The healthcare industry’s leading minds are getting ready to educate, intrigue, and inspire attendees next week at the HIMSS19 conference—a leading healthcare IT event in the US. We expect to see many innovative ideas and solutions to the most prevalent and persistent challenges in modern health, and we are excited to show new technologies making a real difference in people’s lives and demonstrate Microsoft’s commitment to transforming how healthcare is experienced and delivered.
Over the last few years, we have been learning alongside industry experts and making steady progress in helping health organizations navigate complex technology transformations. We have been so pleased by the enthusiastic response of the providers, payors, software developers, device manufacturers and pharmaceutical companies we’ve been working with.
But what drives us most is the profound impact on people. As we all look for more personalized and transparent approaches for healthcare services, technology transformation will help providers deliver modern patient experiences that promote patient engagement, satisfaction, and well-being while increasing the chances of more successful treatment.
This year at HIMSS, we will talk about how Microsoft’s technology and partnerships are helping empower care teams, improve clinical and operational outcomes and advance precision healthcare, with a specific focus on putting people’s privacy at the center. To kick things off, today we’re announcing several new innovations supporting the industry’s transformation:
Empowering health organizations with secure messaging and AI-powered tools
People are at the heart of healthcare – physicians, nurses, clinicians and of course, their patients. We are committed to empowering care teams with the tools they need to deliver their best care as well as empowering people as they interact with various aspects of the healthcare system.
When it comes to secure communications, many clinicians report having to choose between convenience and compliance. Adhering to compliance has often meant having to wait for critical information at the point of care. Conversely, many clinicians have turned to consumer messaging apps that facilitate communication but can compromise security.
Microsoft is working hard to ensure convenience and compliance are no longer a zero-sum equation. Today, we are announcing new capabilities in Microsoft Teams, a secure hub for teamwork that enables secure messaging and collaboration workflows that tap the wealth of patient information housed in electronic medical records.
Enable secure workflows in Microsoft Teams: The new priority notifications feature in Teams alerts a recipient of an urgent message on their mobile and desktop devices until a response is received, every two minutes for up to 20 minutes; message delegation enables clinical staff members to delegate their messages to another recipient when they are in surgery or otherwise unavailable. We are also announcing the ability to integrate FHIR-enabled electronic health records (EHR) data with Teams. The ability to view EHR data is enabled through partnerships with leading interoperability providers, including Dapasoft, Datica, Infor Cloverleaf, Kno2 and Redox. Clinical or hospital staff can securely access patient records in the same app where they can take notes, message with other team members, and start a video meeting, all in a single place to coordinate care.
For health organizations looking to optimize operational processes or create new experiences for their people and patients, we are also announcing the Microsoft Healthcare Bot general availability.
Microsoft Healthcare Bot: The Microsoft Healthcare Bot service is now generally available after first being introduced as a research project in 2017. It is designed to empower healthcare organizations to build and deploy compliant, AI-powered virtual health assistants and chatbots, and includes important features like healthcare intelligence, medical content and terminology, and a built-in symptom checker. The Microsoft Healthcare Bot service is fully extensible to help organizations adjust the bot to solve their own business problems, and can connect to health systems, like EHRs. In addition to partners like Premera, today we are announcing bots available, or available soon, from Quest Diagnostics, Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta and Clalit Health Services.
Securely connecting data for better clinical and operational outcomes
Our bodies are a lot like complex computers, and each interaction with today’s health system creates a new data point. These data points are often spread across multiple records, with valuable insights somewhat hidden in siloes. Microsoft is committed to helping address this opportunity by developing technology that connects data and surfaces important insights at exactly the right time, with privacy and security at the core.
A better-connected healthcare system would provide clinicians with more complete profiles of their patients, researchers with more complete data to study, and individuals with more information to take ownership over their health. I hear this often from leading experts in the research and care delivery communities.
With this in mind, today we’re announcing the Azure API for FHIR, a tool to help health organizations better connect systems and harness the power of data in the cloud.
