June 28, 2018
Dive
Brief:
- Microsoft
this week announced expansion plans into healthcare with the formation of
a new unit, Microsoft Healthcare. Jim Weinstein and Joshua
Mandel will join the company as VP and Chief Architect of the team,
respectively.
- Microsoft
Healthcare formalizes the company’s Healthcare NExT initiative, launched last year,
to advance artificial intelligence and cloud-based healthcare tools.
- The new team will integrate
Healthcare NExT’s research focus “with an added focus of creating
strategic partnerships, and driving the cross-company strategy for
healthcare and life sciences,” Peter Lee, corporate vice president of
Microsoft’s AI & Research division, wrote in a blog post.
Dive
Insight:
Microsoft
has been playing in the healthcare waters for some time now. Since wading into
the wearables market in 2014, the company has teamed up with Twist BioScience on
the capabilities of DNA digital data storage, partnered with UPMC to
create innovative AI-enabled care delivery products and collaborated with Cigna to
leverage Microsoft’s HoloLens technology for interactive game-based health
screenings.
As
healthcare’s digital transformation continues, many organizations are looking
to the cloud to modernize their IT infrastructures, EHRs and data analytics
capabilities to foster value-based care. Microsoft Healthcare stated it will
draw on the company’s AI and the cloud expertise to create products that tackle
those goals.
The
new unit — which will be part of AI & Research — will get help from two
industry pros in Weinstein and Mandel. Weinstein, who joins Microsoft as vice
president of Microsoft Healthcare and head of innovation and health equity, was
previously CEO and president of Dartmouth-Hitchcock healthcare system. He will
work with Lee on Microsoft’s healthcare strategy.
Mandel,
who last led Alphabet life sciences division Verily’s health IT ecosystems
work, will serve as chief architect of Microsoft Healthcare. As such, he “will
work closely with customers, partners and the open standards community to lay
the groundwork for an open cloud architecture to unlock the value of healthcare
for the entire health ecosystem,” Lee said.
“We
are taking concrete steps with an initial ‘blueprint’ intended to standardize
the process for the compliant, privacy-preserving movement of a patient’s
personal health information to the cloud and the automated tracking of its
exposure to machine learning and data science, for example to support external
audit,” Lee wrote.
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