Microsoft’s new cloud service to streamline operations in patient care

Responding to the increased demand for simple, effective, and secure digital health solutions that allow healthcare providers to effectively communicate with and manage the health of their patients, Microsoft is launching its Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare.

By standardising data from different systems, providers are able to obtain enhanced insights into their patient’s health data with ease – all gathered from various medical devices, apps, and other healthcare environments.

The new platform gives healthcare providers tools to ‘improve data interoperability, workflow efficiency, and streamline interactions’, said Microsoft’s Worldwide Health Corporate Vice-President Tom McGuiness. And the service will also support home healthcare and telehealth visits through Microsoft Teams or from the EHR, beginning with Epic's patient and provider portals.

Better patient engagement to improve healthcare outcomes

Microsoft’s new cloud-based platform will also increase patient centricity – often touted as an important factor in increasing patient engagement and improving overall health outcomes.

“Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare will allow patients to build a 360-degree patient view while easily leveraging protected health data using FHIR, IoT, EHR and other applications to drive data-driven decisions, accelerate responses, and improve patient care,” Microsoft said. The firm added that the new platform would also ‘drive greater outcomes across providers, payers, pharma and med-tech organisations’.

Indeed, Hospitals & Healthcare predicts that the interoperability for cloud-based systems that this new offering brings will prove to be an important milestone in improving the management of patient care, especially if it can successfully combine data from different healthcare systems. What’s more, the collaboration that it will encourage across providers will greatly enhance the capabilities of international medical case management, which will, in turn, improve operations for international assistance providers.

Microsoft’s new offering certainly looks likely to enhance the remote patient monitoring sphere – and this is something that both payers and providers can benefit from.