Azure API for FHIR: The Azure API for FHIR will provide a method for health systems and data to ‘talk’ – what is known as interoperability – so for example, health records can connect to collaboration tools, pharmacy systems, fitness devices and others far more seamlessly. Data and insights from this more connected system can then be served up when and where they’re needed most.
API is a term for technology that links software programs together. Similar to electrical outlets and plugs, APIs can most easily be compared to the adapters you need to use electronics while traveling in foreign countries. Though technical, its functionality is important to everyone who interacts with today’s healthcare systems, as interoperability is a foundational health technology need.
The Azure API for FHIR is available in public preview, and we have more than 25 technology partners in our early access program that can help health organizations build FHIR-enabled services today.
Advancing precision healthcare
Some of the most exciting breakthroughs at the intersection of science and technology are in precision healthcare. We all stand to gain from a health system that can precisely care for us based on our unique biology, environments and ailments. Cloud and advanced AI are the key tools that will help achieve that future.
To advance precision care, Microsoft continues to invest in a series of services and computational biology projects, including research support tools for next-generation precision healthcare, genomics, immunomics, CRISPR and cellular and molecular biologics.
For example, Microsoft Genomics, which provides accelerated sequencing and secondary analysis, enables research insights for organizations like St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital with the St. Jude Cloud, the world’s largest public repository of pediatric cancer genomics data.
Earlier this year, we published an update on our partnership with Adaptive Biotechnologies, announcing we’ve opened up our joint research to immunosequence 25,000 individuals, targeting ovarian cancer, pancreatic cancer, celiac disease, type 1 diabetes and Lyme disease.
Work also continues on several Microsoft Research projects, including intelligent scribe Project EmpowerMD, medical imaging Project InnerEye, machine reading Project Hanover and metagenomics Project Premonition. These projects are pushing the boundaries of how technology can be applied in healthcare and we are excited to see how they might be used by health organizations in the future.
Working with the experts
Improving healthcare is not a singular or silver bullet effort. Microsoft’s ambition is not to be a healthcare provider, but to enable and empower those who are doing good things for people around the world. We see strategic alliances with leaders like Walgreens Boots Alliance, Allscripts, Hill-Rom, Novarad and others leading the way, with support from our thousands of technology partners. Here are a few examples:
The future is bright – a more connected future to deliver better experiences, insights and care. We are looking forward to meeting many of you next week at HIMSS19 and sharing more about what we are working on. Please be sure to stop by our booth No. 2500 to see our solutions in action, and follow our HIMSS19 story on @Health_IT to learn more.
The post Microsoft for Healthcare: technology and collaboration for better experiences, insights and care appeared first on The Official Microsoft Blog.
$32 billion in revenue. That’s an incredible number that Satya Nadella and Amy Hood shared during the Q2 earnings call last week. Just as impressive is the commercial cloud revenue increase of 48 percent year-over-year to $9 billion. Did you know that 95 percent of Microsoft’s commercial revenue flows directly through our partner ecosystem? With more than 7,500 partners joining that ecosystem every month, partner growth and partner innovation are directly fueling our commercial cloud growth. One accelerant, the IP co-sell program, now has thousands of co-sell ready partners that generated an incredible $8 billion in contracted partner revenue since the program began in July 2017.
It’s exciting to see the success of our partners, and to know we are collaborating with businesses of all types and sizes wherever there is opportunity. We’re working together with partners old and new to help them build their own digital capability to compete and grow. We’ve doubled down on our partnership with Accenture and Avanade, creating the new Accenture Microsoft Business Group to help customers overcome disruption and lead transformation in their industries. We’re partnering in new ways with customers like Kroger to bring their new Retail as a Service solution built on Azure, to use in their stores – and to sell to other retailers.
Part of Microsoft’s digital transformation is moving beyond transactional reselling via partners, to a true partnership philosophy where we’re working together to develop and sell each other’s technology and solutions. Our partners are building on our technology, collaborating with partners across borders to build repeatable solutions, and creating new revenue opportunities that didn’t exist in the past. We focus as much on selling third-party solutions as our own, and the speed of the cloud enables all of us to accelerate value to our customers.
