As healthcare providers continue to face a complex mix of challenges, including severe financial strain, increasing competition, clinician burnout, and workforce shortages, the need to improve outcomes by using information and technology to enable quality care is stronger than ever.

Amidst rapid change, the healthcare sector is embracing adaptability and resilience. Facilities are rethinking their approaches and harnessing innovative technologies and digital tools to streamline processes and empower healthcare teams to provide exceptional care. Their ability to adapt in the face of adversity is nothing short of inspiring. It has enabled healthcare providers to maintain a high level of service despite the most demanding circumstances.

Providers must also capitalize on digital technologies to help improve operational efficiencies, quality of care, and patient satisfaction and retention, as well as optimize revenue cycle management.

Microsoft empowers the frontline workforce

We are committed to investing in innovative solutions with next-generation AI to help frontline workers thrive.

Read the blog

Tools like Microsoft Teams play a pivotal role in the transformative journey in healthcare. For example, healthcare workers are using Teams as their communications and collaboration hub, facilitating virtual video visits and keeping care teams connected. We’ve seen strong and consistent double-digit growth in frontline workers’ monthly active users of Microsoft Teams in the healthcare industry this year. This highlights the crucial role digital tools play in shaping the future of healthcare, fostering seamless operations, collaboration, and the exchange of vital health information.

Enhancing operational efficiency in healthcare with AI and digital tools

Between fluctuating team schedules and staying up to date with their often large and dispersed healthcare teams—from physicians to phlebotomists—maintaining end-to-end visibility on operations can get time-consuming for managers. But today’s digital tools, including AI, are reshaping the healthcare teams and support staff work.

Lightening the load for frontline healthcare managers

It’s often a complex task for care team managers to quickly identify open items to address throughout the week such as open shifts and ad hoc, time-specific work. Using chat history, shifts data, and more, Microsoft 365 Copilot helps managers improve operational and healthcare outcomes by quickly getting an AI-powered list of important action items specific to their care team and location.

Managers can identify open items such as open shifts that need to be covered with a new Shifts plugin for Microsoft 365 Copilot. Soon, Microsoft 365 Copilot can ground prompts and retrieve insights for frontline healthcare managers leveraging data from the Shifts app in addition to user and company data it has access to such as Teams chat history, SharePoint, emails, and more.  

Enhancing care team coordination and collaboration

Communication within the healthcare chain is evolving, transcending isolated pockets, and embracing a connected ecosystem. Real-time information exchange has become the norm, showcasing the industry’s determination to remain cohesive and collaborative. This connectedness empowers healthcare professionals to make informed decisions swiftly, and enhances patient outcomes and overall care delivery.

Ease of communication

When using the hotline feature on Teams certified phone devices, care teams can simplify and help secure contact management to always reach the right colleague or patient over calling. Devices can now be programmed to directly dial pre-configured hotline phone numbers or contacts, such as a provider’s emergency services, help deck, or security desk.

Leveraging modern communications to connect providers across health systems

Effective organization-wide communication from health providers main headquarters is essential to the success of its care teams, yet getting the right message to the right people can be challenging. Now, Announcements in Viva Connections lets corporate teams deliver communications and create notifications for clinicians and care teams within the home experience of Teams.

To reduce communication overload and help healthcare workers focus on what’s most relevant to them and their patients, organizational leaders can now target important communications like urgent announcements, role-specific updates, and safety policy changes to care teams and other frontline workers with Announcements in Viva Connections. With these new features, important messages are now delivered through push notifications and communications that surface in the home experience within Teams, where healthcare workers often start their day. Announcements are coming to tablet and mobile experiences in September 2023, with desktop experiences coming later this year.

To enhance the home experience in Teams for healthcare with frontline workers who span multiple sites or locations, we are excited to announce that a provider can now have multiple experiences. This new feature allows organizations to provide a tailored experience that reflects each location’s look and feel and customize the dashboard for each location’s unique needs. Multiple home experiences are now available through the Viva Connections app in Teams. Learn more about the recent enhancements to home experiences in Teams.

Drive engagement with campaign targeting

It’s important for providers to be able to target frontline care teams and drive engagement around their organization’s mission and core priorities. With new Targeted Campaigns in Viva Engage, you can now select specific audiences to reach with targeted communication campaigns and initiatives—perfect for scenarios like safety campaigns, policy changes, and other initiatives where you want to get the word out to employees and get people involved.

Personalize workplace communication with generative AI

Copilot in Microsoft Viva Engage helps healthcare leaders create compelling and inspiring posts from simple prompts or trending topics within workplace communities and storyline conversations. Corporate communicators can receive suggestions to further personalize messages, adjust tone and length, and even suggest relevant images to help drive great engagement on the frontline. Leaders can also utilize Copilot to analyze engagement metrics, assess sentiment, and recommend responses. Learn more about Copilot in Viva, coming later this year.

Providing trusted experiences to support health teams

Healthcare providers are committed to improving the work experience of their frontline workforce. They are investing in creating secure, user-friendly environments, reflecting their forward-thinking mindset and dedication to supporting their staff. They recognize that adaptability and progress are intrinsically tied to the people who make healthcare possible, ensuring a sustainable and fulfilling future.

Simplifying digital identity and personal workspaces

You can now provide your healthcare workers with a digital identity and personalized workspace that allows them to seamlessly access what they need to do their work without context switching, no matter the device or ecosystem. With personalized device experiences, care teams can spend less time logging in and out with intuitive experiences that make it easy to be more secure. Frontline healthcare workers can simply and quickly sign in and out of shared devices.

With Windows 365 Frontline, shift and part-time workers can unlock the power of Cloud PCs, allowing them to securely access their personalized Windows experience on any device. Instead of the common hassles that come with sharing physical PCs, Windows 365 Frontline provides personalized Cloud PCs, enabling your frontline employees to work from anywhere, ultimately helping to boost their productivity and job satisfaction. 

When workers log on, they have immediate access to their personalized apps, desktops, data, and settings, so they can pick up where they left off, regardless of their device or location. Integration with Microsoft Entra ID (formerly Azure Active Directory) and Microsoft Intune makes it easy to configure, deploy, manage, and secure your Cloud PCs, enabling you to maximize existing technology resources to meet the needs of all your employees. Windows 365 Frontline is now generally available. Read the announcement blog or contact sales to learn more.

Equip the healthcare industry with Microsoft solutions

In the delicate balance between adaptability and perseverance, the healthcare industry forges a path towards a promising future. Embracing new operational efficiencies, leveraging enhanced communications and connectivity, and fostering a secure work experience are pivotal elements of this journey. The unwavering spirit and commitment of healthcare workers drive these transformative shifts, enabling the industry to provide exceptional care while navigating the complexities of a changing landscape.

Whether it’s improving communication between care team members or enhancing provider operations with AI, Microsoft has solutions to equip frontline healthcare workers to meet new and evolving industry demands.  

• Connect with an expert to learn more about Microsoft frontline solutions.
• Discover how you can connect your customers, your people, and your data with Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare.
• Explore additional Microsoft Teams frontline solutions for healthcare.
• Learn more about Microsoft’s next-generation AI set to transform the frontline.

The post How next-generation AI and digital tools are transforming healthcare appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs.

In our latest feature release for Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare, we’re excited to share how we can help your organization deliver exceptional patient and member experiences, accelerate data-driven decision-making, support your healthcare workforce, and enhance collaboration across the care continuum.

New Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare features accelerate transformation for health payors

We continue to help our customers and partners maximize the value of their investment in Microsoft Cloud technologies with industry specific apps, connectors, workflows, data, and AI models. With today’s announcement, and building on our October 2022 release, we’re accelerating value of the Microsoft Cloud and expanding our investment across a new vertical for health payors and insurers, which will complement the existing capabilities for healthcare providers:

• Unified member view for payors (preview). Helps organizations foster deeper member relationships by delivering useful member data to help relationship managers with a deeper understanding of a member’s wellness goals, important life moments, and other personal attributes. This application provides a comprehensive view of member data and member insights in one place for payor organizations. It builds upon the Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare Payor data model, previewed in 2022, and combines member information about claims, coverage, risk profile, care plans, and more. Customers can utilize this feature within existing Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights instances or utilize Microsoft Power Platform for building new member profile templates.
• Care journey templates for care management outreach (preview). Now payors and providers can automate workflows with common scenario templates (for example, patient discharge, care plan off track, diabetes management, and more) for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing that can be used out of the box or customized for care management scenarios and help improve the quality of the care journey for patients and members. Providers and payors can send messages through Microsoft Teams, surface to-dos in the patient interaction timeline, and allow for secure messaging through Patient Access Portal. The patient journey feature extends communication channels beyond email to include text messaging and push notifications.
• Device data support for remote care management (preview). Built within Microsoft Power Platform, this feature enables healthcare organizations to support better hybrid care services, resulting in fewer patient visits to clinics and more frequent insights into patients’ health. This feature allows care teams and care managers to remotely monitor their patients’ vital health data, identify trends with that data, and manage their inventory of assigned medical devices. This feature builds upon the capabilities of MedTech service in Azure Health Data Services as well that of our independent software vendor (ISV) partner, Life365, that has integration to more than 400 original equipment manufacturer (OEM) devices.
• Enhanced operations support for Virtual Health Data Tables (general availability). We have further enhanced the Virtual Health Data Tables functionality to include support for creating and updating, as well as deleting Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) data. This feature now allows users of Microsoft Power Platform based applications, built leveraging Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare Common Data Model and Virtual Health Data Tables, to also trigger real-time updates of clinical data stored in FHIR servers like Azure Health Data Services without the need for duplicating that data in Dataverse.

We recently announced our expanded collaboration with Cognizant and the plans to integrate Cognizant’s TriZetto healthcare products with the Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare. Through this integration we will be able to help support our mutual clients, deliver enhanced patient and member engagement, have access to improved data interoperability, improve insights, and achieve operational efficiencies in a significantly shorter time-to-value. Our companies will also collaborate to develop and run Cognizant’s current and future healthcare software as a service (SaaS) solution on Microsoft Azure, migrate new and existing clients from on premises environments to streamlined functions managed on the Microsoft Cloud, and support future technologies designed to deliver new insights for payers, providers, and consumers.

Seize the full potential of AI, while safeguarding your business, your data, and your health workforce

At Microsoft, we believe that AI is the defining technology of our time. Our company has been at the forefront of cutting-edge AI research and continually integrates powerful, innovative AI technologies into our products and services to help customers do more. We also recognize that data is the fuel that powers AI technology, and peak performance requires clean, integrated, accessible data. We continue to make huge investments in data and AI research, technologies, and partners because we’re committed to bringing technology and people together to realize the promises of AI responsibly.

Our momentum continues with updates across our Azure AI Services for Health:

• Text analytics for health released social determinants of health (SDoH) and ethnicity support. Enables unlocking mentions of social, environmental, and demographics factors from unstructured biomedical data including assertion detection such as negation of substance uses. Moreover, timing, frequency and amounts mentioned in the context of SDoH will be captured and associated with the entities using semantic relations that will now be surfaced as well. Healthcare organizations, providers, researchers, and pharmaceutical companies can extract insights, improve care, assess health inequity issues, track health outcomes, as well as incorporate underrepresented groups into clinical trials and research, breaking cycles of disparity. 
• Project Health Insights (preview). New Azure applied AI service that provides pre-built models which perform a decision support conclusion that can help health organizations solve high-value productivity challenges for clinical trial matching, and OncoPhenotypes. Project Health Insights models will enable healthcare providers to rapidly identify key cancer attributes within their patient populations based on their tumor site, tumor histology, and cancer staging. The models also matches patients to potentially suitable clinical trials, according to the trial’s eligibility criteria and patient data helping find clinical trials, that patients could be qualified for, as well as finding a cohort of potentially eligible patients to a list of clinical trials.
• Azure Health Bot integration with Azure OpenAI Service (preview). We are releasing a new Azure Health Bot template that allows our customers to experiment with the integration of Azure OpenAI Service into their Health Bot instances for fallback answers. This feature does not aim to facilitate the bot to answer unknown queries in the medical space, rather, it enables customers to access the Azure OpenAI Service API and decide how to use the model to improve their bot built through the Azure Health Bot service. Currently, we are offering the preview for internal testing and evaluation purposes only.

Today, we are also excited to announce the general availability of the accelerator kit for healthcare as part of the Responsible AI Dashboard in Azure Machine Learning. The Responsible AI Dashboard is applicable across industries; the accelerator kit for healthcare is aimed at training and debugging models for fairness, explainability, biases, and more before they are implemented in healthcare settings. The Responsible AI Dashboard accelerator kit for healthcare is a valuable tool to help check models for fairness prior to model adoption, allowing for confidence to use AI to inform space planning in hospitals or dispatching medical staff in facilities.

In addition to model debugging, the Responsible AI Dashboard accelerator kit for healthcare in Azure Machine Learning can equip healthcare providers with directional and causal relationship analyses between historical patient data and health scores to better provide lifestyle recommendations and modifications for patients.

Foster better collaboration and empower your healthcare workforce

Today, global health systems and payors are turning to collaborative technology platforms—intended to reduce administrative burden and proactively share data for interventions—to drive much-needed change. Technology should offer better ways of working, evolving the parts of healthcare delivery that are working and eliminating those that aren’t.  

In our booth at HIMSS 2023, attendees can experience the power of Microsoft Teams to simplify care coordination to help reduce clinician burnout, streamline communication and data sharing, facilitate multidisciplinary collaboration, and improve the patient-care team relationship—without compromising data security and compliance or adding unnecessary friction.

Virtual care tools reduce constraints on what clinical teams can accomplish and enable new and different ways to work. By leveraging virtual care, you remove barriers that hinder traditional care delivery models and empower people to create new solutions that are far more flexible, efficient, and supportive. Virtual Appointments in Microsoft Teams provides an out-of-the-box solution for clinicians to make patient-care team interactions as easy and personalized as possible, now generally available. Built on top of scheduling solutions like bookings or integrated with your scheduling solution through application programming interfaces (APIs), Virtual Appointments enable care teams to serve their patients in new and innovative ways. And with Teams Premium, healthcare organizations get advanced Virtual Appointments to manage the end-to-end appointment experience with capabilities like text messaging, custom-branded waiting rooms, analytics, and more.

For healthcare organizations using Epic® or Oracle Cerner, the Microsoft Teams EHR connector enables care teams to schedule and launch Teams virtual visits directly from their electronic health record (EHR) system. The connector gives patients flexibility with the option to join virtual visits via browser, the Teams app, patient provider portals, or text messaging, and offers support for group visits. Microsoft Teams with Teladoc Health Solo’s medical-grade whole-person virtual care delivery solutions for hospitals and health systems helps to optimize clinical efficiency, improve patient satisfaction, reduce burnout, and increase profitability, all while supporting an organization’s telehealth goals for today and tomorrow.

Health that connects and tech that cares at HIMSS 2023

We’re excited to join other innovators at the HIMSS 2023 conference to showcase how customers’ need for flexibility, choice, and future innovation doesn’t have to mean more complexity, people, and cost. For those of you traveling to Chicago for HIMSS 2023, I look forward to seeing you there. And I look forward to showcasing our latest Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare capabilities and more.

Here are additional ways you can learn more about Microsoft updates:

• Explore our demos and visit our in-booth Learning Center at HIMSS 2023 booth #1201
• Learn more about Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare
• Try out a free limited trial of Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare

Transform the healthcare journey

Deliver better experiences, insights, and care with Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare.

