How to Empower Health Services in a Digital Society
Focus on: Microsoft Cloud for Health
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In an era of infinite compute power and abundance of data, what we really need are “Empowering health” policies” to be successful with the transformation of health systems“Empowering Health” is the vision for how we do Healthcare at Microsoft. So, the question I often get is ‘how does Microsoft go about implementing it”? I pause and smile. Then I mention the focus of our CEO on the “core” of who we are as a company and where we can uniquely contribute to add value to others. Microsoft’s intelligent cloud platform and services lay the trusted foundation for solutions that benefit patients, that empower health professionals and researchers. And how the cloud empowers health takes many and fascinating forms. It is how a mother in Botswana can see her kids grow up because she was diagnosed remotely of cervical cancer by an expert nurse; and how a stroke specialist provides better and faster diagnose, saving patients’ lives out of hours in Brighton.It’s how a researcher creates a prototype watch that enables a graphic designer diagnosed at 29 with Parkinson’s disease, to draw a straight line — and write her name — for the first time in years. It is how applied AI allows radiologists to plan chemotherapy with better accuracy.It’s how to enable one million people to receive their ideal personalized treatment with an individual pharmacogenomics profile. It’s how cognitive capabilities on top of electronic medical records allow to detect, long before it happens, the likelihood of high blood pressure, allowing preventative care and potentially saving $50 billion. These and plenty more stories of empowered patients, researchers and clinicians signal a more profound transformation that is bound to happen.
As intelligent cloud platforms and intelligent edge applications get adopted across industries and business processes, health digital transformation needs to go hand in hand with empowering health services’ policies, empowering cultures and mindsets. That is where we need to pause, ask questions and connect.Getting ready for the World Health Summit in Berlin and the Digital Health Society in Tallin, is a good time to reflect and connect on empowering policies for health. Decisions taken now – for example on GDPR and health will govern life-changing moments for European citizens and patients for years and even decades to come. If you are interested in emerging issues around Health and GDPR, stay tuned to the blog by Steve Mutkowski and the upcoming Call to Action of the Cloud in Health Advisory Council. We have worked with the Council as a vendor-neutral group aiming to bring clarity, confidence, and ignite adoption of policies and innovations that empower patients and citizens.
- To empower health, we need policies that harness health data for better outcomes, overcoming the lack of clarity around how secondary data brings positive impact on people’s health and how this goes hand in hand with patient privacy and security.
- To empower health, we need to put forward “Cloud-first” health policies as a guiding framework to innovation and procurement.
- To empower health, we will benefit from new research on a new ethical framework for health data and “data donation”. First movers like Vivli, lead the way in purpose-driven data sharing to enhance scientific discovery & public trust.
- To empower health, we need Member States to adopt policies or support Codes of Conduct aligned with global security standards and best practices.
Ultimately, to empower health means to transform health systems, to change organizational models and to imagine an better future. Microsoft has been on that journey. We have Hit Refresh. As you read in Satya’s book, doing digital, even digital health, will not be sufficient if we don’t address the deeper unmet needs of health systems, with new business models. It takes deep empathy and a new culture of innovation to empower every patient and every organization to achieve healthier lives.
