The new facility will be located close to Microsoft’s own headquarters, and it will contain designs and technologies out together by both partners designed to create the “hospital of the future”, PharmaPhorum reports. Providence’s 119,000 caregivers will begin using tools including Microsoft Teams and Dynamics 365 as part of the initiative.
The move means another major player is hoping to get a chunk of the lucrative for-profit U.S. healthcare market, after Apple, Amazon and Google’s forays into different forms of healthcare technology. This ranges from deploying cloud computing and big data analytics to support clinical trials and creating new types of medical devices to capture health-related data.
Amazon has also entered talks with supporting healthcare provision directly, working with JP Morgan and Berkshire Hathaway to improve the accessibility of healthcare in a project recently named “The Haven”. The project aims to improve the process of navigating the complex health-care system, and help patients access affordable treatments and prescription drugs.
The Microsoft effort includes shaping the healthcare software market. An earlier attempt was a product called Amalga, which was a health enterprise platform designed to retrieve and display patient information. The system was sold on to GE.
Microsoft has not given up on this topic and the company is working on new forms of electronic medical records systems, which will allow for healthcare data to be shared and also for patient information to be maintained securely. For this to happen improved connectivity within the hospital will be required. Successful e-records for healthcare will reduce time, unnecessary duplication of records and overcome instances where paper records become damaged or lost.
Other areas of focus include accelerating the adoption of the cloud and technologies to enable data-driven clinical and operational decision-making. A further aim is to integrate siloed data sources in a cloud environment, helping to share specialist knowledge across the hospital facility.
According to Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft: “Our ambition is to accelerate Providence St. Joseph Health’s digital transformation and to build new innovations together that are designed to improve health care delivery and outcomes.”
Microsoft also aims to help reduce healthcare costs, especially those incurred by major enterprises based in the Seattle area. The project overall could become bigger, given that Providence own hospitals in Washington and six other states.