Explore resources today

• Epic® is a registered trademark of Epic Systems Corporation.
• For Oracle Cerner customers, the EHR Connector is only available in the United States.

The post Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare: Empowering healthcare to deliver meaningful outcomes appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs.

At Microsoft Ignite 2022, we’re excited to share our latest release wave for Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare, which helps support organizations navigating this changing environment. The solution showcases new tools to free up critical resources and support consumer-centric operating models that ease the burden on providers and help facilitate proactive healthcare, creating “customers” for life.

Enhance patient engagement

The economic case for consumer-driven healthcare is clear. Enhancing patient experience so that it is convenient, transparent, and personalized can drive greater patient satisfaction and reduce care costs. A recent McKinsey survey shows that satisfied patients who receive a more personalized, engaged experience report having 36 percent fewer visits and are 28 percent less likely to switch providers. These patients are also five to six times more likely to use other services from the same provider.¹ While patients may generally be more involved in their healthcare, satisfied patients feel more empowered to engage in their own health and feel as though they are getting better care, leading to improved outcomes overall. 

In this latest release, we continue to improve patient insights to provide a more enriched 360-degree patient view that is at the center of many healthcare processes. Now, care teams see relevant information faster through the Patient snapshot (generally available) in the Unified patient view. It enables an organization to customize their own end-to-end scenarios leveraging low-code and no-code tools like Microsoft Power Apps to optimize the patient view summary. Now, organizations can create unique snapshots that meet the most relevant use cases and help support faster and better care management. 

We’ve also extended the Unified patient view with a Patient trends (preview) feature to share patient indicators based on computed measures and insights about patient activities, for example, the number of days since the last appointment or the number of hospitalizations in the last year. This feature can be customized once installed to help measure relevant activities for each organization. 

Missed appointments can have a significant cost for healthcare organizations through wasted time and resources. They not only lead to a decline in patients’ health, but the economic effects of patient no shows significantly affect clinic operations and fixed cost calculations, resulting in overstaffing and unscheduled downtime—ultimately leaving healthcare providers struggling with everyday operations. Additionally, research has also shown that patients are significantly more likely to miss an appointment if they have missed appointments in the past.² The new Missed appointment prediction (preview) is a fully integrated AI solution that enables organizations to use AI to assess the likelihood that a patient will miss their next appointment. It also provides users with an explanation of the factors that influenced the prediction. Now, organizations can use these predictions to improve the decision-making process and take proactive measures, like care coordinators reaching out to the patient ahead of time, to help ensure patients will attend their next appointment and maintain continuity of care. Patients in turn have peace of mind knowing their physician’s office is prioritizing appointments that work best for them, building trust, and ensuring better patient-centric care.

Empower health team collaboration

Care plans are critical for healthcare organizations switching to value-based care to improve the quality and cost of care. With this new update for Care plan management (generally available), we have improved usability for care providers, making it easier to create and customize care plans to meet existing workflows and view a patient’s goals, interactions, and activities throughout their care journey. Organizations that leverage our Patient Access solution can now empower patients to update their activity progress in their care plan through the patient portal. Patients can view care plans, view upcoming, completed, overdue activities, and modify the status of an activity. Patients engaged in their own health and wellness are more likely to follow through with ongoing treatment and activity recommendations.

Patient journeys follow a series of interconnected events from being introduced, admitted, cared for, discharged, and possibly repeating a cycle as a retained patient. Later this year, we’ll release new Patient journey templates (preview) and tools to help organizations automate workflows across care management, and surface tasks and notifications to improve the quality of the patient journey. This capability will help save valuable time and create even more efficiency for care managers and administrative users who interact with the patients. It also includes out-of-the-box patient scenario templates for patient discharge, maternity care, diabetes management, and care plan off-track journeys.

During Microsoft Ignite 2022, we will also be joined by our partner Teladoc Health, who will share how the combination of communications, collaboration, and workflows in Microsoft Teams with Teladoc Health’s Solo™ will simplify the way healthcare organizations and clinicians work by streamlining the technology and administrative processes associated with providing virtual care.  

Working with Microsoft enables Teladoc Health to integrate with Teams, further strengthening care team communication and collaboration. Clinicians can securely access clinical data included within their electronic health record (EHR) system via Teladoc Health Solo without having to leave the Teams environment.

Data management

If there’s one thing 2022 has taught us is that data is truly a strategic asset for businesses today. The benefits of getting this right are significant. Harvard Business Review found that organizations that embrace data to drive transformations can experience a 54 percent growth in revenue and profits, 62 percent enhancement to customer satisfaction, and 44 percent faster time to market.³

As part of the ongoing strategy for Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare, we are intentionally innovating with data at the center of all that we do and striving to make it easier for customers to manage, connect, and leverage their entire data estate. With the new Data integration toolkit, we have provided IT administrators and integration specialists with a single pane of capabilities and tools to set up, configure, and manage their data integration components. This will make it easier to enable health data exchange within an organization’s existing landscape.

We’re also excited to announce the full feature release of Dataverse healthcare APIs to support the bi-directional integration capabilities of Fast Health Interoperability Resources (FHIR) data. These APIs provide a new, improved way to integrate and exchange FHIR data between Microsoft Dataverse and FHIR endpoints like Microsoft Azure Health Data Services or EHR systems.

We continue to invest in health industry data models. With Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare, we’re using FHIR R4 inspired data models to bring multiple systems and applications together by providing a “shared data model” for applications. This month, we’re releasing an updated Provider data model with an updated set of HL7® FHIR® R4 entities commonly used by customers and partners to build or extend their own healthcare apps leveraging Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare. Later this year, we’ll release a Payor data model that contains the set of HL7® FHIR® R4 entities for health insurers and payors. Health data models simplify data management and app development by unifying data into common data model shapes and applying consistency across multiple apps and deployments. This leads to faster innovation and easier data interoperability across various health data systems.

Organizations today can spend a lot of time defining a harmonized and consistent plan for their enterprise data warehousing, clinical and operational analytics, or lake house initiatives. Our industry-specific health database templates in Azure Synapse are data models that act as blueprints and enable organizations to quickly jumpstart their analytics-based industry use cases. Customers and partners can customize and extend these standard templates using the database editor in Azure Synapse. Our latest release includes templates for providers, payors, pharmaceuticals, clinical trials, retail pharmacies, and genomics.

Our deep commitment to supporting healthcare organizations remains steadfast. Partnering in this evolving healthcare environment requires rapid response, predictive capabilities, and continued innovation to help realize value faster and strengthen the resilience of organizations moving forward.

Learn more at Microsoft Ignite 2022

Microsoft Ignite 2022 is a chance for us to reaffirm our commitment to serving our healthcare customers and demonstrate our commitment to equipping them with the most innovative healthcare tools, partners, and technologies in the industry. On October 12, 2022, I encourage you all to attend the online Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare session and see a demo of the latest feature release. You can also interact with us at Microsoft Ignite 2022 by joining our hybrid Ask the Experts session with Teladoc and Nuance, or if you’re joining us live in Seattle, you can attend our in-person Expert Meet-up session, and you can also take the opportunity to hear from Nuance at our live Ask the Experts session.  

1 The-next-frontier-of-healthcare-delivery.pdf (mckinsey.com)

2 Evaluating the Impact of Patient No-Shows on Service Quality – PMC (nih.gov)

3 How to lead a data-driven digital transformation by Harvard Business Review

The post Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare: Ease provider burden and help create customers for life appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs.

Reshaping the future of healthcare will take continued agility to respond rapidly and predict what’s next, and that requires a new approach to healthcare solutions—one that harnesses data as a resource and turns its potential into power. Microsoft is committed to innovating new and cutting-edge solutions that help make healthcare more personal, affordable, effective, and accessible while continuing to improve the patient and clinician experience. We’re excited to showcase the next wave of innovation for Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare and how it continues to reshape the connected care journey. And if you missed last week’s news on the closing of the Nuance acquisition, we’re looking forward to sharing what’s new with both companies during HIMSS22 in Orlando, March 14 – 18, 2022. 