I want to share more with you about how hundreds of thousands of Microsoft partners are powering customer innovation, and how we are evolving our partnership strategy in order to drive tech intensity for customers around the world.
Partner success and momentum
With hundreds of thousands of partners across the world, our partner ecosystem is stronger than ever.
CSP: Through our Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) program, our fastest-growing licensing model, partners are embedding Microsoft technologies into their own solutions and delivering more differentiated, long-term value for customers. The number of partners transacting through CSP is up 52 percent, and they are serving more than 2 million customers.
Azure Expert MSP: The Azure Expert MSP program has grown to 43 partners that deliver consistent, repeatable, high-fidelity managed services on Azure and are driving more than $100,000 per month in Azure consumption. A big part of this volume is in migration services, as SQL Server 2008 phases out this summer, followed by Windows Server 2008 a year from now. The opportunity for partners can’t be understated. Our estimates put the opportunity around $50 billion for partners to help customers move their existing on-premises workloads to Azure and start capitalizing on the benefits of the cloud.
IP Co-Sell: Our industry-leading IP co-sell program that rewards Microsoft sellers for selling third-party solutions is a runaway success, generating $8 billion in contracted partner revenue since July. Our partners are reaping the benefits and seeing co-sell deals close nearly three times faster, projects that are nearly six times larger, and drive six times more Azure consumption.
Building the largest commercial marketplace
Gartner estimates the opportunity for business applications will be $133 billion this year, with independent software vendors (ISVs) driving more than half of that. So we are upping our commitment to ISVs by investing in Microsoft’s marketplaces, Azure Marketplace, and AppSource, to build the largest commercial marketplace in the industry. Our marketplace provides a frictionless selling and buying experience that brings parity to first and third-party solutions and meets the needs of both IP builders and software purchasers. Partners with solutions in our marketplace can sell directly to more than a billion customers and partners, and they benefit from lower deployment costs and flexible procurement models for software. Through the marketplace go-to-market services, we’ve seen partners achieve an average of 40 percent reduction in cost per lead, and a 2x lead conversion to sales rate compared to industry averages.
New capabilities are coming soon to AppSource and Azure Marketplace. One of the biggest developments is the ability for partners to offer their solutions to our partner ecosystem through the CSP program, with a single click. We’re also improving the user experience and interface with natural language and recommendations features. And by setting up private marketplaces, partners will be able to customize the terms for any specific customer—billing or metering their services on a per-user, per-app, per-month, or per-day basis to meet customer needs. And soon we’ll be offering curated portfolio IP & Services solutions that leverage Azure, Dynamics, Power BI, Power Apps, and Office.
AI for enterprise
IDC estimates that global spending on cognitive and artificial intelligence systems is expected to triple between 2018 to 2022, from $24 billion to $77.6 billion. And just like Microsoft transformed the way people work and live by making personal computing widely accessible in the 1980s and 1990s, we plan to do the same with artificial intelligence. Our aim is to make AI accessible to and valuable for everyone. We’ll do it by focusing on AI innovations that extend and empower human capabilities, while keeping people in control. Our partners are finding huge success and growth in the AI space. Through our AI Inner Circle Partner program, partners provide custom services and enhanced AI solutions to customers and have seen more than 200 percent growth in their AI practices year-over-year.
As we encourage partners to go all-in on AI, we need to make sure they have substantial resources and training. So, we’ve developed AI Practice Development Workshops, Advanced Education, trainings in the classroom, online, and at events. So far, since July, more than 29,000 people have been trained across Microsoft’s data and AI portfolios. Our popular AI Partner Development Playbook and library of online resources—collectively with more than 1 million downloads—have put answers at the fingertips of partners launching and expanding their AI services.
