Tag: Healthcare

We’re all familiar with the scene: the hero of the movie faces a seemingly impossible challenge, when suddenly a moment of clarity hits. His entire life, everything he trained for has prepared him for this moment. His collective experience and opportunity have converged — and because of this, he is ready to rise to the occasion.

But this is real life, not Star Wars or Spider-Man. Sitting at home in Palo Alto, David Rhew has another movie in mind for his professional path.

“My career has been kind of like that movie with the hobbit: ‘The Unexpected Journey,’” explains Microsoft’s Chief Medical Officer. “This has been an unexpected journey for me, in large part because I did not anticipate that I’d be in a position working on technologies that could help at this kind of global scale. But I love working at Microsoft; I love the culture, I love the people, and I love how we’re helping our customers transform during this pandemic.”

The virtues of being curious

“Something I always wanted to do in my career was help people,” he explains. “And when I looked around to see how I could do that, I decided to be a physician.”

Even though his path forward to help others was rooted in medicine, Rhew was always intrigued by the potential of computers. As an undergraduate he double majored in computer science. His senior thesis: Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare. After this intellectual “spider bite,” Rhew often found himself envisioning futuristic possibilities that blended technology with medicine to make positive change in the world.

“After college, I went through the traditional route of medical school, residency; I focused on internal medicine, and interned at UCLA/Cedars-Sinai in Los Angeles,” recalls Rhew. “But I was always curious how you came to a diagnoses, and the people I thought were truly impressive were the infectious disease doctors, because they had such a breadth of knowledge. I decided late in my residency that I wanted to go for an infectious disease fellowship, so I applied to UCLA and was accepted.”

During the year-long gap between residency and studying disorders caused by bacteria, fungi, parasites, and viruses, Rhew was presented with an unexpected stop in his career journey. He decided not to waste the time.

Bridging the gap between medicine and technology

During that year, he saw the value in looking beyond medicine as an independently practiced art, and more as a collaborative field where universal truths like prescribing beta blockers for victims of heart attacks can have a major impact. He joined healthcare startup Zynx Health and it was here that Rhew combined his tech and medicine interests to automate reminders, integrate electronic health records, and ultimately help the company become the top clinical decision support vendor in the healthcare industry.

By making the most of this uncertain time in his professional life, he caught the attention Samsung. “They were very interested in what I was doing,” he remembers. “When I was offered a position, many people were like, ‘What does a chief medical officer do for a technology company?’ But what we made people realize is that these technologies all around us — the smartphone in particular — had a lot of capabilities for medicine. Today, people don’t think twice to use their smartphones for healthcare, but back then it was still a foreign concept.”

Six years later, after spearheading such efforts as Samsung’s virtual cardiac rehabilitation program, Rhew came to Microsoft in mid-2019. “I was so impressed, not only with the people, but also the vision of how the company was developing a platform that could support digital health care solutions,” he says. “I wanted to be a part of that, and it’s been a wonderful journey from where I started to where I’m at.”

Impactful actions in an unexpected reality

Less than a year later, Rhew’s unexpected journey has placed the right person in the right place, at the right time. “Since COVID-19 hit, it has been really remarkable how I’ve been able to apply things I never thought I would, like my infectious disease training, alongside the broader ways Microsoft is helping.”

Among the myriad of efforts Rhew has been a part of is Mural Virtual Care, a team-up with GE that allows healthcare professionals to remotely monitor ICU patients. “GE Healthcare created a tool that hospitals can use to monitor multiple patients on ventilators,” he explains. “Now, medical professionals can manage more people with less resources, so people don’t have to keep going into the room to check on the machine and risk exposing themselves. It has a triple benefit: improving work force efficiency, decreasing the need to use scarce PPE, and decreasing infections.”

Rhew has also been involved in multiple efforts involving existing Microsoft technology, nimbly adapting to face this pandemic. “The Microsoft Healthcare Bot service, for instance, has made an immediate impact. It provides individualized experiences, at scale, that let people self-report symptoms and exposure risk to qualified health professionals,” he says. “We’ve also had tremendous success with Teams Virtual Visits; I was just on the phone with a healthcare provider who shared that two weeks prior to our call, they had never even used Teams. They were now ramping up to have all their virtual visits on Teams — and were very thankful for a tool that has been a lifesaver.”

(The Microsoft Healthcare Bot service empowers healthcare organizations to build and deploy an AI-powered, compliant, conversational healthcare experience at scale. Learn more here)

The adoption rate for these and other technologies has soared in recent months, serving a vital need. “It’s remarkable when you think about the adoption rate for these,” he marvels. “The bot service has had millions of user sessions for COVID-19. We’re talking those kind of numbers after only the first two months. It has been adopted by hospitals, healthcare systems, countries, the CDC; the Teams collaboration has also just been phenomenal in terms of collaboration.”

Rhew’s role at Microsoft and the success technology is having in finding new ways to combat this infectious disease mean his expertise is widely needed. As the international coordinator for the internal COVID-19 disaster response team, Rhew is remotely assisting in Microsoft’s efforts around the world.