Enhancing patient engagement

Over the last several years, health systems have realized that creating a good consumer experience not only helps their patients but makes it easier for their staff to provide consistent care across the patient journey.

Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare provides an upgraded holistic Patient view to help organizations better understand and elevate patient experiences—complete with a new enhanced 360-degree view of a patient’s journey in a clear and intuitive way. Organizations can customize those views for their own end-to-end scenarios. We’re also excited to preview new enhancements to Patient insights, which enable care managers, patient representatives, outreach specialists, and population health analysts to efficiently deliver and capture useful patient insights. Analytics from patient insights can potentially help organizations improve clinical processes and care management experiences.

To adapt to staffing shortages, empowering patient support and healthcare frontline workers with technologies like AI-powered bots and virtual visits allows them to assist patients remotely and effectively. This saves the team’s valuable time and helps ensure that patients still receive a consistent quality of care.

Azure Health Bot allows healthcare organizations to instantly build bot scenarios for collecting secure and compliant responses directly from patients for uses like triage, flu vaccinations, and more. Today, we’re excited to expand its template catalog with new templates for self-reporting of quality-of-life measures and chronic condition management.

We’re also launching several new features through Microsoft Teams for frontline workers in healthcare. We’re excited to announce the general availability of the Microsoft Teams EHR connector for Cerner. The new Cerner-validated application expands the capabilities of the Microsoft Teams EHR connector, making it easier for clinicians to launch virtual appointments with patients or consult with other providers in Teams directly from Cerner PowerChart, effortlessly invite other care team members to virtual appointments, and gain real-time status reports of their visits to help improve patient care. Additionally, to reduce no-shows, the new device test feature through the Microsoft Teams EHR connector, allows patients to test their hardware settings before their virtual visit.

To help lower the administrative burden, we’re providing new ways for organizations to improve virtual appointments. Patient triage information can now be gathered as part of the virtual appointment in Teams through the integration of Microsoft Forms and the Microsoft Bookings app.

We’ve expanded the ability for patients to request on-demand appointments with their provider. Organizations using on-demand scheduling can see and monitor on-demand appointments in a queue view through the Bookings app in Teams. Care teams can view and monitor on-demand appointment requests and get real-time updates on patient wait times, missed appointments, staffing delays, and more.

Gaining insights into the performance of virtual appointments is critical to understanding key business insights like lobby wait time, the impact of SMS notifications, appointment duration, and more. Authorized users can gain insights into these areas in the Microsoft Teams Admin Center for appointments scheduled through Microsoft Bookings and the Microsoft Teams EHR connector.

Empowering health team collaboration

The pandemic laid bare the crisis of burnout in the healthcare industry and exacerbated it in crucial ways. Many clinicians have hit their limits. A recent survey found that nearly a third of frontline healthcare workers in the U.S. are now considering not simply moving on from their institution, but leaving the field altogether. Indeed, the World Health Organization projects a shortfall of 18 million health workers by 2030.

Technology can’t single-handedly end burnout, but it can help. The right tools can centralize communication, surface insights, facilitate file sharing, streamline workforce management, and integrate partner applications. And, the right purpose-built devices can streamline engagement and boost productivity, in addition to tracking and supporting wellbeing, keeping teams connected whether they’re several feet or many miles apart. Check out our latest WorkLab article, exploring some of the issues causing burnout of frontline healthcare workers and tools to help.

Solutions that improve communication and collaboration can also ease the added workload created by EHRs. Microsoft Teams gives caregivers a way to synchronize management efforts across clinicians and administrators, and securely communicate the right information to the right people. Adopting solutions like this doesn’t only increase efficiency—they let your team know that they and their time are valued. I encourage you to visit our HIMSS booth (#2300) to see how this innovation can make a difference in your health team’s productivity and collaboration.

Enhancing clinician experiences

The frontline healthcare worker “great resignation” and clinician burnout epidemic are two of the biggest challenges we have faced as an industry this decade. Microsoft + Nuance are uniquely positioned to address these issues with advanced cloud and AI solutions. Our technologies are designed to improve patient experiences and support for clinicians with automated clinical documentation, and greater flexibility in delivering care through telehealth applications.

Together, we will bridge silos of healthcare data, expand ambient clinical intelligence, increase physician and care team efficiency, and lower overall healthcare costs.

Improving clinical and operational insights

Another challenge facing the health industry is the sheer volume of data it produces, which is too often unstructured and inaccessible. This not only wastes valuable time on processing, but it also means that the data is unusable for analysis and AI and machine learning at scale. We’re excited to make new investments in Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare to support healthcare organizations in their data interoperability journey. The general availability of Azure Health Data Services is a critical next step to help health and life sciences organizations harness and unlock the power of health data.

Azure Health Data Services is a new centralized suite of products and solutions for clinical, imaging, and MedTech data—supporting data standards like Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) and Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM). Azure Health Data Services consists of a set of healthcare APIs, health data connectors, and tools that are purpose-built for personal health information—taking into consideration how data needs to be brought together from disparate sources, while still enabling compliance boundaries and patient privacy. The managed service enables health and life sciences organizations to empower new workloads, analyze multiple data types simultaneously, and build on a trusted cloud.

While FHIR is rapidly being adopted across the globe, there are significant gaps in how to represent unstructured information in the clinical narrative. With the launch of Text Analytics for health’s structuring to FHIR feature, that is about to change. The new structuring capability enables health organizations to transform unstructured clinical documents into bundles of interconnected hierarchical FHIR resources, in adherence with the US Core standards. With this breakthrough solution, Text Analytics for health customers will deepen patient and population insights—and supercharge interoperability.

Enabling increased value and tailoring through partners

For the last several years, Microsoft has worked with leading Independent Software Vendors (ISV) and System Integrator (SI) partners to develop within the Microsoft Cloud. Utilizing the strength of the Microsoft Cloud, our partners are dedicated to serving customers by providing integrated healthcare solutions that extend the core Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare capabilities and identify new opportunities for innovation. Our partners help support health systems to fully customize these capabilities to each customer’s unique environment and business processes. Across HIMSS there are many Microsoft partners joining us to share their latest innovation with attendees.

In the Microsoft booth (#2300), seven partners will join us in live demonstrations of their solutions, including Efferent, EPAM, KPMG, Quisitive, PwC, Tegria, and Teladoc. You’ll experience firsthand how our partners accelerate the delivery of value to our customers by leveraging Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare capabilities.

Reimagining healthcare together

The theme for HIMSS22 this week is “Reimagine Health,” and over the last two years, we have seen so many examples of inspirational and transformational innovation across healthcare.

Our interactions with customers continue to inspire us to keep enhancing the capabilities of Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare, and our work to innovate and help reshape and reimagine healthcare will only continue to grow. Microsoft and our ecosystem of partners are committed to helping organizations strengthen resilience in people, enhance engagement, and empower frontline workers for the benefit of teams, organizations, and patients everywhere. Learn more about Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare from our website and follow us on social to stay informed on what’s happening on the horizon.

Resources

• See more about Microsoft at HIMSS22.
• Learn more about outcomes-focused AI from Microsoft + Nuance.
• Learn more about unlocking the power of health data in the cloud.
• Read how we’re empowering frontline healthcare workers.

The post Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare: Reshaping the future of healthcare appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs.

In this dynamic healthcare era, there’s no more “business as usual.” The way healthcare organizations will work, engage with patients and support community health will never be the same, and it may feel like there’s no roadmap for what’s ahead. Reimagining the next healthcare era, will take continued agility to respond rapidly and predict what’s next, and that requires a new approach to healthcare solutions—one that harnesses data as a resource, and turns its potential into power. Healthcare organizations need to learn how to build upon a strong digital foundation that will carry their organization well into the future.

