Latest Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare capabilities optimize payor, provider productivity
The evolving landscape of healthcare continues to bring opportunities to provide quality care while addressing the challenges to resources. Providers and payors alike understand the complexities of managing vast amounts of data across multiple sources, changing expectations from patients, and the need for security and compliance. Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare is designed to help organizations identify and gather insights to improve decisions across the continuum of care. Leveraging the complete power of the Microsoft Cloud, as well as leading AI and machine learning models, Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare capabilities help health organizations make better decisions, gain new insights, optimize resources, and drive improved care experience and outcomes. As highlighted in the news announced today, at HIMSS 2023 we are showcasing our latest release that introduces capabilities to help payors optimize productivity, while improving on solutions for patient outreach and Care Management.
Introducing Unified member view for payors
In this release, we continue to expand our investment across a new vertical with Unified member view (preview), our first solution for health payors. Similar to Unified patient view, Unified member view provides a single place to aggregate access and utilize different types of data instead of toggling between multiple screens and systems. Using Microsoft Power Apps, Unified member view enables payors to view complete records that combine data from various sources throughout the healthcare system.
Built on a common data model derived from Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) that make it easier for payors to securely exchange data with their providers and other FHIR-supported systems. Unified member view is a highly customizable and extendable solution that enables customers and partners to create innovative solutions targeting different payor scenarios.
Using Unified member view, users can access all the aspects of member data and health insights in one solution in a single view. As part of a seamless experience, users can view information from various sources, including claims and lab reports. Member events such as admissions, discharge, and appointment history can also be visualized. Actionable information, such as gaps in care, suggested next best actions, and pending immunizations, can be computed in custom services and surfaced in this solution. Using this, data health organizations can derive insights to drive better member engagement, coordinate care, and manage population health. Unified member view is designed to help payors proactively reduce costs while also managing care.
Empowering Patient journeys
Improving patient experience and satisfaction begins with understanding the patient journey. The series of experiences and interactions that a patient has with a healthcare organization—from initial contact to post-treatment follow-up—makes up the patient journey. By identifying various touchpoints, health organizations can pinpoint areas for improvement and ensure that patients have a seamless experience at every stage of their journey. By understanding the patient journey, healthcare organizations can optimize their services and tailor their efforts to attract and retain patients and members.
Patient outreach is a patient campaign management application that helps organize and automate marketing and outreach to patients. Extending the customer journey orchestration engine from Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing to support diverse users, the Patient outreach application enables health organizations to engage patients in patient care decisions with personalized patient engagement solutions. Updates to Patient outreach include the addition of the Patient journey (preview)—empowering health organizations to effectively map and analyze Patient journeys.
Optimizing each touchpoint in a patient’s experience can help providers improve patient satisfaction, retention, and loyalty, while payors can address efficiencies and the return on investment of their health plans. This application enables health organizations to orchestrate trigger-based workflows across patient touchpoints to automate repetitive tasks and allow patients to get personalized care faster. We see this as an opportunity not only to improve communication with the patient but to make it more efficient for healthcare workers.
Device data support for Care Management
As healthcare expands beyond the clinician’s office to include wearable devices and in-home patient care, Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare has developed solutions and data integration capabilities for health organizations to make it easier for them to provide care anywhere. Our aim is to make it easier for caregivers to access and track patients’ vitals and to gain early insights into patient conditions. Device data support for Care Management (preview) leverages the MedTech service in Azure Health Data Services to normalize data from diverse medical devices and convert it into the FHIR format in a secure way. The MedTech service enables data coming from the Internet of Things (IoT) devices to be integrated with other clinical data across health systems.
By integrating the device data support capability inside Care Management, care managers can access the patient’s vital data, assess trends, and determine the next best actions for their patient. This enables clinical users to stay on top of a patient’s long-term health. Health organizations can add new health devices when required as well as maintain an inventory of these devices. Care managers can also assign, modify, and track data on devices, and Microsoft Power BI charts offer visualization of tracked data for easier evaluation. With readings analytics through Care Management, organizations can deliver personalized care by understanding the needs of the individual patient as well as the needs of the broader patient population.
Life365, a leading remote patient monitoring solution provider is building solutions on top of Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare—empowering payors and providers to connect and scale to large patient populations. The Life365 Virtual Care Platform will offer the ability to provide a virtual first approach to connecting with patients and access to more than 400 medical devices intended for home care. This integration will allow remote patient monitoring data to be accessed through the cloud and enable health organizations to scale to large patient populations, mitigating the high utilization of resources and associated costs.
“Life365 integrated to the Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare platform allows health organizations to shift from a reactive to proactive approach to care. By receiving insights into patient conditions, clinicians can intervene proactively and determine the appropriate course for care, ideally, helping reduce the risk of emergency room visits.”—Kent Dicks, CEO, Life365.
Easily build applications for health with Power Platform
Health organizations are considering low-code development to improve productivity, gain faster time-to-market, experiment more easily, and overall, be more agile when responding to market changes. A key blocker has been the inability to pull health data from multiple sources and manage it in a secure and compliant way.
Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare includes configurable solutions to exchange data between Dataverse and external systems using the FHIR standard. Dataverse Healthcare APIs provide bidirectional synchronization between Dataverse and FHIR services such as Azure Health Data Services.
As part of the April 2023 release, Virtual Health Data Tables (general availability) has been updated to include support for the create, update, and delete FHIR operations. Utilizing this functionality, customers can perform real-time updates to FHIR resource data on the remote FHIR service directly from within the Power Platform. This enables health customers to leverage Microsoft no-code and low-code Power Platform to build health applications, greatly simplifying the complexities of the FHIR standard. With the new capabilities, Microsoft is helping organizations reduce the cost of duplicate health data by directly connecting apps to where the data exists. Keeping data in fewer places means security improves by reducing the number of integration points and stores that need to be secured.
Learn more about new capabilities with Microsoft
Read the links below and visit our team at HIMSS 2023 to learn more about new clinical and operational insights capabilities such as Project Health Insights (preview), the new Azure applied AI service that leverages multiple Cognitive Services, Healthcare API services , and other Azure resources.
- Explore our demos and visit our in-booth Learning Center at HIMSS 2023 booth #1201.
- Learn more about Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare.
- Try Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare with a free trial.
- Learn more about the latest feature release for Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare.
Transform the healthcare journey
Deliver better experiences, insights, and care with Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare.
MEDICAL DEVICE DISCLAIMER. Microsoft product(s) and service(s) (1) are not designed, intended or made available as a medical device(s), and (2) are not designed or intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, treatment, or judgment and should not be used to replace or as a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, treatment, or judgment.