New HR skills playbook and tools
The latest in our series of Cloud Practice Development Playbooks, released today, is an outstanding human resources guide for partners and customers. We collected input from more than 700 partners to develop “Recruit, Hire, Onboard & Retain Talent.” It is a hands-on guide to walk partners through the HR process of recruiting, hiring, and onboarding employees. Alongside the playbook, we’re launching a new learning portal on MPN that simplifies partner training, and a new Partner Transformation Assessment Tool to help partners map resources and investments against solution areas and workloads.
Partner opportunities ahead
Microsoft’s mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. And we know that partners make more possible. As a customer-first, partner-led company, we start with the needs of our customers and work with our partners to deliver the best outcomes for each organization. We look forward to continued evolution in the Microsoft-partner relationship this year—with more innovation in AI, more co-selling opportunities, and more ways to connect partners to customers and to other partners through Azure Marketplace and AppSource. I invite you to learn more about how Microsoft leaders from the Azure, Dynamics, and ISV teams are supporting our partners, and how partners can capitalize on the opportunities ahead.
The post Inspired and powered by partners appeared first on The Official Microsoft Blog.
Judson Althoff visits Kroger’s QFC store in Redmond, WA, one of two pilot locations featuring connected customer experiences powered by Microsoft Azure and AI. Also pictured, Wesley Rhodes, Vice President of Technology Transformation at Kroger.
Computing is embedded all around us. Devices are increasingly more connected, and the availability of data and information is greater now than it has ever been. To grow, compete and respond to customer demands, all companies are becoming digital. In this new reality, enterprise technology choices play an outsized role in how businesses operate, influencing how employees collaborate, how organizations ensure data security and privacy, and how they deliver compelling customer experiences.
This is what we mean when we talk about digital transformation. As our CEO Satya Nadella described it recently, it is how organizations with tech intensity adopt faster, best-in-class technology and simultaneously build their own unique digital capabilities. I see this trend in every industry where customers are choosing Microsoft’s intelligent cloud and intelligent edge to power their transformation.
Over just the past two months, customers as varied as Walmart, Gap Inc., Nielsen, Mastercard, BP, BlackRock, Fruit of the Loom and Brooks Running have shared how technology is reshaping all aspects of our lives — from the way we shop to how we manage money and save for retirement. At the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) earlier this month, Microsoft customers and partners highlighted how the Microsoft cloud, the Internet of Things (IoT) and artificial intelligence (AI) play an ever-expanding role in driving consumer experiences, from LGE’s autonomous vehicle and infotainment systems, to Visteon’s use of Azure to develop autonomous driving development environments, to ZF’s fleet management and predictive maintenance solutions. More recently, at the National Retail Federation (NRF) conference, Microsoft teamed up with retail industry leaders like Starbucks that are reimagining customer and employee experiences with technology.
In fact, there is no shortage of customer examples of tech intensity. They span all industries, including retail, healthcare, automotive manufacturing, maritime research, education and government. Here are just a few of my favorite examples:
Together with Microsoft, Kroger – America’s biggest supermarket chain – opened two pilot stores offering new connected experiences with Microsoft Azure and AI and announced a Retail as a Service (RaaS) solution on Azure. This partnership with Kroger resonates strongly with me because I first met with the company’s CEO in 2013 soon after joining Microsoft. Since then, I have witnessed the Kroger-Microsoft relationship grow and mature beyond measure. The pilot stores feature “digital shelves” which can show ads and change prices on the fly, along with a network of sensors that keep track of products and help speed shoppers through the aisles. Kroger may eventually roll out the Microsoft cloud-powered system in all its 2,780 supermarkets.
In the healthcare industry, earlier this month, we announced a seven-year strategic cloud partnership with Walgreens Boots Alliance (WBA). Through the partnership, WBA will harness the power of Microsoft Azure cloud and AI technology, Microsoft 365, health industry investments and new retail solutions with WBA’s customer reach, convenient locations, outpatient health care services and industry expertise to make health care delivery more personal, affordable and accessible for people around the world.
