Tag: COVID-19

Every member of the consortium is currently focused on saving lives, but I asked Mathieson and Hoare whether the project would change how McLaren and Ford worked in the future. Will the levels of speed, agility and focus they were forced to adopt be transferred to their own operations?

“Very simply, this is how we need to operate going forward,” Mathieson says. “The auto industry –and it’s true of many other sectors as well – will have to embrace a lot of change, and a lot of that will be focused around technology and culture. This has been a fantastic example of what can be achieved if you get rid of all the normal obstacles, have a clear, laser-sharp focus on the objective, and then people just come together to make it happen.

“Remote working has really come to the fore, and now companies are looking at the future and thinking ‘what space do we need and how do we operate our teams’.”

Hoare believes HoloLens will continue to have a major impact at Ford.

“When you use technology like HoloLens, all of a sudden the rest of your world starts to change shape,” he says. “We can certainly think of applications for the headset in the automotive world. This technology will set us free, reducing our carbon footprint through reducing the amount our staff have to travel. When we need an answer to a very specific problem, we often end up saying, ‘We need Fred on the plane’, and Fred will fly from Asia to the UK to help solve the problem. Then we realise it actually wasn’t Fred we needed, it was Barry who has the skills we need, so he flies over on a plane. There is tremendous potential for HoloLens there.

“It will be one of the memories I take away from the consortium: how the right tools in the right hands with the right need makes all the difference.”

In any time of uncertainty, it is critical we leverage data-driven approaches when solving problems. About a decade ago, we wrote on this blog how we used a data- and model-driven approach to guide us to the cloud as the future of enterprise computing. Today, we’re applying the same foundational approach while benefiting from the power of our cloud and AI capabilities to unpack today’s source of great uncertainty: COVID-19. In the white paper we are releasing today, we outline a policy framework to help governments think through the impact of COVID-19 and recovery strategies. We have also included an economic model that quantifies economic impact.

Economic impact framework

As the white paper highlights, our economic impact model is built on a large dataset of economic signals and takes insights from economics and epidemiologists to define scenarios and estimate GDP impact. We ingest real-time data as well as traditional economic data, use our Azure AI capabilities to drive insights, our Azure cloud to run calculations, and we update the latest numbers weekly on our Power BI dashboard. We continue to evolve and improve the model as we ingest new signals and learn more from others through our discussions with policymakers and NGOs. But policymakers don’t merely predict GDP; they help shape it. As we engaged with them, we saw the need for a framework and data that helped them navigate this.

Social contact budget

“Social contact” used to be something we didn’t have to think about. It was a byproduct of going to the store or the gym, often viewed as a positive byproduct. Since the start of COVID-19, it comes at a high price. Today, it can perhaps be compared to carbon emissions: an unwelcome byproduct of economic activity. One can lead to pollution; the other to infection. In economic terms, social contact has become a scarce resource. It has become the linchpin between managing infections and protecting the economy – it is what is driving up infection rates but is also needed for economic activity. By treating it as an economically scarce resource, it raises three critical questions that we began to address in the paper in a data-driven way:

1. How much room do we have to open the economy (“social contact budget”)?
2. How do we best spend the budget (“return on social contact”)?
3. How do we grow our social contact budget over time (“reducing cost of social contact”)?

On the first question, the lower the transmission rate “R” (R being the average number of secondary cases per infectious case), the greater the social contact budget and thus the more room there is to open up parts of the economy while avoiding a second wave of infections, which is very costly from a health and an economic perspective. Second, as is true with any budget, we must spend it wisely. Depending on what a policymaker optimizes for (e.g. GDP, employment, avoiding bankruptcy), we created data-driven views on how to optimize return on social contact. Industries that can work from home should work from home, as the ones who cannot need the social contact budget more. For the ones who really depend on social contact, we should use data to inform decisions. For example, the figures below compare various industries on their propensity to drive social contact vs. GDP.

Finally, over time, the budget can be expanded through changes in behavior as people adjust to the “cost of social contact” and through measures such as massive testing and contact tracing. These measures essentially weaken the relationship between social contact and R. They ensure that social contact happens between healthy people that do not carry the virus so, over time, we can essentially make social contact free again, as it should be.

This crisis is unprecedented, and no single person or organization has all the answers. New perspectives often appear by recognizing and connecting patterns across silos. We’ve been working with epidemiologists whose work focuses on the potential loss of lives. Economic models and scenarios highlight the loss of livelihoods. As we started discussing this with NGOs and global policymakers, we became aware of the synergies between these workstreams, and we sought an integrated perspective.