It’s been over a year since we announced the general availability of Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare and our vision—to create a resilient patient-centered healthcare journey. Since then, I’ve had the opportunity to talk to healthcare organizations and partners across the globe about the trends in the future of healthcare and life sciences that organizations can capitalize on today. We discussed the need for solutions to elevate the patient experience, ease the administrative burden for frontline healthcare workers, and easily optimize Microsoft cloud technologies for their specific business scenarios. With recently announced enhanced features, Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare continues to produce capabilities built on top of the secure, compliant Microsoft cloud that offers healthcare organizations the scale and performance needed for managing their specific workflows, accelerating access to data insights and unifying data governance that helps their organization manage and govern their data, wherever it resides. Along with our partners, we continue to build on the foundation with tools and systems that make it easier for communities and healthcare organization to have access to data to make better informed decisions, gives health teams connected collaboration tools, and easily adopts the data standards that are important to healthcare.

During Microsoft Ignite 2021, Lisa Maki, VP Health Alliances, Microsoft, was able to connect with Tony Mestres, President, Truveta about our recent strategic partnership announcement and how they’re building an unprecedented data platform. Truveta is creating a learning community for health, bringing researchers together to easily build on each other’s work, readily share their data-driven questions and answers, and ultimately speed their time to insight. Its 17 health provider members care for tens of millions of people and operate thousands of care facilities in 40 states. Clinical data from its health provider members represents the full diversity of the U.S. across age, geography, race, ethnicity, and gender. The Truveta platform will leverage the power of Microsoft Azure and artificial intelligence (AI) to include insights from billions of de-identified datapoints, including medical records, images, and genomics. Importantly, data is refreshed daily and continuously flowing, providing researchers with an unprecedented opportunity to learn about our nation’s health every day. In the future, the Truveta platform will be integrated into Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare, unlocking new insights for precision medicine and clinical analytics from the world’s largest de-identified health dataset. Truveta’s data platform will empower clinicians and researchers to find new therapies and treatments. Together, our partnership will help advance global health outcomes for all.

AI and machine learning (ML) play an important role in our ability to understand big data and learn from it. Text Analytics for health in Azure Cognitive Services, allows developers to process and extract insights from unstructured biomedical text, including various types of clinical notes, medical publications, electronic health records, clinical trial protocols, and more, expediting the ability to learn from this data and leverage it for secondary use. Kepro makes quality of care and medical necessity decisions to ensure patients receive the right care they need, as they need it, and in the location of their choosing. To perform these activities, health care providers and clinical support teams are required to manually review large case histories to search for specific words and phrases that span a range of medical documents, like electronic health records, medication lists, and discharge summaries. With Text Analytics for health, they were able to find key indicators in clinical documents instantly and then abstract and display all pertinent information to improve the speed and quality of our reviews. Kepro has improved both the speed, efficiency, and quality of its healthcare reviews. Using Text Analytics for health helps it continue to meet service level agreements and give clinical staff more time to conduct thorough healthcare quality analysis.

During our Microsoft Ignite session, I was also excited to hear about the great work at Carl Zeiss Meditec, Inc. who partnered with Microsoft to use Azure Healthcare APIs to help power the Zeiss medical ecosystem and allow for data to be standardized and exchanged between their centers across the world while leveraging Microsoft’s geo-support for data residency requirements. The ability to securely and quickly exchange medical imaging data in context with clinical data will help providers using Zeiss products give more personalized care to their patients. Combining Zeiss’s expertise in ocular technology with the power of Azure Healthcare APIs enables Zeiss to also develop new solutions and use AI-powered applications and tools.

The need for connected data and supporting our customer’s privacy, security and compliance journeys will continue to be at the forefront of importance of our engineered systems and tools. As an industry, healthcare has been under enormous pressure during the pandemic to keep their people, communities and patient’s data safe.  At Microsoft Ignite, we were excited to introduce another part of that commitment with Microsoft 365 Insider Risk Management and a new healthcare policy template that leverages data from Epic and other EMR solutions—using our Data Connectors—to help healthcare companies identify potential insider risks related to patient data misuse. You can learn more at Microsoft Ignite session BRK241: Manage risk and compliance with end-to-end security solutions and our Insider Risk Management blog.

We also can’t forget how COVID-19 has impacted the future of the healthcare industry in an unprecedented way. In many ways, it has raised the bar on what we need to collectively deliver as an industry in the next era of healthcare. I want to thank the frontline healthcare workers, researchers, technologists, Microsoft partners, and other industry leaders who helped provide guidance on how we can best help the industry on its digital path forward. We believe to reimagine a new era of healthcare organizations need the agility to respond rapidly and predict what’s next, and that requires a new collective approach to providing better experiences, insights, and care for today and well into the future.

You can learn more about Microsoft and healthcare during these Microsoft Ignite sessions:

BK230: Get long-term benefit from health data with Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare

Ask the Experts: Get long-term benefits from health data with Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare

Customer Tech Talks: St. Luke’s University Healthcare Network

The post Reimagine a new era of healthcare at Microsoft Ignite 2021 and beyond appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs.

Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare continues our commitment to meet and support our customers through these evolving healthcare challenges. This industry-specific cloud provides trusted and integrated capabilities that makes it easier for organizations to create personalized patient experiences, gives health teams connected and secure collaboration tools, and adopts data standards that are important to healthcare. Organizations can use AI that combine multiple sources to give full visibility into data, relieve administrative burden, and improve process and workflow automation to create actionable insights that can help deliver better care faster and at a lower cost. Our extensive ecosystem of healthcare partners are dedicated to serving customers by helping provide more integrated healthcare solutions that extend the core capabilities across the continuum of care and identify new opportunities for innovation.

Today, I’m pleased to share more about new updates to Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare, that address some of the real-world needs for healthcare organizations and our partners.

Enhancing patient engagement

Recently announced healthcare frontline worker and patient enhancements to Microsoft Teams are designed to help enhance the patient experience and improve care coordination. Prior to an appointment, schedulers can streamline virtual visits by securing patient info before appointments with Microsoft Forms integrated into Bookings. As patients are ready to join a virtual visit from a mobile device, they aren’t prompted to download Teams. Teams will now open in a mobile browser without the need to install an app.

The new Waiting Room in Microsoft Teams, now available in preview, ensures every patient feels welcome with virtual waiting rooms designed with the organization’s logo, personalized messaging, and real-time visit notifications. Frontline workers can preview all their virtual visits in one simplified location—with real-time updates on patient wait times, missed appointments, staffing delays, and more. Providers can also send SMS and email reminders directly from the queue view to keep patients up to date.

Empowering frontline healthcare workers and patients

In a post-pandemic world, where quarantining and social distancing may no longer be the norm, the next chapter of healthcare delivery will not treat virtual health as a separate system, but as part of a broader omnichannel healthcare delivery model that balances virtual and in-person care. Gartner predicts, by 2022, 30 percent of outpatient encounters will be virtual, representing 15 percent of revenue, and making the effectiveness of this new care setting a leading strategic objective for healthcare delivery organizations (HDOs).¹

Healthcare systems using an omnichannel approach are adjusting the way they triage, evaluate, and care for patients using methods that do not rely on in-person services. We continue to see a tremendous long-term benefit for virtual patient experiences. Whether it’s enabling a virtual assistant with Azure Health Bot’s built-in medical triage and symptom checker, a virtual visit between a frontline healthcare worker and a patient, or physicians collaborating on a patient case—virtual visits are here to stay.

One of our goals is to make the lives of frontline workers and customers easier. For those that are scheduling or conducting virtual visits in healthcare, this experience is now becoming much more integrated into their existing workflows. With the Microsoft Teams EHR connector, patients and providers can currently launch virtual visits from within the Epic electronic health record system patient or provider portals.