Walgreens Boots Alliance will harness the power of Microsoft Azure cloud and AI technology and Microsoft 365 to help improve health outcomes and lower overall costs.
Customers tell us that one of the biggest advantages of working with Microsoft is our partner ecosystem. That ecosystem has brought together BevMo!, a wine and liquor store, and Fellow Inc., a Microsoft partner. Today, BevMo! is using Fellow Robots to connect supply chain efficiency with customer delight. Power BI, Microsoft Azure and AI enable the Fellow Robots to provide perfect product location using image recognition to offer customers different types of products by integrating point of sale interactions. BevMo! is also using Microsoft’s intelligent cloud solutions to empower its store associates to deliver better customer service.
Fellow Robots from partner Fellow, Inc. are helping BevMo! connect supply chain efficiency and better customer service. The robots are powered by Microsoft Azure, AI and Machine Learning.
In automotive, companies like Toyota are breaking new ground in mixed reality. With its HoloLens solution, Toyota can now project existing 3D CAD data used in the vehicle design process directly onto the vehicle for measurements, optimizing existing processes and minimizing errors. In addition, Toyota is trialing Dynamics 365 Layout to improve machinery layout within its facilities and Dynamics 365 Remote Assist to provide workers with expert support from off-site designers and engineers. Also, Toyota has deployed Surface devices, enabling designers and engineers to fluidly connect in real time as part of a company-wide investment to accelerate innovation through collaboration.
A Toyota engineer uses Microsoft HoloLens to perform a process called “film coating thickness inspection” to manage the thickness of the paint for consistent coating quality on every vehicle.
Digital transformation is also changing the way we learn. For example, in the education space, Law School Admission Council (LSAC), a non-profit organization devoted to law and education worldwide, announced its selection of the Windows platform on Surface Go devices to digitize the Law School Admission test (LSAT) for more than 130,000 LSAT test takers each year. In addition to the Digital LSAT, Microsoft is working with LSAC on several initiatives to improve and expand access to legal education.
One of the thousands of Microsoft Surface Go devices running Windows 10 and proprietary software to facilitate a the modern and efficient Digital LSAT starting in July 2019.
Beyond manufacturing and retail, organizations are adopting the cloud and AI to reimagine environmental conservation. Fish may not be top of mind when thinking about innovation, but Australia’s Northern Territory is building its own technology to ensure the sustainable management of fisheries resources for future generations. For marine biologists, a seemingly straightforward task like counting fish becomes significantly more challenging or even dangerous when visibility in marine environments is low and when large predators (think: saltwater crocodiles) live in those environments. That is where AI comes in. Scientists use the technology to automatically identify and count fish photographed by underwater cameras. Over time, the AI solution becomes more accurate with each new fish analyzed. Greater availability of this technology may soon help other areas of the world improve their understanding of aquatic resources.
Shane Penny, Fisheries Research Scientist and his team using baited underwater cameras as part of Australia’s Northern Territory Fisheries artificial intelligence project with Microsoft to fuel insights in marine science.
With almost 13,000 post offices and more than 134,000 employees, Poste Italiane is Italy’s largest distribution network. The organization delivers traditional mail and parcels but also operates at the digital frontier through innovation in financial and insurance services as well as mobile and digital payments solutions. Poste Italiane selected Dynamics 365 for its CRM, creating the largest online deployment in Italy. The firm sees the deployment as a critical part of its strategy to support growth, contain costs and deliver a better, richer customer experience.
Poste Italiane’s selection of Microsoft is part of their digital transformation program that aims to reshape the retail sales approach and increase cross-selling revenues and profitability of its subsidiaries BancoPosta and PosteVita.
These examples only scratch the surface of how digital transformation and digital capabilities are bringing together people, data and processes in a way that generates value, competitive advantage and powers innovation across every industry. I am incredibly humbled that our customers and partners have chosen Microsoft to support their digital journey.
The post From shopping to car design, our customers and partners spark innovation across every industry appeared first on The Official Microsoft Blog.
