Tag: Healthcare

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Introducing Azure Health Bot—evolution of Microsoft Healthcare Bot brings new functionality

This post was co-authored by Gregory Moore, M.D., Ph.D., CVP for Microsoft Health Next.

Since the start of the pandemic, Microsoft Healthcare Bot has been at the leading edge of helping organizations be more agile with patient engagement. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC), Walgreens, Premera, and Providence are just a few of the many organizations that are leveraging Microsoft Healthcare Bot to create bots to triage symptoms, answer lab and COVID-related questions, locate nearby clinics, and more. Over the last year, the Healthcare Bot has been used to build thousands of bots and deliver close to 1 billion messages to over 80 million people worldwide, spanning 25 countries.

Today we are announcing that the Microsoft Healthcare Bot service is moving to Azure, further empowering organizations to benefit from Azure’s enhanced tooling, security, and compliance offerings. Customers will be able to seamlessly migrate from Microsoft Healthcare Bot to Azure Health Bot with a few simple steps and no downtime. Additionally, we continue to bring new capabilities to Azure Health Bot, such as new templates for checking eligibility for COVID-19 vaccines and providing answers to related questions.

Azure Health Bot empowers developers in healthcare organizations to build and deploy AI-powered, compliant, conversational healthcare experiences at scale. It combines built-in medical databases with natural language capabilities to understand clinical terminology and can be easily customized to support clinical and operational use cases. The service enables customers’ compliance with industry requirements including HIPAA.

As a native Azure service, Azure Health Bot benefits from Azure’s security investments as well as the most comprehensive compliance coverage of any cloud service provider. Now customers can use standard Azure management tools that they are familiar with and rely on the 99.9 percent SLA commitment. While currently available in two regions (East US and West Europe), it will expand availability to eight regions over the coming months.

Azure Health Bot templates to easily get started.

With this move to Azure, we are making it easier than ever before to build bots for healthcare-specific scenarios. Our customers have been using Microsoft Healthcare Bot to drive patient engagement in a variety of use cases and we are excited to see further innovation.

“As part of our Well-Being Initiative, we created the Stress Self-Assessment tool using the Azure Health Bot.This tool offers an anonymous way for nurses to check on themselves and receive guidance to safeguard their well-being. The bot helps nurses discover and make use of a variety of evidence-based ways to build strength and maintain health, like peer support, guided relaxation, apps with well-being tools, and webinars.” —Kate Judge, Executive Director, American Nurses Foundation

“We did not want to build from scratch, but we wanted a robust, scalable platform, that was highly secure. The health bot, built in partnership with Microsoft, started handling 30,000 enquiries a day within a few weeks of first getting up and running.” —Fran Thompson, Interim Chief Information Officer, Health Service Executive (HSE) Ireland

If you are an existing customer of Microsoft Healthcare Bot, you can easily migrate to Azure Health Bot in a few minutes with no downtime. While we highly encourage you to migrate to Azure Health Bot for the best experience, we will continue to support your existing service at least for the coming 12 months.

Get started today

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Medical imaging, AI and the cloud: what’s next?

Today marks the start of RSNA 2020, the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America. I participated in my first RSNA 35 years ago and I am super excited—as I am every year—to reconnect with my radiology colleagues and friends and learn about the latest medical and scientific advances in our field. Of course, RSNA will be very different this year. Instead of traveling to Chicago to attend sessions and presentations, and wander the exhibits, I’ll experience it all online. While I will miss the fun, excitement, and opportunities to connect that come with being there in person, I am amazed by what a rich and comprehensive conference the organizers of RSNA 2020 have put together using the advanced digital tools that we have at hand now.

It would be an understatement to say that this has been a year in which nearly everything is very different. From the tragic loss of life and rampant sickness to the economic disruption and the impact on our professions and our children’s education, so much of what we have been through because of COVID-19 has been extremely difficult. But the resilience of the response that so many people and institutions have shown in the face of all these challenges has been remarkable. And if it is possible to say there has been some good in all this, it would have to be the unprecedented transformation of the global healthcare ecosystem as hospitals, clinicians, and researchers have embraced a new generation of advanced digital health technologies that have helped them respond to the coronavirus crisis and laid the foundation for a more effective, affordable, and equitable future for healthcare.

Trends

As we move forward and the digital transformation of healthcare continues to accelerate, I see three significant trends that will influence the future of health and wellness.

One is the rapid emergence of virtual care through digital tools such as telehealth and remote monitoring that have made it safer and more convenient for patients to connect with their doctors during the pandemic, and that is empowering individuals to take charge of their health in entirely new ways. Virtual care has the capacity to personalize, accelerate, and augment treatment and prevention, saving time and money while improving outcomes. The ability to engage patients without requiring an in-person visit to a clinic will help ensure that they receive the right level of care and enable healthcare facilities to better manage the flow of patients into clinics and emergency rooms.

The second trend is the growing clarity of the promise of AI-driven precision medicine to serve as a major catalyst for improving health outcomes. As platforms for precision medicine and real-world evidence mature, we’ll see exciting opportunities to improve treatment and prevention as we personalize patient care and transform how we diagnose infectious disease, cancer, and autoimmune disorders.

And, finally, where healthcare organizations have long been reluctant to move data offsite due to security, trust, and privacy concerns, we have seen a historic shift to the cloud over the last nine months. Now, driven by regulatory changes, the massive increase in medical data, and the critical need to access and analyze all that data by providers, payers, public health agencies, and researchers, it’s clear to everyone that moving to the cloud is both essential and hugely beneficial, both to providers and to patients.

Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare

As part of Microsoft’s ongoing commitment to help healthcare customers and partners continue to make progress toward recovery and build more resilient and effective systems of care, in late October we announced the general availability of Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare. This powerful industry-specific solution provides integrated capabilities for automated and efficient high-value workflows, and advanced data analysis functionally for structured and unstructured data so that healthcare organizations can truly transform information into insight and insight into action.

Built on the trusted capabilities of Microsoft 365, Microsoft Azure, Microsoft Dynamics 365, and Microsoft Power Platform, Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare is designed to enhance patient engagement to make it easier for patients to interact with caregivers, empower health team collaboration to facilitate more efficient and rich real-time communication and collaboration across the care continuum, and improve clinical and operational data insights with the ability of healthcare organizations to connect data from across their systems to predict risk and help improve patient care and operational efficiencies. Our robust partner ecosystem extends the power of Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare by building and extending advanced health solutions to meet the most demanding challenges in healthcare.

Radiology

All of this makes it a particularly exciting time to be a radiologist. In many ways, our field has always been at the forefront of advances in the technologies that improve the movement, management, and analysis of large amounts of health data. This shouldn’t really be a surprise, given that medical imaging accounts for nearly three-quarters of all health data, and analyzing 3D medical images can require up to 50 GB of bandwidth a day.

At Microsoft, streamlining the flow of health data, including medical imaging data, has been a significant focus of our work over the past few years. With the release of the Medical Imaging Server for DICOM (Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine) in September, we offer developers powerful tools to ingest and persist medical imaging data in the cloud. Elevating interoperability, this is the first cloud technology to bring together DICOM data standard and FHIR (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources) which allows for persisting medical imaging metadata alongside other clinical data and sets the stage for multiple scenarios in research and diagnosis which may be too difficult or expensive to execute today.

Now, with Project InnerEye and the open-source InnerEye Deep Learning Toolkit, we’re making machine learning techniques available to developers, researchers, and partners that they can use to pioneer new approaches by training their own ML models, with the aim of augmenting clinician productivity, helping to improve patient outcomes, and refining our understanding of how medical imaging can be combined with other types of data to advance personalized medicine.

Learn more about our latest medical imaging offerings at the RSNA industry hour lunch and learn on December 3, 12:30 PM – 1:30 PM Central Time.

Partners

Reimagining an industry that is as complex and touches as many lives as healthcare is a massive undertaking and at Microsoft, we have the privilege of working with amazing partners who stand at the forefront of innovation and progress in medical imaging technology.

Our partners are building transformative solutions to address some of the most difficult challenges in medical imaging. The amount of data generated by medical diagnostic imaging and connected devices is growing exponentially. Healthcare stakeholders, therefore, need effective ways of handling these data at scale.

This prompted Siemens Healthineers to build a dedicated cloud environment for Healthcare: The teamplay digital health platform. Through a certified gateway, the teamplay receiver, health data from connected medical devices can be aggregated. The teamplay cloud infrastructure is based on Azure, allowing secured processing of data within or outside a hospital’s network.

GE Healthcare’s Centricity™ Universal Viewer Zero Footprint (ZFP) connects advanced diagnostic tools and system-wide image management platforms across the care continuum to help healthcare organizations improve diagnostic speed and confidence. ZFP users can now open Microsoft Teams with one click and share studies with other clinicians via the secure and compliant channels.1

SOPHiA GENETICS, the company pioneering the Data-Driven Medicine movement—trusted by over 1000 healthcare institutions in 85 countries—is highlighting their radiomics capabilities through the universal SOPHiA Platform for oncology and COVID CT imaging. Radiomics transforms standard medical imaging into mineable data assets that can be analyzed and combined with genomic data for improved decision support of precision medicine. SOPHiA Radiomics Solutions offer comprehensive workflows for multiple research and disease indication needs. SOPHiA multimodal platform is deployed on Microsoft Azure Cloud.

Microsoft and Sectra are partnering on cloud-based enterprise imaging and AI. In our joint RSNA webinar, Reap the benefits of enterprise imaging in the cloud with Microsoft & Sectra on December 3, we will introduce the brand new all-Azure and hybrid Microsoft Azure Stack offering as well as a demo of how Teams integration will help radiologists to cope in the new virtual world. We will hear Judy Bartlett from our joint customer John Muir share her experiences about moving from on-prem to running the Sectra Enterprise Imaging Solution as a Service on Azure.

With the imminent release of a new version of iConnect Enterprise Archive, IBM Watson Health will start to bring to market solutions that support a containerized deployment, in addition to VMWare, on both the IBM Cloud and Azure. The containerization of this portfolio is one of IBM Watson Health’s key initiatives, starting with their VNA foundation and leveraging IBM’s Red Hat OpenShift technology to ensure build once and deploy anywhere to be cloud native and agnostic.

With NVIDIA Clara Imaging, developers and researchers have the ability to accelerate data annotation, build domain-specialized AI models, and deploy intelligent imaging workflows with state-of-the-art pre-trained models and reference applications. Working closely with Azure, these innovators can jumpstart their development in the cloud and also address tough medical imaging challenges faster with Project InnerEye. During the current pandemic, our partnership is heavily accelerating progress Research in drug discovery (UC, Riverside; UCB Covid Moonshot) using GPUs on Azure for quantum mechanics model as well as using AI for SARS COVID-19 risk evaluation in Italy (Hospital San Raffaele, Milan). This partnership also enables the development and deployment of smart hospital solutions, running on NVIDIA Clara Guardian and Azure.

And finally, Flywheel is a cloud-scale informatics platform for biomedical research and collaboration. What is exciting about our differentiated work is the ability to securely leverage cloud at the edge with Microsoft Azure Stack Hub and transform these image analytics with Microsoft AI enabling tools and Flywheel’s depth in medical imaging data management and automated workflows.

Microsoft is the only cloud that extends to the edge from Microsoft Azure Edge Zone for 5G to Microsoft Azure Sphere for security. We’re removing all barriers by covering all security and data sovereignty concerns in the cloud. With over 168,000 partners around the world, the network for innovation and collaboration runs deep. We cannot wait to see how together we will build solutions that transform healthcare around the world.

For more information on Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare, AI imaging tools, or to learn more about partnership visit the Microsoft virtual booth at RSNA or connect with us at our featured demo on November 29, 2:00 PM – 2:30 PM Central Time.

[1] Technology in development that represents ongoing research and development efforts. These technologies are not products and may never become products. Not for sale. Not cleared or approved by the U.S. FDA or any other global regulator for commercial availability.

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AI for Health has awarded more than 150 grants to COVID-19 projects worldwide

We launched our AI for Health program in January to use artificial intelligence (AI) and data to help improve the health of people and communities worldwide. Shortly thereafter, Covid-19 hit us head on and became a global health pandemic that upended the lives of people, communities and economies around the world. Recognizing the global impact of this disease, we mobilized AI for Health in April to focus on helping those on the front lines of Covid-19 research.

Early on, we had no idea the tenacity and duration of the disease. But, as of the time of writing, there have been more than 50 million confirmed cases of Covid-19, and more than 1.25 million deaths globally, according to the World Health Organization. Despite the ongoing efforts of scientists, researchers and policymakers, Covid-19 continues to change and shift the world as we know it.

The Covid-19 crisis has made it painfully clear that health transcends every border, impacting every person on the planet. As such, we want to empower researchers, nonprofits and policymakers with resources including Azure High Performance Computing, Power BI analytics and open datasets from GitHub. Non-profits and health care have less than 5% of global AI resources, so we have made our top data scientists and researchers available to support those on the front lines. Since April, through AI for Health, we’ve awarded over 150 grants to Covid-19 projects around the world.

Our grantees and partners have shared access to Microsoft’s AI technology, and these resources have accelerated the progress made in their research. With large-scale computing and open data, what used to take months can now be done in a matter of days. The rapid progress means researchers can more quickly identify potential solutions to combat Covid-19 and provide timely information to policymakers for data-driven decisions that protect communities, cities and regions. We are proud to support the work that is being done to fight this disease and remain committed in our support.

covid pie chart AI for Health Covid-19 response by the numbers

Through our program, we have seen that 39% of grantee projects are focused on treatment and diagnostics, including UCB and University of California, Riverside. Meanwhile, grantees focused on data and insights, including IHME, Washington State Department of Health and University of Notre Dame, made up 31% of the grants. Some 14% of the projects, such as [email protected], were focused on basic scientific research. The remaining projects, including grantees such as Duke University, were focused on allocation of resources (8%) and dissemination of accurate information (8%) from grantees such as Take.

Highlights from AI for Health Covid-19 response grantees include:

  • A grassroots employee volunteer effort at Belgian biopharmaceutical company UCB has identified 150 new molecules that could potentially counteract replication of the SARS-CoV-2 virus and aid in drug therapies as part of the Covid-19 Moonshot initiative.
  • Harnessing GPU-enabled cloud resources, UC Riverside researchers utilize quantum-based methods to more accurately predict the effectiveness of proposed Covid-19 inhibitors. This is one of several Covid-19 projects underway.
  • IHME, a global health research organization at the University of Washington School of Medicine, forecasts the Covid-19 pandemic, helping governors, hospital administrators and vaccine makers mobilize resources.
  • Organizations such as Washington State’s Department of Health and the Governor’s office are creating Covid-19 data dashboards to track the disease.
  • University of Notre Dame librarians have created a new way to undertake research by enabling access to curated sets of research literature in the cloud that can also be taken offline for analysis when students and researchers are not on campus due to lockdowns.
  • [email protected], a distributed computing project at Washington University in St. Louis, is using AI to better understand the relationship between proteins and diseases with a goal of accelerating new therapeutics, including for Covid-19.
  • Professor Amanda Randles at Duke University is using the power of Azure to conduct hundreds of millions of simulations required to help more patients have access to critical ventilators.
  • Take, the Brazilian leader in chatbots and the smart contacts market, developed a bot to bring official and credible information to the public and connect potential patients to medical teams to avoid overloading Brazilian hospitals.

We also have incredible partnerships with top organizations that extend our Covid-19 efforts, such as:

  • Partnering with the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy’s (OSTP) High Performance Computing Consortium to support researchers and academia.
  • Working with Brown University’s School of Public Health and the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard to visualize a common set of measures on testing and risk levels to help everyone know where we are with the pandemic and help policymakers guide their response. This includes a State Testing Calculator that supports policymakers’ ability to create more nuanced testing and opening strategies while protecting high-risk populations.
  • Joining University of Oxford and their Government Response Tracker initiative to track and compare government and policy responses to address Covid-19 around the world.
  • Being a founding member of The Trinity Challenge, a coalition of private, academic and social organizations using data and advanced analytics to prevent the next pandemic.

Lastly, by using publicly available information from partners such as USAFacts, we have created a number of interactive visualizations to provide transparency into Covid-19 trends globally.

We also created a unique measure called Progress to Zero to help everyone understand, in simple terms, our progress in reducing Covid-19 cases, hospitalizations and deaths.

Covid Power BI image

In the U.S., we’ve updated the dashboard to show Covid-19 risk levels by congressional districts to help policymakers understand the progress and actions they need to take against the disease.

Our partners and grantees make progress against Covid-19 every day, but there is still much to do to fight the disease. The great work being done by our partners and grantees emboldens us to continue working tirelessly against Covid-19, while also supporting and helping those on the front lines. We are humbled by their incredible efforts and remain committed to supporting researchers and policymakers around the world as they tackle this terrible disease.

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Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare now generally available: unlocking health data for better care

As healthcare providers have faced unprecedented workloads (individually and institutionally) around the world, the pandemic response continues to cause seismic shifts in how, where, and when care is provided. Longer-term, it has revealed the need for fundamental shifts across the care continuum. As a physician, I have seen first-hand the challenges of not having the right data, at the right time, in the right format to make informed shared decisions with my patients. These challenges amplify the urgency for trusted partners and solutions to help solve emergent health challenges.

Today we’re taking a big step forward to address these challenges with the general availability of Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare. 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. It 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.

Innovation and Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare

That starts with Azure API for FHIR, which enables the rapid exchange of data through Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR®) APIs, backed by a managed platform as a service (PaaS) offering. It makes it easier for anyone working with health data to ingest, manage, and persist protected health information in the cloud. The healthcare industry is rapidly transforming health data to the emerging standard of FHIR®, which enables a robust, extensible data model with standardized semantics and data exchange that enables all systems using FHIR to work together. Transforming your data to FHIR allows you to quickly connect existing data sources such as the electronic health record systems or research databases. FHIR also enables the rapid exchange of data in modern implementations of mobile and web development. Most importantly, FHIR can simplify data ingestion and accelerate development with analytics and Machine Learning tools. The shift from on-premises computing to the cloud in healthcare is one of the five megatrends I spoke about recently and is a one-time event happening in a more compressed period than other industries.

Another key innovation for Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare was born out of a Microsoft Hackathon and launched in 2019, but gained worldwide utilization this year during the pandemic. The Microsoft Health Bot service is an Azure cloud service that empowers healthcare organizations to rapidly build and deploy AI-powered virtual health assistants and chatbots that can be used to enhance their processes, self-service, and cost reduction efforts. The Health Bot comes with built-in healthcare AI services, such as clinical protocols and medical content from trusted industry sources, healthcare templates for rapid design, language understanding models that are tuned to understand medical and clinical terminology, and seamless hand-off to live chat and telehealth when required. The uptake of the Health Bot service has been incredible. Since March 2020, Microsoft’s Health Bot has triaged over 600 million messages and deployed 2,300 COVID-19 bots in 25 countries, to serve more than 50 million users. At a time when call centers and emergency departments were overwhelmed, this bot service has helped many hospital systems, non-government organizations (NGOs), and public health systems, including the US Center for Disease Control, to communicate up-to-date guidance, prioritize care for their most urgent patients, and receive real-time data on people’s interactions with the bot.

As we continue to expand the capabilities in Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare, our teams continue to bring forward innovations. Remote patient monitoring provides the ability to gather patient health data outside of traditional healthcare settings. Healthcare institutions can use Azure IoT Connector for FHIR to bring health data generated by remote devices into Azure API for FHIR. This data could be used to closely track patient health status, monitor patient adherence to treatment plans, and provide personalized care.

Recently released in Open Source, the Medical Imaging Server for DICOM streamlines the process of ingesting medical imaging data in the cloud. By using the Medical Imaging Server for DICOM alongside the Azure API for FHIR or other FHIR services, data references are created between imaging data and clinical data in FHIR, setting the stage for multiple scenarios which are difficult and expensive to execute in today’s on-premises systems. As a radiologist, I am excited to see the development of Microsoft’s imaging server. Imaging data makes up 74 percent of all medical data and on our quest for patient-centered care, this imaging data often provides the clues to connect the dots in disease detection as well as to guide the most effective prevention and treatment strategies. 

Text Analytics for Health, a feature of Microsoft Azure Text Analytics, is an AI service currently in preview that enables and simplifies the process of extracting insights from unstructured medical data. Trained on a diverse range of medical data—covering various formats of clinical notes, clinical trial protocols, and more—this health feature is capable of processing a broad range of data types and tasks, without the need for time-intensive, manual development of custom models. Much of today’s healthcare data is in the form of unstructured text, such as doctor’s notes, medical publications, electronic health records, clinical trial protocols, medical encounter transcripts, and more. Healthcare organizations, providers, researchers, pharmaceutical companies, and others face an incredible challenge in trying to identify and draw insights from all that information. Unlocking insights from this data has massive potential for improving healthcare services and patient outcomes.

Future enhancements of Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare will include solutions for precision medicine. Decoding the information in an individual’s genome has led to a greater understanding of the variability in disease progression and treatment response across individuals. Gaining a better understanding of these genetic variations at an individual and population level is key to development of precision medicine strategies to prevent, diagnose, and treat disease. Microsoft Genomics open source solutions (Cromwell on Azure, Genomics Notebooks) enable biomedical researchers to orchestrate scalable workflows and efficiently manage genomics pipelines and analytics using the power of the Azure cloud. Our goal is to make genomics data actionable by analyzing and interpreting data generated by modern genomics technologies. 

Unlocking the power of health data with Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare and its expanding pipeline of enhancements allow care givers to gain a holistic view of the patient with insights and actionable next steps for more informed, personalized care management.

With today’s launch, Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare lays the foundation for our customers and partners to build innovative solutions, leading to better experiences and outcomes for both patients and their providers. Collaborating with our partners to bring these innovations to life is the work that keeps me energized as we reimagine the future of health globally.

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CVP Tom McGuinness: Top takeaways from HLTH 2020

Doctor touching electronic medical record on tablet. DNA. Digital healthcare and network connection on hologram modern virtual screen interface, medical technology and futuristic concept.Doctor touching electronic medical record on tablet. DNA. Digital healthcare and network connection on hologram modern virtual screen interface, medical technology and futuristic concept.

It’s always exciting to attend an event like HLTH! A time to come together with other healthcare innovators as a community to connect with peers, share, and learn from each other. It’s an opportunity to get a pulse on what’s trending and how we shape the future of healthcare. It’s an opportunity to get a pulse on what’s trending and how we shape the future of healthcare.  I encourage you to watch HLTH sessions on-demand at HLTH 2020.

But 2020 has been a year of dynamic change—The world after this pandemic will not be the same as the one that came before it. From remote teamwork and telehealth, to supply management and customer service, to critical cloud infrastructure and security—we are working alongside customers every day to help manage through a world of remote everything.

The whole of the healthcare industry has been impacted by COVID-19 in an unprecedented way. It’s had a substantial impact, and in many ways, it has raised the bar on what we need to collectively deliver as an industry.