In the paper, we detail this framework and share data we have been collaborating on with policymakers. It is by no means perfect. We are already collaborating with a number of organizations on improving this work and getting additional data. Our hope is that, by publishing this work, we can invite others to contribute and leverage it so that we can bring more perspectives to bear on one of the great challenges of our lifetime.

Tags: AI for Health, Azure, COVID-19, Power BI, social contact

Within 12 days, the state was able to launch the Washington Healthcare Emergency and Logistics Tracking Hub (WA HEALTH) built on Microsoft Power Platform, which runs on Microsoft Azure.

“This really helped us understand how do we get patients to the right care at the right place in the right amount of time and also to understand the needs for personal protective equipment across the state — who had what and where were the gaps,” Henry said.

Cloud providers like Microsoft Azure are by their nature designed to expand and scale quickly and meet elastic demand. With the more than 60 datacenter regions around the globe — including three new regions announced this past May in Italy, New Zealand and Poland — Microsoft can shift traffic if a natural disaster or power outage affects capacity in one part of the world. Computing hardware to protect against demand spikes is stockpiled in warehouses around the globe, ready to be deployed to where it’s needed most.

By March the epicenter of that demand was in Europe, as countries such as Italy and Spain imposed nationwide lockdowns to slow the spread of the coronavirus. Around the same time, manufacturing issues in China and Southeast Asia due to the global health pandemic created a temporary disruption in the supply chain for certain datacenter hardware as dramatic spikes in usage began challenging computing capacity in some regions. In a Microsoft quarterly earnings call on April 29, the company said those hardware supply chain issues largely began resolving themselves late in the quarter that ended in March.

“The scope and the scale of the response to COVID-19 was completely unprecedented, in terms of how much of the world went digital inside a month,” said Mark Simms, a senior Azure engineer who helped manage the COVID-19 response across Azure. “So the work that we had to do to get through the initial surge in demand and free up capacity for our customers to run critical health and safety workloads was also unprecedented.”

“We made some pretty profound changes in order to do the right thing, and we did them under a very short time frame,” Simms said.

Datacenter employees began working in round-the-clock shifts to install new servers while staying at least six feet apart. Microsoft product teams worked to find any further efficiencies to free up Azure resources for other customers. The company doubled capacity on one of its own undersea cables carrying data across the Atlantic and negotiated with owners of another to open up additional capacity. Network engineers installed new hardware and tripled the deployed capacity on the America Europe Connect cable in just two weeks.

Microsoft’s plan emphasized continuity of service for all its customers, but especially for those on the front lines of the COVID-19 response: health care providers, police and emergency responders, financial institutions, manufacturers of critical supplies, grocery stores and health agencies providing critical information to the public about how quickly the virus was spreading.

The Azure Global and Customer Experience engineering teams mobilized and monitored Azure services around the clock to ensure critical customers could continue to operate smoothly and meet new challenges posed by COVID-19. Employees from across the company volunteered to switch gears to help deploy urgent projects like WA HEALTH.

Microsoft’s Regional Government Emergency Response and Monitoring Solution, on which WA HEALTH was built, uses Microsoft Power Apps Portal and Microsoft Power BI, which run on Azure, to allow healthcare workers to quickly update counts of COVID-19 cases and critical resources at the end of a shift or whenever is convenient through a web portal or by mobile phone.

As the pandemic was unfolding and cases were surging, it allowed state and local health officials to use near-real-time dashboards — based on data from more than 100 acute care hospitals around the state — to coordinate responses. It continues to allow the state to monitor trends, as well as inform decisions such as how quickly counties can move toward safely reopening their economies, Henry said.

“This was a real-time moving event, and people needed to make decisions hour by hour and minute by minute,” said Gary Bird, a principal program manager for Microsoft Power Platform who worked to deploy WA HEALTH. “You really saw the whole company lean in across all fronts to make solutions happen.”

Balancing supply and demand

Once the pandemic hit, Microsoft’s plans to deal with unexpected spikes in usage and expand Azure’s computing resources kicked in. The company began adding new servers to the hardest hit regions and installing new hardware racks 24 hours a day. To protect the health of critical datacenter employees, Microsoft also quickly established social distancing requirements, provided protective equipment and implemented strict disinfectant policies.

Microsoft prioritized capacity for existing customers while also reserving capacity for first responders who needed to quickly scale life and safety services. It also expanded cloud support for non-profits working to protect people’s health during the pandemic.

