Microsoft has been working on health-related initiatives for years, but is now bringing its efforts together into a new Microsoft Healthcare team. It’s a bigger effort to create cloud-based patient profiles, push doctors to the cloud, and eventually have artificial intelligence analyzing data.
The software maker has hired two industry veterans to help out, Jim Weinstein and Joshua Mandel. Weinstein is the former CEO of the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Health system and joins Microsoft as the VP of Microsoft Healthcare, and will work with healthcare organizations to move systems to the cloud.
Mandel joins as Microsoft Healthcare chief architect, after completing two-years at Google as an executive for the company’s Verily venture. Mandel will be working closely with the open standards community to create an open cloud architecture for all healthcare providers.
Microsoft is trying to find ways to move healthcare data to the cloud securely and in a way that doesn’t break strict compliance requirements for confidentiality. The new Microsoft Healthcare team will be part of Microsoft’s broader 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,” explains 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.”