We all have the potential to deliver a personalized experience for health consumers, empower health team productivity, improve health data accessibility, and find ways to remove the barriers of health equity and affordability. Across the healthcare ecosystem, we’re seeing organizations bring together compute, data, and artificial intelligence (AI) to help accelerate the response to COVID-19. From diagnostic testing to therapeutics and vaccines. Healthcare providers are triaging patients with our Healthcare Bot service, helping more than 40 million people to access critical healthcare information. Biotech organizations are using our machine learning capabilities to decode the immune system response to the virus, and healthcare providers and hospitals around the world are using FHIR technology in Azure to make data available for research, provide more robust treatment assessments, and deliver first-class telehealth experiences to their patients.

Technology has played an important role in helping to battle the pandemic, and Microsoft will continue to lean in to support efforts where technology can make a difference today and beyond.

Leading through COVID-19 response and recovery

During their HLTH keynote, Microsoft’s own Kurt DelBene EVP, Corporate Strategy, and Toni Townes Whitley, President US Regulated Industries, along with Dr. Nicole Fisher, President, Health and Human Rights Strategies, Global Health and Policy Contributor, Forbes, shared their insights and initiatives that are helping Microsoft employees, customers and partners through the pandemic.

In these types of situations, we must be ready to learn together. Over the past several years one of the hallmarks of our culture has been a learning organization. This is incredibly important as we focus on our employees and our customers. We became digital-first responders supporting customers and partners by leaning in, learning and helping organizations adapt to the disruption, and build scalable modalities of care while safeguarding patients, employees, and assets. From remote teamwork and telehealth, to supply chain management and customer service, to critical cloud infrastructure and security, we are working alongside customers every day to help manage through a world of remote everything.

Our commitment has always been to ensure the tools we provide are up to the task of supporting our customers in their time of need. In that same spirit, we announced our first industry-specific cloud offering, Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare. The offer brings together existing and future capabilities that deliver automation and efficiency on high-value workflows, as well as deep data analytics for both structured and unstructured data, that enable customers to turn insight into action. A robust partner ecosystem extends the value of the platform with additional solutions to address the most pressing challenges the healthcare industry is facing today. In September, we announced the general availability of Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare coming on October 28, 2020. Throughout the public preview, we’ve been working closely with customers and partners across the healthcare ecosystem on key use cases, to facilitate integrations into existing platforms and systems of record, to streamline their workflows, and ultimately deliver better experiences, insights, and care.  

At Microsoft, we will continue to focus on helping everyone get back to their places of work or school, and enabling organizations with the speed and agility to adjust to change, build resiliency that help them weather today’s challenges so they can begin to reimagine tomorrow. 

Reshaping the future of disease diagnostic

Julie Rubinstein, President of Adaptive Biotechnologies, and Dr. Greg Moore, Microsoft CVP of Health, highlighted the unreleased insights from the growing and largest ImmuneCODE database in their announcement session, “T-cells: The key to SARS-CoV-2 immunity?” ImmuneCODE is one of the largest, most detailed views of the immune response to COVID-19 based on de-identified data generated from thousands of COVID-19 blood samples from patients around the globe. This new data points to T-cells giving us predictive power for early detection and predetermining the body’s immune response.

This is reshaping the future of disease diagnostic with Azure machine learning and AI. Microsoft took the existing partnership with Adaptive and pivoted to use the same technology and antigen mapping and apply it to COVID-19. Recognizing that this approach to the virus is one of a kind, looking at T-cells for the answer for early detection, immune response individual to individual, and for therapeutics and vaccines to determine the best course of action for each patient. Information from ImmuneCODE will continue to accelerate ongoing global efforts to develop better diagnostics, vaccines, and therapeutics for COVID-19. For more information on how to join or get involved in the Adaptive and Microsoft collaboration, check out, ImmuneRace.

Accessibility as a tech opportunity

With the unprecedented shift to a virtual world, it has never been more important to be accessible and inclusive of more than one billion people worldwide with a disability.

October marks the 75th anniversary of the National Disability Employment Awareness Month (NDEAM). Jenny Lay-Flurrie, Chief Accessibility Officer at Microsoft, talked about her own personal journey and gives us a peek into the evolution of accessibility across companies, education, and healthcare.   

At Microsoft, we’re making accessibility a core part of our culture and how we design and build our products. People with disabilities have been the catalyst for innovations that have been critical during these times. Live Captions in Teams saw 30X growth in April versus February, Immersive Reader had a 560 percent increase in use, and upcoming wellbeing features in Teams responded to the growing importance of mental health.

Disability is a strength. All these technologies have been powered by insight from employees with disabilities. It’s one of the many reasons why our workforce must reflect the diversity of everyone who uses our technology. You might be surprised what is included as a disability, the majority of disabilities are invisible and include non-apparent conditions such as Cancer, Dyslexia, Autism, Depression, Anxiety, Diabetes, Asthma, and Lupus.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is one of those technologies that can help employers eliminate barriers to employment and it can help people with disabilities develop professional skills and influence workplace culture. Microsoft is an advocate of people with disabilities, committed to influencing the future of technology to ensure global independence and inclusion in society in three areas of focus: employment, daily life, communication, and connection. Read more about AI for Accessibility or our AI for Accessibility grants.

Ethical approaches to AI

Given the global scale of the pandemic, technology will play a critical role in nearly every facet of addressing COVID-19, from using AI to crunch massive datasets to analyzing disease vectors and identifying treatment impacts. We continue to collaborate with nonprofits, governments, and academic researchers on solutions, and bring our experience to the table, providing access to Microsoft AI, technical experts, data scientists, and other resources.

During the early days of the pandemic, a heightened public concern along with a readily transmissible respiratory pathogen necessitated that health systems adjust their underlying processes for screening and triage. Providence, a large multi-state multi-hospital health system with a significant presence in the greater Seattle region, applied an artificial intelligence (AI)-based chatbot technology, developed by Microsoft, to address the rising patient concerns about the virus.

By asking a series of questions based on the latest Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) guidelines, the chatbot screened patients for COVID-19 symptoms and/or exposures. Patients with symptoms and/or exposures were subsequently directed to Providence’s telehealth portal for clinical evaluation and possible testing. The bot was facilitating successful and efficient population-level care coordination. This enabled high-risk and/or symptomatic patients to receive a timely remote clinical evaluation, without increasing the risk of virus transmission to other patients or extending the wait-times for those with symptoms.

Since then, Microsoft has delivered the same chatbot technology for hospitals and governments across the globe. Today, more than 45 million people globally have been using this AI-enabled bot technology.

We all know every person is unique, and so are their illnesses. AI enables an entirely new level of personalized treatment by taking into consideration what makes a patient unique, from their genetics to their lifestyle. Precision medicine has the potential to radically improve health and longevity for every patient. This is an inflection point where the healthcare industry has an opportunity to improve the quality and delivery of care by taking a people-centered approach to the research, development, and deployment of AI. To achieve this, as an industry we need to embrace diverse perspectives, continuous learning, and agile responsiveness as AI technology and precision medicine continue to evolve.

But it’s also important healthcare organizations cultivate a responsible AI-ready culture throughout their businesses and put principles into place from implementation to governance with practices, tools, and technologies built on multidisciplinary research, shared learning, and leading innovation. Learn more about Microsoft’s commitment to responsible AI.

It’s a pivotal time to be working in healthcare and HLTH proved it. If you didn’t attend any of the live sessions, I’d encourage you to watch HLTH sessions on-demand at HLTH 2020.  And I look forward to seeing all of you at the HLTH 2021 event, where we are sure to gain a whole new set of insights and inspirations for a bold path forward.  

Visit Microsoft for Healthcare to learn about our perspective for healthcare organizations and the opportunity to see more information about the new Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare solution. 

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ZEISS partners with Microsoft for better patient care through data-driven healthcare and to enhance quality and efficiency in manufacturing

Robotic devices in manufacturing
ZEISS provides quality assurance solutions delivering meaningful information on parts dimensions, component behavior and defect detection (©ZEISS).

Oberkochen, Germany, and Redmond, Wash., October 7, 2020 – Today, ZEISS Group and Microsoft Corp. announced a multi-year strategic partnership to accelerate ZEISS’ transformation into a digital services provider that is embracing a cloud-first approach. By standardizing its equipment and processes on Microsoft Azure as its preferred cloud platform, ZEISS will be able to provide its customers with enhanced digital experiences, address changing market needs more quickly and increase its productivity.

Leveraging Azure high-performance compute, AI, and IoT services, ZEISS will work with Microsoft to provide original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) with new quality management solutions, enable microchip manufacturers to build more powerful, energy-efficient microchips, and deliver new digital healthcare solutions for improved clinical workflows, enhanced treatments, and device maintenance. Furthermore, ZEISS will create a seamless experience for its customers through one digital platform and manage all digital ZEISS products through one cloud-native platform to enhance continuous and agile product development.

Microsoft’s datacenter regions around the globe help meet the regional needs of ZEISS’ customers while delivering against highest security, privacy and resiliency standards. ZEISS will build on Microsoft’s experience in software development to grow its own digital capabilities while helping Microsoft enhance its customer-driven product innovation through deep industry insights.

Connected quality platform drives industrial efficiency

Initially, ZEISS will enable its solutions in the Industrial Quality & Research segment to be run on a connected quality platform built on Azure, allowing direct integration into the customer’s production process. The platform will help gain business insights and foster collaboration across domains, assets and processes that have traditionally been managed in siloed, proprietary systems.

ZEISS provides metrology and quality assurance solutions delivering meaningful information on parts dimensions, component behavior and defect detection. Real-time and large-scale analysis of data that is collected at all stages of the manufacturing process is key to efficient and effective quality assurance, tightly integrated with today’s and tomorrow’s IoT-enabled production processes.

Quality is also a key objective of a new ZEISS audit trail solution, initially focused on highly regulated manufacturing industries, such as medical technology which is particularly sensitive to quality assurance. The solution will allow customers to identify root causes and react quickly on quality issues to reduce down-time and keep productivity up. The software will allow customers to track, trace, visualize and analyze process and product data with the help of Azure AI services to identify failure root causes more quickly.

High-performance computing enables more powerful, energy-efficient microchips

The ZEISS Semiconductor Manufacturing Technology segment (SMT) enables chip manufacturers worldwide to produce smaller, more powerful, more affordable and more energy-efficient microchips which are used in essentially every technical device today. Optical lithography applying deep ultra violet (DUV) and even extreme ultra violet (EUV) light allows to manufacture chips at structure sizes 4,000 times thinner than a human hair or, more scientifically, at single-digit nanometer sizes. Lithography systems include extremely complex and ultra-precisely shaped aspherical lenses (DUV) and mirrors (EUV). ZEISS SMT is a technological leader in this field of the semiconductor industry. Especially the development of next-generation, so-called High-NA EUV systems requires the most complex optical calculations calling for massive compute power.

Using Azure high-performance compute capabilities, ZEISS is now able to dynamically burst to the cloud to complement its sophisticated on-premises high-performance computing cluster and handle peaks more efficiently. Such capabilities enable the development of future leading-edge EUV lithography tools. Optical lithography and especially EUV technology advancements are driving digitalization and are keeping Moore’s Law alive for many years to come.

Data-driven healthcare solutions improve patient care

ZEISS Medical Technology provides comprehensive solutions for ophthalmic professionals and microsurgeons, consisting of devices, implants, consumables and services. Through the partnership, ZEISS will connect its medical technology to Microsoft’s cloud and leverage Azure AI and IoT technologies for new digital services such as improved clinical workflows, enhanced treatments, and device maintenance in a secure environment that enables compliance with regulatory requirements in the health industry. These solutions will help improve the quality of life of patients and drive progress, efficiency and access to healthcare.

Cloud-native ZEISS platforms enhance customer experience and boost internal productivity

ZEISS Digital Innovation Partners and ZEISS Corporate IT already partner very closely with Microsoft and will further intensify and scale this partnership going forward. Together with Microsoft, ZEISS Corporate IT has developed a cloud-native digital integration platform running on Azure to integrate all customer-facing digital ZEISS products into ZEISS Enterprise IT. ZEISS can apply the latest technology developments and share its manufacturing and medical technology insights at the same time to support Microsoft’s customer-driven product innovations.

ZEISS Digital Innovation Partners builds on these integration capabilities and uses Azure cloud and DevOps services to enable a seamless and coherent end-to-end digital journey for ZEISS customers, for example quality experts and eyecare professionals. The digital customer interaction platform MY ZEISS will integrate various customer-facing solutions into one platform so that customers can easily manage their Zeiss touchpoints through one central web application.

“As a global leader in optics and optoelectronics, ZEISS is committed to digitally enable its customers’ business models, products, and services. We are proud to join forces with Microsoft in our quest to apply precision optics, IoT capabilities, artificial intelligence and machine learning to the most demanding processes in healthcare and manufacturing,” says Dr. Karl Lamprecht, ZEISS President and CEO. “Improving the patient’s life and doctor’s work and driving industrial quality assurance in the production process have always been top of mind for us. We are taking our expertise to the next digital level together with Microsoft, a leading innovator and provider of digital technologies.”

“Zeiss is driving innovations across industries to improve the quality of individual lives and create industrial efficiencies by overcoming data silos and integrating digital experiences,” said Scott Guthrie, Executive Vice President Cloud + AI at Microsoft. “Harnessing the power of Microsoft’s cloud, AI and IoT services, ZEISS is transforming into a leading digital services provider.”

ZEISS and Microsoft will also explore opportunities to collaborate and co-innovate across other ZEISS segments and units including Consumer Markets, ZEISS Ventures and Corporate Research and Technology.

About ZEISS

ZEISS is an internationally leading technology enterprise operating in the fields of optics and optoelectronics. In the previous fiscal year, the ZEISS Group generated annual revenue totaling more than 6.4 billion euros in its four segments Semiconductor Manufacturing Technology, Industrial Quality & Research, Medical Technology and Consumer Markets (status: 30 September 2019).

For its customers, ZEISS develops, produces and distributes highly innovative solutions for industrial metrology and quality assurance, microscopy solutions for the life sciences and materials research, and medical technology solutions for diagnostics and treatment in ophthalmology and microsurgery. The name ZEISS is also synonymous with the world’s leading lithography optics, which are used by the chip industry to manufacture semiconductor components. There is global demand for trendsetting ZEISS brand products such as eyeglass lenses, camera lenses and binoculars.

With a portfolio aligned with future growth areas like digitalization, healthcare and Smart Production and a strong brand, ZEISS is shaping the future of technology and constantly advancing the world of optics and related fields with its solutions. The company’s significant, sustainable investments in research and development lay the foundation for the success and continued expansion of ZEISS’ technology and market leadership.

With over 31,000 employees, ZEISS is active globally in almost 50 countries with around 60 sales and service companies, 30 production sites and 25 development sites. Founded in 1846 in Jena, the company is headquartered in Oberkochen, Germany. The Carl Zeiss Foundation, one of the largest foundations in Germany committed to the promotion of science, is the sole owner of the holding company, Carl Zeiss AG.

Further information at www.zeiss.com

About Microsoft

Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT” @microsoft) enables digital transformation for the era of an intelligent cloud and intelligent edge. Its mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.

Microsoft Media Relations

WE Communications for Microsoft
(425) 638-7777
[email protected]

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Nuance and Microsoft announce the integration of Dragon Ambient eXperience and Microsoft Teams for virtual telehealth consults

AI-powered ambient clinical intelligence accelerates the adoption of telehealth workflow solutions to improve patient experiences and health outcomes while reducing physician burnout

BURLINGTON, Mass., and REDMOND, Wash. — Sept. 15, 2020 — Nuance Communications Inc. and Microsoft Corp. on Tuesday announced Nuance Dragon® Ambient eXperience™ (DAX™), an ambient clinical intelligence (ACI) solution, is now integrated into Microsoft Teams to broadly scale virtual consults aimed at increasing physician wellness and providing better patient health outcomes. As a Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare partner and part of a broader partnership between the two companies, the integration enables physicians to activate Nuance DAX from within their Microsoft Teams workflows, so they can focus on the patient while the AI securely captures the details of the virtual visit in context — creating clinical documentation that writes itself™.

Innovated by Nuance and Microsoft, the integration of Nuance DAX and Microsoft Teams for telehealth is part of the ongoing strategic partnership to accelerate the adoption of ACI solutions to improve healthcare experiences by reducing administrative workloads that lead to physician burnout. This telehealth workflow solution built on Microsoft Teams:

  • Synthesizes physician-patient conversations during virtual visits through Microsoft Teams, allowing physicians to remain focused on the patient instead of taking notes on the computer.
  • Incorporates patient data securely with contextual information from the electronic health record (EHR) to auto-populate a complete and highly accurate clinical note for physicians to review directly within the patient’s medical record. The physician always remains in control.

Research shows that the pandemic has accelerated virtual consults and expanded access to care, while physician burnout remains an important concern facing the healthcare industry today.  Healthcare providers are rapidly scaling virtual health consults, with a reported 50- to 175-fold increase in telehealth patient volumes since the onset of the pandemic.1 This rapid step change in technology adoption suggests that now is the time for the healthcare industry to make improvements in information exchange, broadening access and integration of technology for improved access to care for better health outcomes and increased efficiencies in the healthcare system.

“The dramatic growth of telehealth represents a unique opportunity to use Nuance DAX ambient clinical intelligence technology to transform healthcare experiences and define what healthcare providers and consumers should expect from advanced digital health solutions,” said Diana Nole, executive vice president, and general manager of healthcare, Nuance. “Our strategic partnership with Microsoft, which led to this rapid integration of Nuance DAX with Microsoft Teams for telehealth, illustrates the ongoing importance of combining our technologies, domain expertise and market reach to develop advanced cloud-based conversational AI solutions that keep the health of clinicians and patients front and center in healthcare delivery.”

“Telehealth has grown in just a few months from being an infrequently used, specialized solution prior to the pandemic to becoming core to how we deliver care today and in the future. The integrated Nuance-Microsoft Teams solution will be game-changer for our clinicians and patients alike,” said Dr. William Silver, medical director, Triangle Region EmergeOrtho. “This integration brings us the ease of use, reliability and security of the Microsoft Teams platform for healthcare, and the ability to automatically capture and document patient-physician encounters with Nuance DAX to significantly ease the burden of clinical documentation.”

“Through our strategic partnership with Nuance, we are combining the best in Nuance’s conversational AI technology with Microsoft Teams, Azure and Azure AI to accelerate and scale the development and adoption of innovative solutions that emphasize the essential and personal aspect of quality healthcare between a physician and patient,” said Gregory Moore, M.D., Ph.D., corporate vice president, Microsoft Health. “This important milestone and the integration of Microsoft Teams within the Nuance DAX solution will empower front-line care providers to positively transform the patient care experience.”

Nuance DAX leverages and extends the proven power of Nuance Dragon Medical, relied upon by over 550,000 physicians globally, and is already delivering significant outcomes, including a 20% increase in patient throughput, 50 to 75% reduction in clinical documentation time, an 88% increase in provider satisfaction scores for clinical documentation, and patient consent rates of over 90%.

The Nuance DAX solution is built on top of Microsoft Azure, a highly secure HITRUST CSF-certified platform, compliant with the HITECH Act, and has implemented the physical, technical and administrative safeguards required by HIPAA. As part of the strategic collaboration between the two companies, Nuance has migrated the majority of its on-premises internal infrastructure and hosted products to Microsoft Azure and is a Microsoft Office 365 customer for its more than 8,500 employees worldwide, empowering them with the latest in collaboration and communication tools, including Microsoft Teams.

The companies will demonstrate the integrated DAX-Teams telehealth solution available to customers for private preview at the Microsoft Ignite virtual conference Sept. 22-24, 2020. Those interested in learning more about the Nuance DAX and Microsoft Teams integration should visit www.nuance.com/DAXTeams or watch this video.

About Nuance Healthcare

Nuance provides intelligent systems that support a more natural and insightful approach to clinical documentation, freeing clinicians to spend more time caring for patients. Nuance healthcare solutions capture, improve and communicate more than 300 million patient stories each year, helping more than 500,000 clinicians in 10,000 global healthcare organizations to drive meaningful clinical and financial outcomes. Nuance’s award-winning clinical speech recognition, medical transcription, CDI, coding, quality and medical imaging solutions provide a more complete and accurate view of patient care.

About Nuance Communications Inc.

Nuance Communications (NASDAQ: NUAN) is the pioneer and leader in conversational AI innovations that bring intelligence to everyday work and life. The company delivers solutions that understand, analyze, and respond to people – amplifying human intelligence to increase productivity and security. With decades of domain and AI expertise, Nuance works with thousands of organizations globally across healthcare, financial services, telecommunications, government, and retail – to create stronger relationships and better experiences for their customers and workforce. For more information, please visit www.nuance.com.

About Microsoft

Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT” @microsoft) enables digital transformation for the era of an intelligent cloud and an intelligent edge. Its mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.

1 See “Telehealth: A quarter-trillion-dollar post-COVID-19 reality?” McKinsey & Company, May 2020

 

Trademark reference: Nuance and the Nuance logo are registered trademarks or trademarks of Nuance Communications Inc. or its affiliates in the United States and/or other countries. All other trademarks referenced herein are the property of their respective owners.

For more information, press only:

Microsoft Media Relations, WE Communications for Microsoft, (425) 638-7777, [email protected]

Nancy Scott, Nuance Communications, (781) 565-4130, [email protected]

Note to editors: For more information, news and perspectives from Microsoft, please visit the Microsoft News Center at http://news.microsoft.com. Web links, telephone numbers and titles were correct at time of publication, but may have changed. For additional assistance, journalists and analysts may contact Microsoft’s Rapid Response Team or other appropriate contacts listed at https://news.microsoft.com/microsoft-public-relations-contacts.

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Walgreens Boots Alliance creates personalized, omnichannel healthcare and shopping experiences powered by new customer experience management technology and data platform

Company announces strategic partnership with industry leaders Microsoft and Adobe to launch second phase of digital transformation at the intersection of health and technology

Logos for Adobe, Walgreens Boots Alliance and Microsoft

DEERFIELD, Ill., REDMOND, Wash., and SAN JOSE, Calif. – June 30, 2020 – Walgreens Boots Alliance, Inc. (Nasdaq: WBA), today announced an expansion of its strategic partnership with Microsoft and Adobe to launch a world-class digital experience and customer insights platform to deliver personalized healthcare and shopping offerings. It will provide Walgreens and Boots customers with products and services from its global pharmacy and retail businesses wherever, whenever and however they may want them. Establishing this platform will advance WBA into the second phase of its digital transformation, one of its key strategic priorities.

“At WBA, our mission is to deliver extraordinary experiences that enrich our customers’ lives. Capabilities to combine previously disparate customer data sets, including information from more than 100 million members of our loyalty programs, into more singular, unified view of the customer – powered by these modern technology platforms – will enable us to truly personalize our omnichannel healthcare and retail offering,” said Vineet Mehra, global chief marketing officer, Walgreens Boots Alliance. “This digital magic coupled with the valued knowledge and quality of care provided by our pharmacists and team members is what allows us to best serve our customers.”

For more than a century, WBA’s iconic brands, including Walgreens and Boots, have earned the trust of patients and customers by serving their needs in some of the most personal categories – health, wellness and beauty. The strategic partnership with Microsoft and Adobe allows WBA to harness insights to deliver more engaging and personalized experiences, while respecting and protecting privacy choices of patients and customers. This can help increase access to key services within pharmacy and beauty, among other categories, while driving convenience and providing more options to address daily needs. Data privacy and security are fundamental design principles in the development of the technology, underscored by Microsoft’s investments in building a trusted cloud platform.

For example, with this new personalization platform, Walgreens will launch an individually tailored prescription experience for patients at Walgreens,  and Boots will launch a bespoke beauty experience for customers by enabling Boots Beauty Consultants to provide custom product recommendations. This new platform will also dramatically enhance WBA’s marketing effectiveness and power the company’s strategic initiative around mass personalization – delivering the right offers and content to the right customer, in the right context, at the right time and through the right channels.

Personalized Customer Experiences

The strategic partnership with Microsoft and Adobe is the cornerstone for these new WBA customer experiences, connecting WBA’s wealth of knowledge related to serving customers in the health, wellness and beauty categories. Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights will serve as WBA’s Customer Data Platform (CDP) to provide a unified, 360-degree view of the customer and unlock insights that power personalized customer experiences. Adobe’s Customer Experience Management (CXM) solutions will enable the company to deliver those unmatched customer experiences, with the industry’s only end-to-end solution for analytics, content management, personalization, campaign orchestration and more.

“There’s no denying that the retail industry has been in a constant state of change over the past several years and consumers expect personalized interactions, connected online and in-store experiences, and high-quality customer service when they shop,” said Shelley Bransten, CVP Retail and Consumer Goods Industries, Microsoft. “Through this strategic partnership, Walgreens Boots Alliance is transforming the future of retail, health and beauty, creating digital experiences that make shopping fun and rewarding. Dynamics 365, Power Platform and Adobe’s Experience Cloud will provide deep insights and a single view of the customer, enabling the nurturing of customer relationships on one platform for highly tailored experiences.”

“Adobe has been a strategic partner for global brands in their digital transformation,” said Anil Chakravarthy, executive vice president and general manager, Digital Experience Business, Adobe. “COVID-19 has created a world that is more digital, while redefining the value of physical stores. Walgreens Boots Alliance, a global leader in retail and wholesale pharmacy, is taking this head on and paving the way for its next chapter. With Adobe Experience Cloud, WBA will be able to activate customer data and personalize experiences, while better blending online and offline customer experiences.”

 About Walgreens Boots Alliance, Inc.

Walgreens Boots Alliance (Nasdaq: WBA) is a global leader in retail and wholesale pharmacy, touching millions of lives every day through dispensing and distributing medicines, its convenient retail locations, digital platforms and health and beauty products. The company has more than 100 years of trusted health care heritage and innovation in community pharmacy and pharmaceutical wholesaling.

Including equity method investments, WBA has a presence in more than 25 countries, employs more than 440,000 people and has more than 18,750 stores.

WBA’s purpose is to help people across the world lead healthier and happier lives. The company is proud of its contributions to healthy communities, a healthy planet, an inclusive workplace and a sustainable marketplace. The company’s businesses have been recognized for their Corporate Social Responsibility. Walgreens was named to FORTUNE* magazine’s 2019 Companies that Change the World list and Boots UK was recognized as Responsible Business of the Year 2019-2020 by Business in the Community.

WBA is included in FORTUNE’s 2020 list of the World’s Most Admired Companies. This is the 27th consecutive year that WBA or its predecessor company, Walgreen Co., has been named to the list.

More company information is available at www.walgreensbootsalliance.com.

*© 2019, Fortune Media IP Limited. Used under license.

 About Microsoft

Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT” @microsoft) enables digital transformation for the era of an intelligent cloud and an intelligent edge. Its mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.

About Adobe Experience Cloud

Adobe is reimagining Customer Experience Management (CXM) with Adobe Experience Cloud, the industry’s only end-to-end solution for experience creation, marketing, advertising, analytics and commerce. Adobe Experience Cloud helps brands deliver consistent, continuous and compelling B2C, B2B and B2E experiences across customer touchpoints and channels—all while accelerating business growth. Unlike legacy enterprise platforms with static, siloed customer profiles, Adobe Experience Platform empowers companies to fully understand customers and make data actionable through Adobe Sensei, the company’s AI and machine learning technology. Industry analysts have named Adobe a leader in over 20 major reports focused on experience—more than any other technology company.

Walgreens Boots Alliance, Inc. Cautionary Note Regarding Forward-Looking Statements: All statements in this release that are not historical are forward-looking statements made pursuant to the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance and involve risks, assumptions and uncertainties, including, but not limited to, those related to the timing and effectiveness of implementation of plans for the new platform, the ability to realize the anticipated benefits of the strategic partnership, and the ability to realize anticipated efficiencies and achieve anticipated financial and operating results in the amounts and at the times anticipated,  as well as those described in Item 1A (Risk Factors) of Walgreens Boots Alliance, Inc.’s Form 10-K for the fiscal year ending August 31, 2019, Form 10-Q for the fiscal quarter ending February 29, 2020, and in other documents that Walgreens Boots Alliance, Inc. files or furnishes with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Should one or more of these risks or uncertainties materialize, or should underlying assumptions prove incorrect, actual results may vary materially. These forward-looking statements speak only as of the date they are made. Walgreens Boots Alliance, Inc. does not undertake, and expressly disclaims, any duty or obligation to update publicly any forward-looking statement after the date of this release, whether as a result of new information, future events, changes in assumptions or otherwise.

(WBA-GEN)

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Walgreens Boots Alliance builds a better shopping experience – with better access to wellness

As a new immigrant to Canada, Vineet Mehra quickly grasped the inequities that he and his family now faced.

He was just 6 years old.

But he saw the unfairness. His parents, who had arrived from India with little money, both worked hard. Yet they lacked the same access to health care as other residents in the town’s more-affluent neighborhoods.

That disparity – health outcomes driven by postal code more than genetic code – became “etched in my mind,” recalls Mehra, global chief marketing officer of Walgreens Boots Alliance (WBA). Today, he remains devoted to closing those gaps with fresh technologies that can help democratize health and wellness.

Vineet Mehra is shown from the chest up. with his arms folded. He is smiling.
Vineet Mehra.

Tuesday, WBA, Microsoft and Adobe launched a cloud platform that will provide WBA customers with personalized health care and shopping experiences. Headquartered in suburban Chicago, WBA owns Walgreens, Boots and Alliance Healthcare.

Transform spoke with Mehra to learn how the new platform and its data-fueled customer connections can help reinvent shopping for health and wellness goods – and make those products available to more people.

TRANSFORM: How will the platform make shopping better and more personal?

VINEET MEHRA: We have two of the largest loyalty programs in the world – our Walgreens Balance Rewards program and our Boots Advantage Card program. Between them, there are well over 100 million primary customer profiles.

The work we’re doing with Microsoft is critical as we organize that information and data in a cloud-based solution. This new cloud platform puts our most valuable data in one place and allows us to orchestrate experiences that meet people where they are, giving them what they need.

TRANSFORM: Can you give me an example?

MEHRA: Imagine a customer named Annie who receives an email through her loyalty membership for Vitamin B offers. Based on her purchase history, we know she’s a Vitamin B shopper. We know she typically runs out of Vitamin B after 30 days.

Annie visits walgreens.com and Vitamin B options are prioritized for her viewing. We don’t show her anything but Vitamin B because we know she’s in the market for that now. She buys it. As she’s further browsing the site, Annie adds Emergen-C (a Vitamin C supplement) to her cart. But let’s say that Annie doesn’t finalize her purchase online – it remains in her cart.