Microsoft’s Azure and product teams worked around the clock to ensure that services like Teams, Office and Xbox could meet rapidly exploding demand from customers. Next, they looked for efficiencies across all of Microsoft services running on Azure to free up more capacity for external customers.

Microsoft Teams was the first and most obvious service to experience massive growth. But other Azure services that enable remote work, such as Windows Virtual Desktop, which saw its usage triple in one month, and Azure Active Directory’s Application Proxy had to scale those services dramatically as financial institutions, schools, call centers and other companies moved thousands of employees onto those platforms practically overnight.

Not only were new customers signing up, but suddenly existing users were relying on the tools to power every single meeting or interaction in their workday, said Mark Longton, a principal group program manager for Microsoft Teams.

“Teams went from a service that was cool and convenient and something that people realized was the future of communication to very quickly becoming a mission critical, can’t-live-without-it sort of thing,” Longton said. “Really what this did was accelerate us into the future.”

Microsoft Teams began using early data from China and Italy to plan for expected growth as the pandemic spread. As more countries went into lockdown, dozens of Redmond-based Microsoft employees gathered remotely each Sunday night to watch telemetry, look for bottlenecks and troubleshoot as unprecedented numbers of remote European workers began logging in first thing Monday morning.

“Normally, you find and fix issues organically as you grow. When you take software and put it under explosive growth – with services getting used an order of magnitude more in one day — you tend to find all of those in a really short period of time,” said John Sheehan, Microsoft distinguished engineer for Azure quality.

Once critical services were successfully scaled and stabilized, the company shifted to looking for efficiencies. Microsoft opened up performance data for all services running on Azure to engineers across the company, asking them to submit ideas that would allow Microsoft to provide more computing capacity to the wider pool of Azure customers.

In Teams, small tweaks that few customers would notice — lengthening the time it takes for the three dots to appear when someone else is typing in a Teams chat or disabling the feature that suggests a contact every time you type a new letter in the “to” field — made the system run much more leanly. Engineers rewrote the code to make video stream processing 10 times more efficient in a marathon push over a weekend.

The response to the COVID-19 pandemic is stretching health care systems across the Asia Pacific region and around the world. The infrastructure and supply chains of health care providers are being challenged, and our health care front-liners work tirelessly to provide treatment and support in a time of unprecedented demand for patient care. And if there is one question on the minds of those of the pandemic’s front-line it is most likely: “Can we do more with less?”

It is crucial to speed up routine tasks and services, especially during this time when a growing number of patients and limited resources can quickly overwhelm staff. We have seen how collaboration with customers and partners has taken on a speed and agility that we’ve not encountered before and how new cloud-based solutions, often leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning, can do much to augment the work of doctors, nurses and first responders.

It can start with better managing resources and protecting the health of personnel and patients from the very moment someone enters a hospital.

Taipei’s Yonghe Cardinal Tien Hospital deployed digital first-line protection measures and resource management in the early stages of the COVID-19 outbreak. It installed a “2-in-1” detection device at its main entrance that collects and analyzes data with AI and machine learning to scan individuals as they enter the hospital’s lobby. It sends out an alert if there are potential health concerns – such as a raised temperature. Scanning from a distance and autonomously minimizes risk for everyone. It also has delivered much-needed efficiencies by significantly streamlining the number of staff who are needed to monitor arrivals. That means more time and personnel can be allocated to patient care.

Similarly, Austin Health in Melbourne has introduced COVID-Care systems to improve their capacity to cope with anticipated demand. Patients no longer have to come to the hospital but can use a self-assessment tool instead. If advised to be tested, they are also advised of the nearest testing clinic or, if directed to Austin Health, can book an appointment. Another of the system’s tools monitors the symptoms of recuperating patients. Using AI and algorithms, COVID-Care automatically alerts doctors to follow up with patients via telehealth consultations and determine if the patient needs to go to the hospital or can stay home.

AI and machine learning can greatly assist front-liners and alleviate the stress on our health care systems. Since the beginning of March, health organizations have created 1,600 COVID-19 self-assessment bots with the Microsoft Healthcare bot service that help respond to inquiries and free up health care workers. This has served over 31 million individuals across 23 countries to date. More than ever, it is crucial that patient needs are met despite limited resources, to ensure the well-being of our communities and technology can support that.

Ensuring accessibility to health care in safe conditions through remote care

There are more challenges when a patient is fighting COVID-19 along with existing medical issues. Let’s take for example a COVID-19 patient who also has a broken limb. Could an orthopedic doctor attend to the patient without entering the isolation ward themselves?

The team at Austin Health has addressed this with their deployment of Microsoft Teams and Teams Navigator to help their 8,500 staff collaborate and assist doctors in conducting virtual ward rounds. They can check in on their patients in the isolation wards, while maintaining a safe distance.

In India, Fortis Healthcare has introduced tele-consultations, which have proved helpful for those like expectant mothers and individuals with mental health conditions who need continuous treatment and high frequency care.

We see how health care providers like HealthCare Global (HCG), India’s largest provider of cancer care, addressed this challenge by adopting Teams Virtual Consult. Doctors now schedule and conduct virtual consultations with patients who can continue receiving the necessary care from the safety of their homes.

Similarly, in China, Sichuan’s Huili County People’s Hospital and Chengdu’s Third People’s Hospital deployed a remote consultation platform, connecting patients in need from a remote part of the country with the quality medical care provided from a distant facility. Doctors use Surface, Azure and AI to carry out remote online consultations. They can also discuss cases and diagnoses with fellow physicians remotely.

Reimagining access to healthcare

Bain and Company’s 2020 Asia-Pacific Front Line of Healthcare survey revealed that the adoption of digital health services due to COVID-19 is not just unprecedented, but also one that will endure. Nearly 50% of patients said that they expect to use digital health tools in the next five years, and 91% of consumers said they would if the costs were covered by an insurance provider or employer.

Dr. David Rhew, global medical chief officer at Microsoft, reinforces this perspective, saying, “This pandemic has given us a great understanding that we need digital tools in health care. Tools that enable everything from telehealth to remote patient monitoring, care team collaboration and care at home. Virtualizing and streamlining other aspects of care from ventilator management to supply chain management have now become vital elements of health care in the COVID-19 era.”

Access to medical supplies, especially as countries remain under lockdown, is another critical element for the safety and well-being of communities. In response, Zuellig Pharma, one of the largest health care services groups in Asia, ensures that vital supplies get to those who need them. They launched a 24/7 interactive engagement platform to assist their customers – hospitals, clinics and pharmacies – with placing orders for prescription drugs, medical devices or consumer health products any time, anywhere to make sure that every medical facility and every patient have access to the medicines they need.

During the pandemic, limited access and possible shortages to pharmaceutical supplies have raised concerns around counterfeit drugs entering the market. In response, Zuellig Pharma has also fast-tracked the development of eZTracker, which allows consumers to verify the authenticity of a medicine by scanning a code on the packaging.

Gearing up for the battle ahead

In the short span of time since the emergence of COVID-19, we have already seen significant changes in the way that health care is delivered. Undoubtedly, the pandemic will have a profound impact on the whole industry for years to come.

I cannot agree more with Dr. Rhew, who emphasized that, “a safer return to the workplace will require a lot of changes in how businesses will be run. Every organization must adjust, and Microsoft has the ability to support them.”

As efforts to battle the pandemic continue, we are hopeful that technology will continue to play a meaningful role in equipping health care experts with the tools they need for meaningful patient care and contributing toward research for a cure.

As part of our efforts, Microsoft has mobilized an AI for Health initiative with $20 million dedicated to help on the front lines of research, where our data scientists can best contribute: data and insights; treatment and diagnostics; allocation of resources; dissemination of accurate information; and scientific research.

We’ll also be offering Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare, our first industry-specific cloud offering,  in October. This will help bring together capabilities for customers and partners to enrich patient engagement, connect caregiving teams and improve operational efficiencies. Ultimately, to address the most pressing challenges the industry is facing today.

We’ll also continue to work with our partners, including ATGENOMIX, a startup in Taiwan that is providing virus genome sequencing technology, which runs on Azure HPC, to speed up research and health care analysis, and support vaccine development. 

Ultimately, the collaboration across our broad ecosystem and beyond is crucial to effectively address the challenges of this global crisis and support our customers in building their resilience and agility so they can continue to provide so much needed care for the communities.

We are committed to working together to empower health care organizations in the fight against the adverse effects of the pandemic and in the long run, support their pivot toward better experiences, better insights and better care.

(Top photo by kumikomini/Getty Images)

We are living in a new world, a world racing online as social distancing forces many of us to work, communicate and connect in new ways. In the United States alone, state and local directives have urged 316 million Americans to stay in and, when possible, work from home. As communities around the world adapt to a world with COVID-19, broadband connectivity and access are more critical to our lives and livelihoods than ever before.

