Healthcare breakthroughs powered by digital
Many of you might be familiar with Becton-Dickinson. For over 100 years, Becton-Dickinson (BD) has been one of the top global manufacturers of syringes and other injection devices. Chances are if you’ve had your blood drawn, it was probably with a Becton-Dickinson device. You might not know that the company of 40,000 associates is also a leader in Diabetes Care with Insulin delivery, Medication Management, Microbial Diagnostics Systems, Molecular Diagnostics, Biosciences and is also active in fighting anti-microbial resistance, cancer research/detection and HIV/AIDS prevention.
I’m Phil Eng, a Microsoft Senior Digital Advisor. Microsoft Digital Advisory Services is a team within Microsoft Services. Digital Advisors around the world partner with customers on their Digital Transformation, and our website can be found here.
We were invited by Becton-Dickinson to work with them on a business challenge they were facing. They wanted to stay relevant through industry regulation, changes in healthcare, and rapid technological advancements. “The impending health care transformation to value-based care requires connectivity of the diagnostics and the connectivity of the therapeutics, and tying those two together,” said David Feygin, VP of Health IT Innovation and Integration at the time.
Looking for ways Becton-Dickinson could digitally transform their footprint in the industry, we pushed them even further by asking, “How can we transform Becton-Dickinson into a healthcare leader?” We began working with their HIT Innovation team by kicking off an exploration and envisioning exercise focused on how Azure could bring their IoT strategy of connected medical devices to life. By concentrating on Becton-Dickinson’s business context and the threats to their business model, he led implementation of an Agile and FDA-compliant design on Azure using DevOps. Rather than creating new hardware and datacenters, Becton-Dickinson could transform the hardware they were already manufacturing through cloud connectivity. The flow of data from these devices can now drive health decisions that improve customer outcomes.
David described this innovation as a large cultural shift. “You’re going from a product development life cycle that’s 20 years long to a software development life cycle that might be two years long.”
The project evolved over time. In mid-2015, another Digital Advisor, Ravi Mundhe joined the Innovation team to drive the Becton-Dickinson connected device strategy- just as the Becton Dickinson team was preparing to evangelize their connected device strategy at the HIMSS conference in Las Vegas. Together, Ravi and the Becton-Dickinson team spoke with healthcare professionals, clinicians, executives and IT professionals, evangelizing the next-generation Azure cloud application we had helped them build.
Read the full Becton-Dickinson case study here. For those of you that will be at HIMSS 2017, Microsoft and a group of Digital Advisors will be there at booth 2509.
