Microsoft for Healthcare: technology and collaboration for better experiences, insights and care

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:

• Microsoft 365 for health organizations: New capabilities in Microsoft Teams that enable healthcare teams to communicate and collaborate in a secure hub for teamwork.
• Microsoft Healthcare Bot: Now generally available, this service helps organizations create AI-powered, compliant virtual assistants and chatbots for a variety of healthcare experiences.
• Azure API for FHIR®: A new tool to help health systems interoperate and share data in the cloud.

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.

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M12 and VC partners award women-led companies transforming enterprise tech - Microsoft Certifications

Microsoft Corp. venture fund M12, in partnership with EQT Ventures and SVB Financial Group, announced the two winners of the Female Founders Competition: Acerta and Mental Canvas. The companies and their founders, Greta Cutulenco (CEO and co-founder, Acerta) and Julie Dorsey (founder and chief scientist, Mental Canvas) beat out several hundred applicants to receive $2 million each in venture funding, along with access to technology resources and more to help progress the future of their businesses.

Earlier this year, M12 and its partners kicked off the global event in a bid to not only find and fund innovative female entrepreneurs, but also to spotlight the funding gap that exists and the need for more equitable distribution of capital. Hundreds of startups across North America, Europe and Israel applied, providing a glimpse into the potential opportunity and untapped talent in the market.

“Our goal for this competition was to clear a path to funding for more women entrepreneurs,” said Peggy Johnson, executive vice president of Business Development, Microsoft. “We were thrilled by the response we received and feel confident that we’ll see great returns on our two newest additions to our portfolio, but we also know there’s much more work to do. We plan to continue exploring other ways to close the funding gap using the lessons we learned from this competition: There’s no shortage of women entrepreneurs building for the enterprise, there’s more than one way to source an investment, and networking is essential to women founders’ growth and success.”

In early November, the VC firms narrowed the selection down to 10 finalists. Teams from each startup then pitched their company to a group of judges from M12 and the partner VC firms for one of two chances at the top prize: a total of $2 million in venture funding from M12, EQT Ventures and SVB Financial Group, and access to Microsoft technology. The winning companies include:

Waterloo, Ontario-based Acerta, founded by CEO Greta Cutulenco, provides an AI platform that ensures vehicle systems’ quality and reliability throughout a vehicle’s lifecycle.

New York-based Mental Canvas, founded by chief scientist Julie Dorsey, reimagines sketching for the digital age by augmenting it with spatial strokes, 3-D navigation and free-form animations, all drawn with the ease of pencil and paper.

“At SVB, we have the good fortune to work with some of the most innovative companies around the world,” said Tracy Isacke, head of Corporate Venture at Silicon Valley Bank. “This partnership provided the opportunity to meet some incredible female founders, and we were truly inspired by the depth and breadth of innovation that they are bringing to the enterprise technology market. We are proud to support Acerta and Mental Canvas as they pursue their ambitious business goals.”

“The quality and number of submissions for the competition was incredible, and the EQT Ventures team would like to congratulate both Acerta and Mental Canvas,” said Alastair Mitchell, partner and investment advisor at EQT Ventures. “Our fund is dedicated to backing founders with the ambition, drive and vision to build a global success story, and this competition not only provides a great launchpad for Acerta and Mental Canvas, it highlights the fact that far more needs to be done to close the funding gap between male and female founders. The EQT Ventures team is proud to play a part in bridging that gap.”

Microsoft’s mission is to empower every person and organization on the planet to achieve more. With the help of its partners and competitions like this, the company is pushing forward in its efforts to ensure women are afforded an equal opportunity when raising capital.

About EQT Ventures

EQT Ventures is a European VC fund with commitments of just over €566 million. The fund is based in Luxembourg and has investment advisors stationed in Stockholm, Amsterdam, London, San Francisco and Berlin. Fueled by some of Europe’s most experienced company builders, EQT Ventures helps the next generation of entrepreneurs with capital and hands-on support. EQT Ventures is part of EQT, a leading investment firm with approximately €50 billion in raised capital across 27 funds. EQT funds have portfolio companies in Europe, Asia and the U.S. with total sales of more than €19 billion and approximately 110,000 employees.

About SVB Financial Group

For 35 years, SVB Financial Group (NASDAQ: SIVB) and its subsidiaries have helped innovative companies and their investors move bold ideas forward, fast. SVB Financial Group’s businesses, including Silicon Valley Bank, offer commercial and private banking, asset management, private wealth management, brokerage and investment services and funds management services to companies in the technology, life science and healthcare, private equity and venture capital and premium wine industries. Headquartered in Santa Clara, California, SVB Financial Group operates in centers of innovation around the world. Learn more at www.svb.com.

About M12

As the corporate venture arm for Microsoft, M12 (formerly Microsoft Ventures) invests in enterprise software companies in the Series A through C funding stage with a focus on big data and analytics, business SaaS, cloud infrastructure, machine learning and artificial intelligence, productivity, and security. As part of its value-add to portfolio companies, M12 offers unique access to strategic go-to-market resources and relationships globally. The company has offices in New York, San Francisco, Seattle, London and Tel Aviv.

