your own unique roadmap for taking a step-by-step approach to the cloud, so stay tuned. And if you have any questions or feedback, of if you’d like help with your journey to the cloud, please reach out via email, Facebook, or Twitter.

The post Align your cloud projects with your mission statement appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs.