Reimagine, Redesign and Transform Healthcare

The pandemic tested many facets of our old world and illustrated the scope and speed of change that was possible. Our providers were pushed to work harder than before, innovate faster, collaborate, and be resilient at an unprecedented pace for the pandemic. What could have taken months, took days as healthcare organizations, governments and solutions providers joined forces to respond. This act will be remembered in history on how our front-liners responded heroically, how the world collaborated and the pivotal moment of digital transformation for the Healthcare industry.

From the outset of the pandemic, healthcare organization implemented transformation initiatives such as Telehealth, Patient management, Case coordination, health screening, diagnostics automation and so on at a pace and scale that was unimaginable months ago. Public health organizations and governments, leveraged platforms and tools to help connect the dots and make real-time informed decisions on lockdown measures, resource utilization and capacity needs. Multi-organization partnerships and research collaborations led indispensable modelling efforts to predict the course of the outbreak and identify the high-risk profiles to support resource allocations and coordinated response. At Microsoft, we operated as the digital first responders to our first responders. Globally, the response efforts are at full swing.

As we look back, an important takeaway from the pandemic was resilient digital-first operations and healthcare services. Presently, Healthcare systems are experiencing a financial stress as elective procedures are cancelled, and outpatient volume drop. At the same time providers need to cater to investments in improving isolation strategies and emergency medical equipment and supplies overall stretching the strain on our Providers. So, as we look forward it is important to evaluate the transformation levers that can support the healthcare systems to reform and emerge sustainably.  

What’s critical for Healthcare leaders today is how we reform healthcare for the future

A reform blending in the best of old world, embedding the COVID-19 initiatives and bringing in innovation to augment the healthcare transformation. Here are three key doses:

#ReimagingCareDelivery Taking care delivery to the edge at the home of the patients through Telehealth and remote patient monitoring solutions and including delivery of medications. In India, Fortis Healthcare has already embarked on this journey delivering #virtualconsult through #MicrosoftTeams. Patients are asked to share diagnostics and test reports securely before the appointment. Both consultation and prescription are completed digitally. 

#RedesigningOperations With short to mid-term cash crunch, Healthcare organizations will require to manage operations, workflows, resource demand and scheduling more efficiently through data insights. Microsoft’s newest releases that support FHIR technology enabled the Chicago Dept of Public Health (CDPH) and Rush Hospital with an end to end solution to bring together clinical, lab and capacity data analysis in just a few days to support the COVID-19 crisis. Singapore’s Zuellig Pharma developed online ordering(eZRx) and payment platforms(eZPay) to ensure business continuity at its 99-year old pharma business. This enabled it to serve customers across Singapore, Malaysia, and Philippines during the outbreak.

#TransformingHealthcare The world after this pandemic will not be the same as before. We have an opportunity to transform the way patients are engaged across the care continuum, empower our care teams with seamless workflows by breaking down the siloed systems and creating a single pane of glass for care coordination, and finally unlock powerful insights with limitless analytics that translates into concrete business and clinical decisions and actions, and trigger automated workflows and predictive analytics. We are already seeing providers making such strides. Recently announced, Providence St. Joseph Health, in partnership with Microsoft, will develop and deploy new health care technologies that will harness the power of Microsoft Azure and AI with clinical expertise to transform the care experience.

As we think of digital transformation, Security should be key focus. Microsoft recently launched 'Account Guard' to provide free cybersecurity services to medical institutions. The security services are designed to secure global health care facilities from cybersecurity, including all organizations that provide medical services, including hospitals, nursing facilities, clinics, and clinical laboratories, as well as human rights and humanitarian organizations.

To accelerate the transformation of our customers and the healthcare eco-system, Microsoft recently announced Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare that brings together trusted and integrated capabilities for customers and partners that enrich patient engagement and connects health teams to help improve collaboration, decision-making and operational efficiencies through automation and efficiency on high-value workflows and deep data analytics that transforms analysis into real time insights accelerating innovation. 

To optimize speed to market with these automation capabilities, we launched Microsoft Healthcare Bot service, a AI-powered virtual health assistants that can be used to enhance their processes, self-service, and cost reduction efforts. Within first three months,1600 bots were created that are serving 31M people across 23 countries. In a world where we have shortage of healthcare workers, organizations will need to explore these new ways of services in order to deliver care sustainably.

Aimed at catalyzing research through AI capabilities, Microsoft AI for Health funds are dedicated to help front-liners accelerate research in (1) treatment and diagnostics (2) allocation of critical medical resources (3) dissemination of accurate information; and (4) scientific research to fight COVID-19.

To know more about our initiatives, visit the Microsoft Healthcare Summit where you can hear from our executives, partners and customers on ideas that are transforming healthcare.

We also bring to you in coming days, #ReimagineHealthcare, a curation of digital forums and platform where we reimagine Healthcare in APAC with you! Join us for our upcoming #ReimagineDigitalSeries.

Let’s reimagine, redesign to transform healthcare for greater patient engagement and speed to breakthrough in medical research!