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Mastercard & Microsoft join forces to advance digital identity innovations

Currently, verifying your identity online is still dependent on physical or digital proof managed by a central party, whether it’s your passport number, your proof of address, driver’s license, user credentials or other means. This dependence places a huge burden on individuals, who have to successfully remember hundreds of passwords for various identities and are increasingly being subjected to more complexity in proving their identity and managing their data. Working together, Mastercard and Microsoft aim to give people a secure, instant way to verify their digital identity with whomever they want, whenever they want.

The answer to these challenges is a service that would allow individuals to enter, control and share their identity data their way – on the devices they use every day. That’s Mastercard’s intention, working closely with players like Microsoft.

“Today’s digital identity landscape is patchy, inconsistent and what works in one country often won’t work in another. We have an opportunity to establish a system that puts people first, giving them control of their identity data and where it is used,” says Ajay Bhalla, president, cyber and intelligence solutions, Mastercard. “Working with Microsoft brings us one step closer to making a globally interoperable digital identity service a reality, and we look forward to sharing more very soon.”

Access to a universally-recognized digital identity could unlock new and enhanced experiences for people as they interact with businesses, service providers and their community online, including:

• Financial Services: Improve and speed the applicant identification process for establishing a new bank account, loan or payment service account
• Commerce: Enable a more personalized and efficient shopping experience online and in stores, regardless of the payment type, device or service provider
• Government Services: Simplify interactions with government agencies and services – such as filing taxes, applying for passports or securing support payments (e.g., Social Security)
• Digital Services: Streamline and provide easier use of email, social media, movie/music streaming services, and rideshare platforms

“Digital identity is a cornerstone of how people live, work and play every day,” said Joy Chik, corporate vice president, Identity, Microsoft. “We believe people should be in control of their digital identity and data, and we’re thrilled to first work with Mastercard to bring new decentralized identity innovations to life.”

This digital identity initiative could also help solve for common challenges:

• Identity Inclusion: More than 1 billion people, a majority of them women, children and refugees, are not officially recognized; a digital identity can improve their access to health, financial and social services.
• Identity Verification: A single, reusable digital identity can help people interact with a merchant, bank, government agency and countless other digital service providers with greater integrity, lower cost and with less friction.
• Fraud Prevention: A single digital identity can help reduce payments fraud and identity theft of various forms.

This initiative will serve as the foundation for new Mastercard services powered by Microsoft Azure and built-in collaboration with leaders in the banking, mobile network operator and government communities. Microsoft and Mastercard are bringing together their respective strengths – Microsoft’s expertise in identity technology and Mastercard’s expertise in securely orchestrating digital interactions in a complex, multi-stakeholder ecosystem.

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Microsoft holds annual shareholders meeting

Speaking to shareholders at Microsoft Corp.’s annual meeting on Wednesday, Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella highlighted the importance of creating technology that benefits people and society broadly, and the opportunity for Microsoft to help its customers and partners thrive in a world where every company is a software company.

“I’m proud of the progress we made this past fiscal year as we innovate and help our customers digitally transform,” Nadella said. “We create economic opportunity in every community, and this broad impact – coupled with our focus on instilling trust in technology across everything we do – makes me incredibly optimistic about the opportunity ahead.”

Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer Amy Hood shared highlights of Microsoft’s record performance over the past year fiscal year including continued growth in its commercial cloud business and strong growth across each service. Hood noted that Microsoft is confident in its ability to execute against its innovation roadmap, positioning the company for continued growth and to deliver shareholder value.

The following proposals were acted on by the company’s shareholders at the meeting. All proposals received above 95 percent of votes cast.

• Re-elected 14 directors to serve until the next annual meeting of the shareholders.
• Approved, on a nonbinding advisory basis, the fiscal year 2018 compensation of the company’s named executive officers.
• Ratified the selection of Deloitte & Touche LLP as the company’s independent auditor for fiscal year 2019.

Microsoft’s board of directors consists of John W. Thompson, Microsoft independent chairman; William H. Gates, co-chair and trustee of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation; Reid Hoffman, partner at Greylock Partners; Hugh Johnston, vice chairman and chief financial officer of PepsiCo Inc.; Teri L. List-Stoll, executive vice president and chief financial officer of Gap Inc.; Satya Nadella, chief executive officer of Microsoft; Charles H. Noski, former vice chairman of Bank of America Corp.; Dr. Helmut Panke, former chairman of the board of management at BMW AG; Sandra E. Peterson, former group worldwide chair for Johnson & Johnson; Penny S. Pritzker, founder and chairman of PSP Partners; Charles W. Scharf, chief executive officer of The Bank of New York Mellon Corp.; Arne Sorenson, president and chief executive officer of Marriott International; John W. Stanton, chairman of Trilogy Partnerships; and Padmasree Warrior, chief development officer, NIO Inc. and chief executive officer, NIO USA Inc.