Microsoft is now bringing together new healthcare efforts with its Microsoft Healthcare Team. Although people can’t sign up for a physical or the flu shot, instead Microsoft’s main goal is to create cloud-based patient profiles and push doctors to the cloud, while eventually having AI analyze data, according to The Verge.
Microsoft has hired Jim Weinstein, former CEO of Dartmouth-Hitchcock Health system, and Joshua Mandel, Google’s executive for Verily venture (formally known as Google Life Sciences). Weinstein will work with healthcare organizations to move systems to the cloud, while Mandel will work with the open standards community to create a unified, open cloud architecture for healthcare providers.
Microsoft is trying to find more secure and safe ways to move healthcare data to the cloud. They want to ensure it does not break strict compliance requirements for confidentiality. The new Healthcare team will also be part of Microsoft’s AI and Research division.
“At Microsoft, we’re confident that many aspects of the IT foundations for healthcare will move from on-premise doctors’ offices and clinics to live in the cloud,” said Peter Lee, head of Microsoft Healthcare. “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.”
Lee said there is still a lot Microsoft has to do, and it will not be an easy task because there is an ongoing race to bring healthcare and technology together. IBM, Baidu Google and Alibaba are some of the few working on healthcare initiatives that intertwine technology. Microsoft hopes to forge forward in the race and introduce the healthcare economy to cloud technology, IoT devices and AI.