DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION IN HE ALTH

The Microsoft Cloud empowers organizations of

all sizes to re-envision the way they bring together
people, data, and processes that better engage
From Illness
patients and customers, empower care teams to Wellness:
and employees, optimize clinical and operational
effectiveness, and digitally transform health. Transforming
Public Health

By Gareth Hall,
Director of Business Development,
Microsoft Worldwide Health
DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION IN HE ALTH 2

When I worked for a public

health organization, my chief
executive used to say at the
start of every board meeting,
“Remember, we work for the
national illness service, not the
national health service. Why
don’t we try and change that?”

Public health and human and social services often

fill the gap for people who get left behind by what
everyone else thinks healthcare is. Costs are rising
and not enough people are getting the services they
need. We simply can’t keep up with a population
that’s growing, aging, and more encumbered by
chronic disease. To optimize the use of public
resources and better serve our citizens, we must
transform the very expensive and reactive “sick care”
model of public health to a proactive one that focuses
on population wellness.

1. We need to understand current levels of

health, our biggest health problems, and
what’s trending.
 DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION IN HE ALTH 3

2. We then need to understand what’s causing our Let’s say we’re able to gather the necessary data.
biggest health problems and what we can do to That’s only the first step. Now we need to turn it into
mitigate them. a full and accurate picture of the population’s health:
how community demographics are shifting, rates
3. We must apply our resources to developing and of illness, who’s getting services and who’s not, and
providing services that reduce incidents of illness which communities are healthier or sicker than others.
and get ahead of trends before they become This requires analysis. We then need to take things
public health crises. one step further to try and uncover causes and cor-
relations. The more complete data we have, and the
It’s very difficult to know the best way to promote more thorough our analysis, the more intelligently we
wellness in a particular population, because it’s very can apply our public investments to design and deliver
difficult to understand the current picture. Although the appropriate services.
we may have some ideas, we don’t actually know if
they’re right, because they’re backed by incomplete And let’s not forget—we need to do all of the above
and fragmented information such as small, point-in- as cost effectively as possible, for as many people
time, location-specific studies about a particular illness as possible.
like Zika or influenza. If we’re limiting ourselves to the
problems we think we have, or just the ones we know
about, we may not make progress against the actual Pooling resources to benefit
problems that need solving. public health
To make public health work more effectively and
efficiently, we need an amalgam of information from The great news is that public health and human and
providers, payors, and government sources. But social services organizations around the world are
gathering and updating information siloed inside already doing exactly this.
multiple organizations has been notoriously difficult. The secret to their success is cloud computing.
How safe and reliable is it to express mail hard drives
back and forth? In an ideal world, we could continu- In the cloud, there’s virtually no limit to storage or
ously collect, aggregate, structure, and store data computing cycles. It’s possible to build a secure data
about populations—automatically. warehouse that will always be connected to multiple

public, private, or commercial sources, offering a layer
of abstraction that allows authorized parties to access
the data—with strict oversight.
Interested parties can run algorithms on this data
without ever taking it out of the warehouse or learning
the identities of the people it describes. Moreover,
because cloud providers continually deploy software
updates and security patches as soon as they’re
available, clinicians and researchers always have
immediate access to the latest technology, compliant
with regulations, without having to do any care or
feeding of datacenter infrastructure themselves.
DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION IN HE ALTH
The cloud model makes it much easier to keep data
up-to-date and in one place. It allows us to analyze as
much data as we can gather from as many sources as
we can find to get a clearer picture of the problems
we’re facing in public health, what may be causing
them, and what we need to do to fix them.
Since cloud solutions scale easily, and can be accessed
from anywhere, it’s possible to build centralized
services and offer them at a reduced cost. We can
create solutions to target specific problems in specific
populations at specific times, deploy them widely, and
monitor their impact on public health. Over time, we
can learn which approaches are most effective for the
population as a whole, or for specific subpopulations
and geographical areas. We can share our learning
(and our data) with other public health agencies
around the world, amplifying the impact of our
work, and everyone else’s.
Cloud-powered services to
improve population wellness
Let’s look at some real-world examples of how health
organizations are using cloud-based solutions to better
treat, monitor, and prevent illness. They illustrate how
digitizing processes, closing gaps in communication,
shifting care into the community, sharing data, and
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informing decisions with data analysis can improve
results for individuals and communities.
Virtual health reduces wait times and brings services
to people who may not otherwise have access to
them. Brighton and Sussex University Hospital, part
of the National Health Service in the UK, uses
compliant telehealth technology to connect different
elements of the health system, such as ambulances,
neurologists, and general healthcare providers, to help
diagnose potential stroke victims properly and ensure
they receive the right treatment. The ability to confer
with a specialist as quickly as you can make a Skype
call saves valuable time that could mean the difference
between life and death or permanent disability.
Remote patient monitoring allows us to move
care outside of hospitals to patients’ homes.
Children’s Mercy Hospital in Kansas City, Missouri, uses
an app called CHAMP, which runs on Microsoft Azure,
and off-the-shelf tablet PCs to monitor babies born
with Hypoplastic Left Heart Syndrome once they go
home after surgery. Care teams receive digital data,
including videos, several times a day from parents, vs.
getting notes once a week on paper. This allows them
to identify warning signs and take corrective actions
very quickly if necessary. The solution has dramatically
increased the survival rates of these very fragile children
and reduced the cost of caring for them. Imagine
applying the same model to patients suffering from
leading killers like congestive heart failure.

Patient engagement that’s consistent and continuous
encourages people to care about their health, manage
their chronic diseases, and comply with
recommendations such as follow-up tests and
prescribed medications. For example, although
diabetic retinopathy is the leading cause of preventable
blindness in diabetic Americans aged 20 to 65, only
half actually get screened annually as recommended.
IRIS developed a cloud-based appliance that allows
any primary care provider to screen patients during
routine visits in about ten minutes. CoxHeath, a not-
for-profit health system in Missouri, used the IRIS
platform to increase compliance rates for the diabetic
retinal exam (DRE) from 32 percent across their
constituents to as much as 70 percent for one key
contract. AiR (Assistance in Recovery), offers
personalized and continuous support for patients with
chronic behavioral health conditions, helping more
than 70% achieve a 12-month abstinence rate. In this
era of connected technology, we really need to stay
connected with the people we serve.
Care coordination allows us to work more efficiently
in teams across health, government, social services,
and commercial industry to deliver public health at
scale. Access to up-to-date information stored in the
cloud and tools for more efficient collaboration help us
care for at-risk individuals and communities, such as
people with addictions and the elderly. Australia’s
Silver Chain uses Microsoft’s cloud-based relationship
DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION IN HE ALTH
management system, Dynamics 365, to connect
patients, clinicians, and public health services, helping
coordinate nurses to provide follow-up care to
recently discharged patients in their homes. Simply by
closing communication gaps that increase delays and
expense, we can increase the effectiveness of care.
Data analytics and machine learning help health
organizations identify risk and take preventative
measures, whether those risks are clinical or
operational. Fullerton Health in Singapore uses
business intelligence and predictive analytics to
develop chronic disease management plans for
patients across Asia Pacific, resulting in fewer
hospitalizations, lower absenteeism, and a 60%
reduction in claims. A solution from Stockholm-based
Optolexia tracks and analyzes eye movement patterns
to help identify the 10 to 15 percent of school-age
5
children thought to have dyslexia, making it possible
to teach them coping mechanisms much earlier.
Empowering public health
through the cloud
We’re really just beginning to see what better access
to health data and services can do for individuals
and populations. The cloud’s unique ability to handle
computing-intensive workloads and process massive
amounts of data is powering innovative efforts in
a number of areas that can have a profound impact
on public health, such as curating research, sharing
clinical trial data, and tracking and combating
disease outbreaks.
It’s clear, however, that the cloud is already
empowering a revolution in health that will help us
take better care of populations who have specific
illnesses, long-term conditions, or identifiable risk
factors. As we better understand our needs, where
we’re falling short, and what measures work for
individuals and their cohorts, we can use the cloud
to refine and deliver new services to even more
people more quickly, proactively, and efficiently.
To explore more stories about innovation in health,
please visit Microsoft’s health industry site.

Benefits of cloud computing
Trust. Security is a big concern when it comes to cloud adoption.
Health data needs to be protected. The industry experts who
manage cloud data centers take physical, technical, and
operational measures to achieve and maintain security and privacy
so your organization can meet the compliance requirements of
regulators. They deploy the latest security patches as soon as
they’re available, so you get them automatically.
Speed. Traditionally, getting access to new or better tools, more
storage space, or more computing power has involved a lot of
waiting. This happens when IT has to get budget, purchase
hardware and/or software, and set it up before they can give you
what you need. With the cloud, it takes minutes instead of days,
weeks, or months, to get more storage space, compute cycles, or
updated software.
DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION IN HE ALTH
Scale. The cloud provides an almost infinite set of computing
resources, which is necessary for storing or processing massive
amounts of data. When you need more resources, you can scale
up instantly and automatically. When you need fewer resources,
you scale down instantly and automatically. In other words, you
get exactly what you need, when you need it—no more, no less.
Economics. Few organizations have the resources to set up
or manage very-largescale data centers. The cloud model, like a
utility, is pay-as-you-go. This way you never have to worry about
having fewer resources than you need, and your organization
never has to worry about paying for more than you’re using.
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Choosing a cloud offering
Health organizations need cloud services that are not only
powerful, but also secure and compliant. Here is a short
checklist to consider when evaluating cloud offerings:
• Is it Enterprise-ready? Do the services it offers scale to large
organizations with many users or customers?
• Does it offer more than infrastructure, such as platforms
that support core functions for productivity,
communications, relationship management, and analytics,
so you can easily tailor solutions to meet your needs?
• Does it work with on-premises environments and with
technologies from multiple cloud providers and device
manufacturers?
• Does it have certifications to show it complies with
health security and privacy regulations in the countries
where you operate, so you can safely store and process
personal health information?
microsoft.com/health

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