Today, we are very excited to extend our electronic health record connection to include the Cerner EHR for multi-participant virtual visits (in private preview). Patients can launch virtual visits from the patient portal or SMS, with no app download required. Healthcare providers can launch visits from Cerner PowerChart™, and system administrations can easily manage and configure the EHR integration and have access to downloadable consumption reports.

To help connect and engage healthcare workers and empower them to adapt to a dynamic healthcare market, we’re also excited to announce new waiting room, queueing, and SMS features for virtual visits. Learn more these new features and see them in action through this blog post.

Improvements to data capabilities

Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare introduces capabilities built on top of the secure, compliant Microsoft Cloud that offers healthcare organizations the scale and performance needed for managing industry-specific workflows, accelerating access to data insights and unifying data governance that helps healthcare organizations manage and govern their data, wherever it resides.

During this current release, the Healthcare Data Model is now generally available to download for our partners and customers and is designed to support healthcare organizations with the ability to better model health and operational data in Microsoft Dataverse. It eases interoperability and helps unify data to enable organizations to define and customize business processes and workflows to manage clinical communications, appointments, patient encounters and care plans for care team coordination. You can read more about the recent release and updates for improving data capabilities through this blog post.

Putting patients at the center of care

The patient is at the center for many healthcare processes. Getting the full 360-degree view is essential for good quality care. Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare now offers an enhanced unified patient view which allows providers to see relevant information faster through better visualizations in the patient form. Additional enhancements for care management allow a provider to leverage the patient record to learn more about their situation, conditions, or needs. One patient might be linked to multiple or groups of patients. This improved functionality in Patient Insights helps care managers associate one patient record with other patient records and easily navigate between them for faster access to meaningful patient group information.

To broaden availability of the cloud offerings beyond the United States, customers will now be able to install solutions in United Kingdom, Canada, Germany France, Europe, Asia Pacific, and Australia with solutions now being available in French, German, and Dutch.

As the next generation of patient care, frontline healthcare worker collaboration and virtual health efforts accelerate globally, unlocking the full value of an organization’s data is the new linchpin in positive patient outcomes. Explore the latest updates for Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare by joining Microsoft’s Chief Medical Officer, Dr. David Rhew on Tuesday, October 19, 2021 at 12:15 PM ET at HLTH 2021 in Boston, or explore these blogs to learn how the connection between patients, care teams, and data is fundamental to delivering better experiences, insights, and care.

Explore blogs:

Three ways to support frontline workers in a hybrid world

Improving patient engagement and more in the latest Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare update

References:

1. Over 100 Data and Analytics Predictions Through 2025, Gartner, March 2021.

The post Enable the next generation of patient care with Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs.

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

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

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

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

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

Connecting data to care transformation

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

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

End to end pipelines for managing PHI in the cloud

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

Transforming healthcare through virtual health

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

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

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

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

Connect with us at HIMSS Digital 2021

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

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

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

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

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

2020 was the year that challenged healthcare professionals to learn, adapt, and grow as they cared for patients through the COVID-19 pandemic. The concepts of quarantine and social distancing became commonplace, as virtual health and remote patient monitoring usage grew exponentially, operational limits stretched, and care collaboration became more important than ever.

Fast forward to our current state during the COVID-19 pandemic and improving the pace of vaccine distribution. We have some of the same obstacles, and constant change has become normal. It has shown us what the healthcare community is capable of, although the current level of disruption and energy is not sustainable for the long term. It has proven that organizations—both big and small—can be adaptable and resilient. In response, we have accelerated our efforts to support and co-innovate with customers and partners to support you now and into the future. Last fall, we announced the general availability of Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare, and today, we are announcing the first update will be available in April, including new features for virtual health, care collaboration, and care coordination.

Enhancing patient engagement

Virtual health has helped expand access to care at a time when the pandemic has restricted patients’ ability to see their doctors. This requires providers to think about ways to improve patient experiences, enhance care management workflows, and ensure secure health information exchanges. We’re introducing new Microsoft Dynamics 365 patient access features to streamline virtual experience for patients by allowing more flexibility in self-scheduling both virtual and in-person appointments through their existing patient portal and integrating virtual health assistants, like the Azure Health Bot service, for triaging, scheduling, and making it seamless to receive follow-up and wellness guidance from their care team.

Microsoft Teams empowers clinicians and patients to schedule and launch virtual visits in Teams or ​from within the Epic EHR*. Teams integrates into already existing workflows to improve collaboration while protecting sensitive patient information. During virtual clinic visits, physicians and caregivers can use Dynamics 365 patient insights to see a holistic, 360-degree view of their patients’ care plans without having to bounce between multiple systems to gather relevant patient information. Now physicians can see what appointments are scheduled and who’s waiting in their virtual clinic patient queue. This allows physicians to seamlessly move to their next patient visit and have all the respective patient data ready at their fingertips.

With the expertise of Microsoft partner Avtex, Mary Washington Health System is deploying a solution built on Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare that connects providers with patients who have canceled or deferred elective procedures, helping them reach patients digitally, more effectively than with traditional marketing campaigns. These improved consumer-integrated conveniences and highly secure access to care can help create a more efficient healthcare system, empower patients to take a more active role in their healthcare, and lead to better patient experiences.

Empowering health team collaboration

New models for virtual care can also lead to engaging with broader areas of the healthcare system. Health organizations can offer new care services for delivering a large portion of non-urgent office visits virtually or embedding virtual services in home care models.

Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare is helping clinicians stay connected across the health system, and to their patients by offering new home health care plan management features. We’re providing robust functionality in Dynamics 365 care management features that allow care managers to develop and follow-through on care plan activities and goals, set timeline views of the patient care plans, and improve workflow efficiency with the ability to view clinical events sequentially to discern the best next step in care and avoid costly duplication. Virtual home health features enhance patient and caregiver experiences, extend the reach of care providers, and improve care coordination and collaboration within the broader team. Care coordinators can enable integrated access between physicians, care managers, and at-home caregivers to deploy digital coaching or care plan navigation tools tailored to patient needs. Inside the health organization, Microsoft Teams provides a highly secure care collaboration channel to providers, care managers, and others involved in their care.

These new expansions in Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare make home care delivery more seamless for all involved. We are excited to see the impact as our healthcare customers and partners put them to use.

“Best Buy Health is able to deliver on its mission to help enrich and save lives through technology and meaningful connections by taking a digital-first approach to home healthcare. Using its unique assets, including Best Buy stores, caring centers, technology products including Lively devices, and virtual care capabilities, Best Buy Health supports care delivery in the home and provides independence and safety for active aging adults and people living with chronic conditions. Its partnership with Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare helps power these healthcare offerings, resulting in more personalized care, better virtual health opportunities and deeper patient insights, by using Power Platform, Dynamics 365, and Azure API for FHIR,” President of Best Buy Health, Deborah DiSanzo.

Improving clinical and operational analytics

Expanding access to care through virtual capabilities also means health organizations should reinforce the data and analytics foundation that will be required to achieve the full potential of virtual health. When you build an architecture in Azure—you now have a connected cloud for healthcare scenarios—tools are specifically designed to support data exchange with Azure API for FHIR, tools built to meet the requirements that health organizations need in the health care industry for GDPR, HITRUST, CCPA, and HIPAA, and we’re building that connectivity into our Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare tools so our health customers don’t have to spend cycles thinking about interoperability. Azure services widely support the healthcare common data model as the foundation for our business, workflow, and data and AI workflows. This sets us apart from other technology providers and offers our customers an easy way to accelerate their transformation by offering pre-built connectors and creating rich, 360-degree patient views for deep clinical and operational insights.

Successful adaptability and sustainability require strong tech partnerships

Embracing the power of digital, along with the power of human innovation and strategic partnerships can help support the continuity and stability of public health and safety in every country as the world works to address the pandemic and prepare for future public health risks. Our partner ecosystem continues to build and extend the capabilities of Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare creating new solutions to help healthcare providers connect digitally with patients, improve care collaboration, and customize to meet the needs of every healthcare customer.

As your partner and trusted advisor, we’re applying a digital-first-responder mindset to ensure we’re doing our part to help the global community address this historic challenge. Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare is designed to address that need—enabling your organization to be adaptable and agile during the changing environment while building resiliency that helps you weather today’s challenges and into the future.

Watch our Microsoft Ignite Digital Breakout Session #FS188 on March 2, 2021, to learn more about our latest feature updates for Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare. Visit Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare to view demos and stay updated.

* Support for other EHR systems coming soon

The post Building resilient models of care with new Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare features appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs.

COVID-19 has accelerated the transformation of the healthcare industry and how healthcare is delivered for the foreseeable future. Healthcare leaders and frontline workers have been the catalyst to reveal areas that could improve the resilience of the system. Some of these opportunities include ways to improve care access, expand critical care, support the well-being of their workforce, and keep clinicians safe as they help patients with the virus. Today Microsoft continues to work with our healthcare customers and partners to set a course for recovery and resiliency in an ever-changing environment and I’m excited to share Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare is now generally available.

Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare provides trusted and integrated capabilities that deliver automation and efficiency on high-value workflows as well as deep data analysis functionality for both structured and unstructured data, that enable healthcare organizations to turn insight into action. This end-to-end, industry-specific cloud solution includes released and new healthcare capabilities that unlock the power of Microsoft 365, Azure, Dynamics 365, and Power Platform. It makes it faster and easier to provide more efficient care and helps customers support end-to-end security, compliance, and interoperability of health data. A robust partner ecosystem extends the value of the platform with additional solutions to address the most urgent challenges the healthcare industry is facing today. 

“At Providence, our vision of health for a better world drives us to continuously innovate on behalf of our caregivers and patients. As part of our journey to simplify, modernize and innovate across our technology ecosystem, we are proud to have not only adopted but also to have contributed to the development of key capabilities of the Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare. By bringing together the right technology and data at the point of care – along with powerful solutions such as machine learning and artificial intelligence – we are empowering clinicians on the front lines. And as the first health system in the U.S. to treat COVID-19, this has made a critical difference in Providence’s ability to respond rapidly to the pandemic. Going forward, we are excited about how these innovations will further ease the way of our caregivers so they can better serve our patients and extend our healing mission to more people in need.” BJ Moore, Executive Vice President and CIO of Providence.  

Enhance patient engagement

We worked closely with our customers to develop a set of capabilities to help patients interact directly with health teams and simplify routine tasks for better patient satisfaction and care transparency.  

Patients’ demand for personalized care continues to evolve. They’re actively seeking digital health tools that allow them to be seen by their provider without leaving their homes. This evolution of engaged patient care will mean the proliferation of virtual health and services to deliver preventative, ongoing care management, and individualized patient programs that help promote better health and wellness outcomes. Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare helps healthcare organizations integrate secure virtual health capabilities by creating workflow cohesive artificial intelligence (AI) health bots and virtual visits into the care journey and helps expand services to more patient encounters and new medical specialties. 

Facilitating patient access to secure portals and mobile tools to help them interact directly with health teams, and simplify routine tasks, will help your organization deliver higher levels of patient satisfaction and care transparency. Patient insights help you create a patient-centric lens of transactional, observational, and behavioral patient data to rapidly analyze data unique to each case, optimize the patient experience, and enable collaborative care management across both digital and human-assisted channels, anywhere, anytime.  

Empower health team collaboration

Care teams need to be able to connect with patients, increase communication and collaborate more efficiently in a secure, real-time environment to address issues from single-patient monitoring through pandemic-level crises that necessitate a broader reach and level of interaction. Building a 360-degree patient view helps care teams understand the patient’s needs, enabling faster decision support and actioning across care teams. The capabilities under care coordination help teams manage patient care activities and share information among all participants involved in the patient’s ongoing care.  

Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare helps empower teams to collaborate and share knowledge in a single secure place, with advanced messaging features including priority notifications, smart camera, and message delegation. Health teams can use data integrated across clinical systems, applications, and electronic health records to help accelerate treatment decisions and improve patient care. Communicating the right information, at the right time, to the right people enables faster decision support and actioning across care teams, and simplifies complex workflow management (e.g., bed management, patient discharge, equipment, and staffing).  

Whether in-facility, or through at-home medical care, extending patient care beyond the hospital walls through continuous remote monitoring helps your organization reduce re-admissions, and provide new modalities of care. Using IoT and AI, healthcare organizations can generate secure health data monitoring for patients in recovery, rehabilitation, or find ways to help support patients with disabilities or managing chronic diseases.  

Improve clinical and operational data insights

Healthcare organizations continue to face a variety of challenges with their data. There is a virtual explosion in the amount of collected information, fragmentation of data and formats across providers and care teams, spiraling cost escalation, and a shortage of staff and resources to keep up with the workload.

However, with technology rapidly changing and growing, adopting it may seem like a daunting prospect for many healthcare organizations that also need to follow compliance regulations and ensure data security. The good news is that it is possible to achieve HIPAA compliance while also implementing cloud technologies to store and utilize health data to make smarter decisions. 

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

Once healthcare organizations have their data in the cloud a host of data analytics tools become available for analyzing and mobilizing your clinical and operational data for reporting, real-time assessment, and ongoing quality improvement. When organizations deploy AI-driven predictive analytics for data modeling, risk assessment, and decision support they can extend patient data with financial, operational, and medical device information to leverage insights for faster decision–making across the entire care journey. 

Partnering to support connected experiences across healthcare workflows

Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare enables healthcare systems to take advantage of our robust ecosystem of healthcare partners who can provide solutions that complement and extend core cloud capabilities. Using these partners’ expertise will help organizations through EHR and platform integrations, implementation services, and healthcare SaaS offerings.  

For the last several years, Microsoft has worked with leading Independent Software Vendors (ISV) and System Integrator (SI) partners to help innovate on the cloud. Our partners are now ready to evaluate, extend, and build innovative solutions for healthcare organizations that need to create more responsive, connected, and meaningful engagement with their patients, care teams, and their communities.  

Healthcare organizations’ missions are about ensuring the health and well-being of individuals, families, and communities. Their scope of responsibility is wide-ranging and varies from country to country, and they are required to provide healthcare services to their citizens, including crisis response, disease prevention, and wellness services. The rise of technology-driven innovation may improve healthcare organization’s ability to transform their care ecosystem to deliver more convenient, integrated care to consumers, enhance productivity of providers, and improve outcomes while lowering cost. 

Today’s launch is just the beginning. Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare will release regular updates and we will continue to build and extend cloud capabilities for healthcare payors, providers, pharmaceutical, and medical device companies. Our continued goal is empowering global healthcare organizations to find connected, innovative ways to create better experiences, insights, and care. Visit Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare to explore the capabilities, see demos, and hear more from our customers.  

The post Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare is transforming the healthcare journey appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs.

It’s always exciting to attend an event like HLTH! A time to come together with other healthcare innovators as a community to connect with peers, share, and learn from each other. It’s an opportunity to get a pulse on what’s trending and how we shape the future of healthcare. It’s an opportunity to get a pulse on what’s trending and how we shape the future of healthcare.  I encourage you to watch HLTH sessions on-demand at HLTH 2020.

But 2020 has been a year of dynamic change—The world after this pandemic will not be the same as the one that came before it. From remote teamwork and telehealth, to supply management and customer service, to critical cloud infrastructure and security—we are working alongside customers every day to help manage through a world of remote everything.

The whole of the healthcare industry has been impacted by COVID-19 in an unprecedented way. It’s had a substantial impact, and in many ways, it has raised the bar on what we need to collectively deliver as an industry.

