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Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare helps empower care teams with better experiences, better insights, and better care

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Healthcare organizations have faced tremendous challenges over the past year in the fight against COVID-19, and care teams are doing everything they can to provide the best possible care while under extreme pressure. To help address these challenges, we’re pleased to announce that Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare is now generally available.

Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare brings together trusted capabilities to help customers and partners enhance patient engagement, empower health team collaboration, and improve clinical and operational insights. By bringing together innovations from across the company, Microsoft makes it faster and easier to provide more efficient care and helps to ensure the end-to-end security, compliance, and interoperability of health data.

I’m really excited about Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare and want to expand on how access to care for patients can be improved through virtual health, while at the same time helping to drive down costs for healthcare providers. Additionally, Cloud for Healthcare can help care teams communicate securely in real-time, bringing together traditionally siloed systems to help optimize resources and solve problems collectively.

Virtual health

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To respond to the global pandemic, healthcare organizations have accelerated the transition toward virtual health. From consults between care team members to patient-to-provider virtual visits, care delivery is going through a massive transformation.

Our seamless virtual health experience includes the ability to:

  • Schedule and conduct virtual visits through Microsoft Teams and Microsoft Bookings
  • Deliver email confirmation and text reminders to the patient for their virtual visits
  • Streamline virtual visit experience across devices with no need to install an app
  • Help protect sensitive health information and support compliance requirements like HIPAA, HITECH, GDPR, and more
  • Personalize options to improve home health, patient access, care management, and more

With the new Microsoft Teams EHR connector, now available with unlimited meetings as part of Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare, clinicians can launch virtual visits in Teams from within the Epic electronic health record system. This helps make the experience seamless for the clinician since it incorporates into their existing workflows. Additionally, the Microsoft Teams EHR connector will soon be available as a standalone offering with more information coming over the next few weeks.

Expanding on virtual health capabilities, Nuance and Microsoft partnered together to integrate Nuance’s Dragon Ambient eXperience (DAX) with Microsoft Teams. This integration adds Nuance and Microsoft’s AI investments to virtual visits by securely capturing and contextualizing physician-patient conversations, and automatically documents the virtual visit. Instead of taking notes throughout the visit, the clinician can stay focused on the patient.

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Our customers have seen great results using Microsoft Teams for virtual visits. St. Luke’s University Health Network, based in Bethlehem, PA, is a twelve hospital health system supporting more than 300 care sites in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. St. Luke’s used Microsoft Teams to deliver virtual outpatient care and care to COVID-19 patients.

“Teams really showed its mettle when we used it for a coordinated response to the COVID-19 crisis happening in our hospitals. There’s no doubt that Teams contributed to saving lives,” says Dr. Douglas Corwin, Pulmonary and Critical Care specialist at St. Luke’s.

Care Team Collaboration

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Seamless communication and collaboration across the care team is vital in healthcare. Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare can help accelerate the clinician’s ability to coordinate care in a secure environment and simplifies complex workflow management. It helps care teams collaborate and share knowledge in a single secure place. Highlights include:    

  • Secure messaging in Microsoft Teams that’s as easy to use as a consumer chat app, but with the extra security and regulatory compliance features needed to help protect sensitive health information
  • Healthcare templates for Microsoft Teams with predefined settings, channels, and approved applications to help facilitate efficient collaboration across the care team
  • Streamlined processes for discharge planning and multidisciplinary team meetings for patients using Lists in Microsoft Teams
  • Full visibility into each patient’s care plan, medical history, goals, and preferences with Care Management and Patient View
  • Access and exchange information between patients and providers with the Azure API for FHIR and the Common Data Service

To better understand how your organization can benefit from many of these innovations using Microsoft Teams and Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare, you can watch this session from our event, Microsoft Ignite.

The launch of Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare brings together trusted capabilities to customers and partners that enhance patient engagement, empower health team collaboration, and improve clinical and operational insights. Learn more about Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare.