Providing coordinated, high-quality care is both facilitated and in some ways complicated by a number of technological trends that are changing the ways many healthcare organizations operate, including:An Explosion of Data: When I said earlier that most organizations don’t have a clear picture of their patients, it’s not for a lack of information. Today, healthcare organizations are awash with data. What’s worse, it comes wrapped in layers of complex regulations and stringent federal and state regulations (Ex: HIPAA, HITECH Act (US), EU Model Clauses (Europe)). Collecting data is not the problem; it's the ability to process, store and interpret significant amounts of information that is one of today's most important technological drivers in health.Cloud Computing: Cloud computing is the delivery of IT infrastructure assets over the Internet on a utility basis. Increasing numbers of health organizations are investing in on-premise, cloud, or hybrid solutions to help address their current computing needs, while providing a sustainable path to the future.Bring your own device: Doctors generally prefer to use the technology with which they are most comfortable. The Bring Your Device trend–in which employees use unsupported, personally owned technology in the workplace—makes this tendency particularly significant for healthcare IT. Healthcare providers are now faced with balancing security in a non-homogenous information technology environment while supporting the different communication needs of workers across an organization. Tablets and new mobility scenarios are now possible in healthcare.In response to recent healthcare reform initiatives, organizations are leveraging one or more of these trends for data coding, the transmission of data, improved security, quality measurement, safety reporting, electronic health record implementation, meaningful use, accountability, and transparency. In countries like the United States, major facets of the healthcare industry are being reshapedand new financial incentives favor organizations that practice a more integrated approach to patient care.
We all strive to achieve better care and better outcomes for more people. It’s a shared goal, and Microsoft works every day with health organizations, communities, and partners around the world to help realize it. We assist by bringing together people, processes, and information to support better-informed decisions and greater collaboration. Our solutions—some designed specifically for health and others well-known to people everywhere—are intuitive and powerful, delivering excellent value. They work well with customers’ current systems and approaches, and they also provide new capabilities to help people advance research, management, and care.Currently we are focused with our partners on these areas:Flexible WorkstyleProductivityAnalyticsInnovation
Real impact can only be delivered through real innovation. From the advances in Bring Your Own Device through to cloud platforms for the enterprise, we have the most comprehensive set of tools that embraces both the consumer and the business arena to maximize on the technological paradigm shifts we discussed earlier.Our ongoing commitment to the consumer market helps us deliver a better technology experience for your users by understanding how they want to use technology and evolving how they interact with computing:Natural User Interface. Kinect for Xbox 360 is revolutionizing gaming today and has huge possibilities to revolutionize computing for health organizations, and we’re already seeing innovative uses in health. While touch-based interfaces are all the rage today, we believe that gesture-based and speech-based computing are the future.Big Data. We talked earlier about the explosion of digital information. Our consumer experience with web search is helping us dramatically improve enterprise search capabilities as well, which organizations can use toward collecting and analyzing population health information and disaster response.Devices. We’ve made a deep investment to re-enter the smartphone market with a phone that delivers an experience that your users will love and the business capabilities they need. Windows® Phone 8 makes it easy to do everything from managing personal and professional contacts, calendar, and email, to interacting with friends and peers over social networks, to accessing and editing documents stored on Microsoft SharePoint® sites. We are seeing an emergence of tele-medicine using Windows Phone 8 and other telecommunication devices.Research. Microsoft invests over US$9M per year in research. Our smart technologies have opened the door for numerous health applications, ranging from Cyberchondria analysis, Bayesian Triage, computer-aided diagnostics (Twitter analysis for depression), ER wait-time predictor (or readmissions manager) to home monitoring and sensing.Our approach is fundamentally unique. We’re not just workplace or consumer, we’re not just on-premises or cloud, and we’re not just the data center, the PC, or the phone. We’re all of it.