We all have the potential to deliver a personalized experience for health consumers, empower health team productivity, improve health data accessibility, and find ways to remove the barriers of health equity and affordability. Across the healthcare ecosystem, we’re seeing organizations bring together compute, data, and artificial intelligence (AI) to help accelerate the response to COVID-19. From diagnostic testing to therapeutics and vaccines. Healthcare providers are triaging patients with our Healthcare Bot service, helping more than 40 million people to access critical healthcare information. Biotech organizations are using our machine learning capabilities to decode the immune system response to the virus, and healthcare providers and hospitals around the world are using FHIR technology in Azure to make data available for research, provide more robust treatment assessments, and deliver first-class telehealth experiences to their patients.

Technology has played an important role in helping to battle the pandemic, and Microsoft will continue to lean in to support efforts where technology can make a difference today and beyond.

Leading through COVID-19 response and recovery

During their HLTH keynote, Microsoft’s own Kurt DelBene EVP, Corporate Strategy, and Toni Townes Whitley, President US Regulated Industries, along with Dr. Nicole Fisher, President, Health and Human Rights Strategies, Global Health and Policy Contributor, Forbes, shared their insights and initiatives that are helping Microsoft employees, customers and partners through the pandemic.

In these types of situations, we must be ready to learn together. Over the past several years one of the hallmarks of our culture has been a learning organization. This is incredibly important as we focus on our employees and our customers. We became digital-first responders supporting customers and partners by leaning in, learning and helping organizations adapt to the disruption, and build scalable modalities of care while safeguarding patients, employees, and assets. From remote teamwork and telehealth, to supply chain management and customer service, to critical cloud infrastructure and security, we are working alongside customers every day to help manage through a world of remote everything.

Our commitment has always been to ensure the tools we provide are up to the task of supporting our customers in their time of need. In that same spirit, we announced our first industry-specific cloud offering, Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare. The offer brings together existing and future capabilities that deliver automation and efficiency on high-value workflows, as well as deep data analytics for both structured and unstructured data, that enable customers to turn insight into action. A robust partner ecosystem extends the value of the platform with additional solutions to address the most pressing challenges the healthcare industry is facing today. In September, we announced the general availability of Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare coming on October 28, 2020. Throughout the public preview, we’ve been working closely with customers and partners across the healthcare ecosystem on key use cases, to facilitate integrations into existing platforms and systems of record, to streamline their workflows, and ultimately deliver better experiences, insights, and care.  

At Microsoft, we will continue to focus on helping everyone get back to their places of work or school, and enabling organizations with the speed and agility to adjust to change, build resiliency that help them weather today’s challenges so they can begin to reimagine tomorrow. 

Reshaping the future of disease diagnostic

Julie Rubinstein, President of Adaptive Biotechnologies, and Dr. Greg Moore, Microsoft CVP of Health, highlighted the unreleased insights from the growing and largest ImmuneCODE database in their announcement session, “T-cells: The key to SARS-CoV-2 immunity?” ImmuneCODE is one of the largest, most detailed views of the immune response to COVID-19 based on de-identified data generated from thousands of COVID-19 blood samples from patients around the globe. This new data points to T-cells giving us predictive power for early detection and predetermining the body’s immune response.

This is reshaping the future of disease diagnostic with Azure machine learning and AI. Microsoft took the existing partnership with Adaptive and pivoted to use the same technology and antigen mapping and apply it to COVID-19. Recognizing that this approach to the virus is one of a kind, looking at T-cells for the answer for early detection, immune response individual to individual, and for therapeutics and vaccines to determine the best course of action for each patient. Information from ImmuneCODE will continue to accelerate ongoing global efforts to develop better diagnostics, vaccines, and therapeutics for COVID-19. For more information on how to join or get involved in the Adaptive and Microsoft collaboration, check out, ImmuneRace.

Accessibility as a tech opportunity

With the unprecedented shift to a virtual world, it has never been more important to be accessible and inclusive of more than one billion people worldwide with a disability.

October marks the 75th anniversary of the National Disability Employment Awareness Month (NDEAM). Jenny Lay-Flurrie, Chief Accessibility Officer at Microsoft, talked about her own personal journey and gives us a peek into the evolution of accessibility across companies, education, and healthcare.   

At Microsoft, we’re making accessibility a core part of our culture and how we design and build our products. People with disabilities have been the catalyst for innovations that have been critical during these times. Live Captions in Teams saw 30X growth in April versus February, Immersive Reader had a 560 percent increase in use, and upcoming wellbeing features in Teams responded to the growing importance of mental health.

Disability is a strength. All these technologies have been powered by insight from employees with disabilities. It’s one of the many reasons why our workforce must reflect the diversity of everyone who uses our technology. You might be surprised what is included as a disability, the majority of disabilities are invisible and include non-apparent conditions such as Cancer, Dyslexia, Autism, Depression, Anxiety, Diabetes, Asthma, and Lupus.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is one of those technologies that can help employers eliminate barriers to employment and it can help people with disabilities develop professional skills and influence workplace culture. Microsoft is an advocate of people with disabilities, committed to influencing the future of technology to ensure global independence and inclusion in society in three areas of focus: employment, daily life, communication, and connection. Read more about AI for Accessibility or our AI for Accessibility grants.

Ethical approaches to AI

Given the global scale of the pandemic, technology will play a critical role in nearly every facet of addressing COVID-19, from using AI to crunch massive datasets to analyzing disease vectors and identifying treatment impacts. We continue to collaborate with nonprofits, governments, and academic researchers on solutions, and bring our experience to the table, providing access to Microsoft AI, technical experts, data scientists, and other resources.

During the early days of the pandemic, a heightened public concern along with a readily transmissible respiratory pathogen necessitated that health systems adjust their underlying processes for screening and triage. Providence, a large multi-state multi-hospital health system with a significant presence in the greater Seattle region, applied an artificial intelligence (AI)-based chatbot technology, developed by Microsoft, to address the rising patient concerns about the virus.

By asking a series of questions based on the latest Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) guidelines, the chatbot screened patients for COVID-19 symptoms and/or exposures. Patients with symptoms and/or exposures were subsequently directed to Providence’s telehealth portal for clinical evaluation and possible testing. The bot was facilitating successful and efficient population-level care coordination. This enabled high-risk and/or symptomatic patients to receive a timely remote clinical evaluation, without increasing the risk of virus transmission to other patients or extending the wait-times for those with symptoms.

Since then, Microsoft has delivered the same chatbot technology for hospitals and governments across the globe. Today, more than 45 million people globally have been using this AI-enabled bot technology.

We all know every person is unique, and so are their illnesses. AI enables an entirely new level of personalized treatment by taking into consideration what makes a patient unique, from their genetics to their lifestyle. Precision medicine has the potential to radically improve health and longevity for every patient. This is an inflection point where the healthcare industry has an opportunity to improve the quality and delivery of care by taking a people-centered approach to the research, development, and deployment of AI. To achieve this, as an industry we need to embrace diverse perspectives, continuous learning, and agile responsiveness as AI technology and precision medicine continue to evolve.

But it’s also important healthcare organizations cultivate a responsible AI-ready culture throughout their businesses and put principles into place from implementation to governance with practices, tools, and technologies built on multidisciplinary research, shared learning, and leading innovation. Learn more about Microsoft’s commitment to responsible AI.

It’s a pivotal time to be working in healthcare and HLTH proved it. If you didn’t attend any of the live sessions, I’d encourage you to watch HLTH sessions on-demand at HLTH 2020.  And I look forward to seeing all of you at the HLTH 2021 event, where we are sure to gain a whole new set of insights and inspirations for a bold path forward.  

Visit Microsoft for Healthcare to learn about our perspective for healthcare organizations and the opportunity to see more information about the new Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare solution. 

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