Broadband already powers much of our modern lives, but COVID-19 has acted as an accelerant, a fuel of sorts that has driven many essential activities online. All learning, services, commerce, most workplaces and daily interactions online require a high-speed connection to the internet. Those without access to this online world – more than 18 million Americans with 14 million living in rural areas, according to the Federal Communications Commission – risk falling farther behind. While 18 million is a big number – more than the entire populations of Indiana, Iowa and Tennessee combined – a new study has found that the actual number of people lacking access to broadband in the US is closer to 42 million.

We will eventually come out the other end of the COVID-19 crisis, but the future that emerges will look different from the world we left when this crisis began. The future of commerce, work, medicine, education and services will have changed – and, in some instances, permanently.

A problem intensified by COVID-19

Lack of broadband for rural populations, both in the United States and in the developing world, just can’t be ignored. That’s why, in the last three months, we’ve doubled down on our Microsoft Airband Initiative to expand the number of people reached. As of March 31, we’ve helped provide 1.2 million people with access to broadband in rural, previously unserved areas of the United States. This is almost double our total from December 31, 2019, and up from 24,000 people in the whole of 2018. We’re doing the most recent work by donating hotspots and wireless connectivity equipment, and expanding our digital skills offerings by developing COVID-19-specific digital skills offerings for rural communities.

We’re undertaking this work in tandem with ISPs, state and local governments, non-profits such as the National 4-H Council, and other mission-aligned public- and private-sector entities. Eight out of 12 of our commercial ISP partners have taken the FCC’s Keep Americans Connected Pledge, committing to maintaining connectivity to customers who are economically impacted by the crisis. Even those partners that have not formally signed on to the FCC’s pledge have committed to serving their communities by maintaining connectivity for existing customers and connecting new subscribers. The Airband Team has published a customer-ready Airband US COVID-19 Response Summary outlining our programmatic and policy responses to COVID-19 in the US.

We’re not the only ones trying to make a difference. Companies across the country are stepping up to the plate, including tech companies such as Google and T-Mobile. But it isn’t just tech that’s helping – companies such as Land O’Lakes are also working to close the broadband gap. We need the government to step up and meet us halfway.

Policy principles and new federal funding to accelerate much-needed changes

The most significant way to move the dial for Americans without broadband is by changing policy at the federal, state and local level, not only for more funding but to remove roadblocks so that broadband can reach rural and underserved Americans faster. In short, there’s a critical need for Congress to do three things.

First, Congressional action is needed to address the immediate broadband connectivity needs that are having a heightened impact on individuals and communities during the COVID-19 crisis. Funding is needed in the next stimulus bill so that students and teachers have access to remote learning, people have access to their doctors and other telehealth options, and to help people work from home, file and maintain their unemployment benefits, and apply for jobs online.

Second, there’s an urgent need to provide funding to the FCC so it can implement recently enacted broadband-mapping legislation. As we’ve said before, we can’t solve a problem we don’t understand.

Third, additional action is needed to permanently close the broadband gap. With accurate data on broadband availability, we recommend Congress provides funds based on seven important principles. Namely, these funds should be:

1. Targeted: Any broadband funding mechanism should be designed to address a known market need; for example, the need to deliver broadband access to unserved rural areas and connect students without broadband access before schools start in the fall.

2. Technology neutral: Broadband funding should be made available on a technology neutral basis.

3. Broadband-capable: Networks should be required to meet at least the FCC-defined speed for broadband.

4. Least costly: To minimize costs, funding amounts should be determined through a competitive bidding process (the FCC’s use of reverse auctions is an example of such a mechanism).

5. Non-distortionary: Any program should aim to minimize market distortions in how funds are collected and how they are distributed.

6. Deployed quickly: Preference should be given to broadband providers that commit to rapid deployment of broadband networks and services.

7. Avoid administrative burdens: Programs should minimize red tape and only impose requirements on recipients that are necessary to ensure the integrity of the programs.

With this approach, the country can finally provide the funding needed for ISPs to close the broadband gap. In addition, we support efforts by the FCC, USDA and other federal and state agencies to release funds under new and existing programs to address the needs of vulnerable healthcare workers and patients, educators and learners, and remote workers. This is especially important because, in times of economic downturn, states are more cash-strapped than usual and don’t have resources necessary to make these critical investments.

The COVID-19 virus has created a national crisis. But it has also created an important opportunity. It’s time to galvanize the nation and recognize the obvious. Broadband has become the electricity of the 21st century. Well before the end of the 20th century, we recognized that no American should live without electricity. As we embark on the third decade of the 21st century, every American deserves the opportunity to access broadband.

Tags: Airband initiative, broadband access, COVID-19, rural broadband