Later that day, she’s walking by a Walgreens store. We now have the infrastructure to allow Annie to control how and when we communicate with her. So, when we identify that the Emergen-C that she left in her online cart is in stock at that Walgreens location, she receives a text message notifying her. She goes in to buy it.

TRANSFORM: How does the platform connect the retail and pharmacy experience for customers?

MEHRA: Let’s go back to Annie. As she enters that Walgreens store to buy her Vitamin C, she gets a real-time alert on her phone: The prescription that she was supposed to pick up tomorrow can be ready today at that store. This is because we now know she’s in the store with us.

Annie heads to the pharmacy to pick up the prescription. The pharmacist also reminds her she’s due for a flu shot. We know from our cloud-based customer data that she gets the vaccine each year.

With customer information thoughtfully organized, we can create these seamless experiences around health and wellness that allow our retail offering to complement our pharmacy offering. But that can only be enabled if all that data is in one place, not scattered in many data warehouses all over the country.

TRANSFORM: You have previously talked about the need to democratize health care, to make it more human and more personal, to treat each customer and patient as a complete, unique individual. Does this platform help WBA meet that mission?

MEHRA: Absolutely. It’s something that I personally and our company are passionate about.

The recent events around the racial equality movement are showing there are “haves” and “have-nots” in our society. Your postal code, in some cases, dictates your health outcome more than your genetic code. We have pharmacy deserts in America. We have food deserts. We have areas without access to health care. But imagine if we knew who you were, we could offer those experiences to you in multiple ways.

So health outcomes don’t have to be defined by the fact that you may live in a lower-income area or that you don’t have access to public transportation or a car or that there’s no pharmacy around you. If we knew who you are, we could say to you, “Hey, it’s time for your Vitamin C to maintain the health of you and your family.”

We can offer up an experience to deliver it direct to your door. And we’ll set up delivery lockers in certain neighborhoods where people can pick things up.

TRANSFORM: And through these innovations, you are democratizing access to health and wellness products?

MEHRA: Yes, to products that families need but may not always have access to just because of the structural challenges we have in our society in America. By knowing who people are, we can provide them access that may not always involve heading to a store.

In other cases, you have families with two working parents or single moms or single dads. How do they even get out of the house when they’ve got three kids at home and one of the kids is sick? You start to see how this information will allow us to get people health and wellness the way they need it when they need it.

TRANSFORM: When and how did this mission become so important to you?

MEHRA: I grew up as a first-generation immigrant kid. I was born in India. My parents came to Canada, to a blue-collar town, with relatively little. The experiences some of my friends and I had there are still etched in my mind – like this idea of access to health and wellness being defined by where I live, it never made sense to me.

It comes from those roots, from realizing that some people had more than I did but it had nothing to do with how hard we worked. Health care should be one of those rights that everyone has access to.

TRANSFORM: At their core, these innovations are all about people, is that right?

MEHRA: It’s important that we don’t just talk about this as digital technology. It happens to be digitally hosted but with the idea of human kindness and digital magic coming together. That applies to the side of the business with our pharmacists – humans you interact with in critical ways. We’re mashing together human kindness with technology.

TRANSFORM: How will Microsoft Dynamics 365 benefit the new platform?

MEHRA: The best part of Dynamics is that it acts as a tool that is constantly giving us better signals.

If you think about health and wellness and taking care of your family, these things are constantly evolving. You can be diagnosed one day with something. You can go from having a cold one day to allergies the next. Dynamics 365 is a great customer-data platform because it’s so real time. It’s processing data constantly then turning that data into insights that allow our pharmacists to more efficiently treat patients.

TRANSFORM: Before joining WBA, you were the chief marketing officer at Ancestry.com. There may be nothing more personal than genealogy and genetic testing. Do you think of yourself as an evangelist for truly personalized customer service?

MEHRA: In my experience working deeply in consumer genetics, I got a deep appreciation for the fact that while we all may be more similar than we think, we’re all wired up very differently. The medicines that work for you may not work for me.

We have to meet people where they are – this idea of personalization is becoming absolutely critical in health and wellness.

Brands like Walgreens and Boots are the front lines of health and wellness access to much of the population. If we can be in the business of personalized health services for people, that’s going to make society healthier. It’s going to give people access in ways they’ve never had before.

Top photo: A Walgreens store in downtown Chicago. (Photos courtesy of Walgreens)

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Microsoft Azure will become the preferred cloud platform for Johns Hopkins inHealth precision medicine initiative

Five-year agreement will support Johns Hopkins Medicine inHealth in driving new medical discoveries to improve disease management and patient care

Medical professional uses a mobile device to consult with a patient
Photo by Getty Images

REDMOND, Wash. — June 18, 2020 — On Thursday, Microsoft Corp. and Johns Hopkins Medicine (JHM) announced a five-year relationship centered on Microsoft’s Azure and analytical tools that will support new discoveries as part of JHM’s inHealth precision medicine initiative. The work will bring together JHM’s leading global research expertise with the power of Microsoft Azure, and its AI capabilities, to help advance JHM’s discoveries that will benefit personalized health care. JHM will maintain total control over its data.

inHealth embodies Johns Hopkins’ commitment to precision medicine, using new tools to understand and manage patients’ health, informed by their broader health history and environment. This program integrates JHM’s longstanding leadership in health care research and delivery with the expertise of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Johns Hopkins Whiting School of Engineering and Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab.

In support of inHealth, JHM has established 16 Precision Medicine Centers of Excellence, where researchers are pursuing breakthroughs in numerous disease settings, such as prostate cancer and multiple sclerosis. JHM aims to have 50 centers in the next five years.

“Johns Hopkins is committed to leading the way in precision medicine, and our relationship with Microsoft will help us achieve that goal,” said Paul B. Rothman, M.D., CEO of JHM and the Frances Watt Baker, M.D., and Lenox D. Baker Jr., M.D., dean of the medical faculty. “Using Azure will improve our ability to develop innovative solutions and treatments for our patients, and we are excited to collaborate with Microsoft to push the boundaries of science and medicine even further.”

Ethical use of patient data is a cornerstone of all of JHM’s partnerships with patients, including this important work with Microsoft in precision medicine. All projects are compliant with all appropriate privacy regulations, and JHM maintains strict control over all data, including through the use of its Institutional Review Board and its internal Data Trust Council that reviews data use across JHM.

“It is a distinct privilege to partner with many of the world’s leading physicians, scientists and engineers at JHM as they use Microsoft Azure and its AI and machine learning capabilities to support some of the most advanced research and breakthroughs in precision medicine,” said Gregory Moore, M.D., Ph.D., corporate vice president of Microsoft Health. “I’m inspired by the collaboration and its bold goals to improve health for all by bringing together some of the world’s best minds in medicine and technology to deliver the future of medical science innovation.”

JHM has previously used Microsoft services as JHM developed its pioneering Precision Medicine Analytics Platform (PMAP), a highly innovative data platform that allows collection and analysis information from a broad array of sources in a secure environment. This new agreement will enable inHealth to expand use of other Microsoft resources, such as advanced services, AI, machine learning and analytics.

More information about Johns Hopkins Medicine precision medicine work and inHealth can be found here.

Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT” @microsoft) enables digital transformation for the era of an intelligent cloud and an intelligent edge. Its mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.

For more information, press only:

Microsoft Media Relations, WE Communications for Microsoft, (425) 638-7777, [email protected]

Note to editors: For more information, news and perspectives from Microsoft, please visit the Microsoft News Center at http://news.microsoft.com. Web links, telephone numbers and titles were correct at time of publication, but may have changed. For additional assistance, journalists and analysts may contact Microsoft’s Rapid Response Team or other appropriate contacts listed at https://news.microsoft.com/microsoft-public-relations-contacts.