The next chapter

Hopefully, the next turn in this journey will focus on recovery and a return to normalcy. Rhew and those around him have already begun planning accordingly — particularly regarding how technology is best used for our healthcare needs.

“I’ve seen a lot of things that have changed, and some things that haven’t,” he says of his career bridging the gap between medicine and tech. “Technology has allowed us to pool information together, draw insights and become more proactive. But what hasn’t changed is that there are patients, and then there are doctors, nurses, pharmacists, and others who care about them.”

Ultimately, Rhew is thankful for his unexpected journey — one that put him in a position to do something. “There are very few companies that have the right vision, the right people, and can-do things at this scale,” he says. “Microsoft checks all those boxes. We have a platform, it has the capabilities to do all that needs to be done, and we have the people who know how it needs to be applied. We’re transforming the industry, and I’m proud to be part of the team.”

If you are interested in joining Microsoft and learning from leaders like Rhew here in the Bay Area, job openings can be found here: https://aka.ms/MicrosoftBayAreaCareers.

As hospitals and other healthcare delivery organizations accelerate their adoption of virtual care and mobile devices in response to the COVID-19 outbreak, it’s critical that providers can access cloud and on-premises apps quickly and securely. Imprivata is a healthcare-focused digital identity company that addresses this need. For today’s “Voice of the ISV” blog, I invited Kristina Cairns and Mark Erwich of Imprivata to provide insight into how Imprivata’s solutions are helping healthcare organizations deliver care beyond the four walls of the hospitals.

Supporting healthcare delivery organizations during COVID-19

By Kristina Cairns, Director of Product Marketing, Imprivata and Mark Erwich, VP Marketing, Imprivata

In response to COVID-19, hospitals and clinics have turned to remote tools to care for a surge of patients, while protecting the health of staff. These tools let clinicians connect remotely with patients, care teams, and other organizations, but they can be difficult to securely access from shared workstations or mobile devices, such as tablets. Imprivata digital identity solutions simplify access while maintaining security, so clinicians can deliver quality care safely and conveniently—no matter where they are located.

At the same time, healthcare staffing demands are skyrocketing, and these needs must be met in real time. This can mean quickly adding, or provisioning, new or re-allocated staff and ensuring they have proper access to applications, immediately. Once the crisis is over, these same staff will need to be de-provisioned to ensure security and compliance requirements are met.

Imprivata is a digital identity company that focuses on healthcare. We employ doctors and nurses who have a real-world understanding of the unique needs of hospital environments. Our solutions are designed to work with healthcare workflows and regulations, so hospitals can get up and running with new tools and upgrades, fast. In these challenging times, we’ve partnered with Microsoft to provide an integrated identity and access management platform that meets the needs of healthcare organizations. Our joint solutions make it easy to connect to healthcare’s existing identity and application data and automate at scale. Healthcare providers can use our platforms to address unique demands, such as:

• Saving precious time in hospitals: Accessing necessary apps quickly while healthcare providers move between clinical workstations and new networked devices at the point of patient care.
• Protecting healthcare staff and patients: Identifying providers potentially exposed to COVID-19.
• Scaling up remote work and virtual care: Providing remote access to a diverse set of tools spanning on-premises and cloud infrastructure as providers and patients move outside of traditional healthcare environments.
• Simplifying role-based access identity management: Securely manage access for temporary workers and existing staff who change roles or departments.

Saving precious time in hospitals

Healthcare workers are busy in the best of times. They juggle administrative tasks with a full day of patient care. As the pandemic has driven up the number of patients admitted to hospitals, time has become even more precious. Imprivata OneSign is a single sign-on (SSO) solution that enables care providers to spend less time with technology and more time with patients.

During a shift, healthcare workers use several cloud and on-premises applications including business and enterprise applications, electronic health records, medical imaging, patient management, and other systems. Each of these apps in this hybrid environment often requires a unique username and password. Imprivata OneSign eliminates the need for clinicians to memorize and manually enter their credentials. They can sign in once to access all their on-premises and cloud apps, including Microsoft Teams, Office 365, and 3,000+ Microsoft Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) Marketplace applications. No Click Access™ lets them sign in with a badge or fingerprint making it faster to access applications and workflows.

Protecting healthcare staff and patients

As healthcare delivery organizations treat patients under evaluation for COVID-19, they must also safeguard the health of clinicians. Yale New Haven Health is using Imprivata OneSign reporting capabilities to identify exactly where and when specific users accessed specific workstations in different patient care zones in the clinical environment. By combining these data with workstation mapping and electronic health record data, Yale can more accurately identify all providers potentially exposed to COVID-19 and take necessary actions.

Scaling up remote work and virtual care

To limit the spread of COVID-19, administrative roles at clinics and hospitals have migrated to remote work when possible. Care providers have rapidly scaled up virtual care services to provide non-emergency healthcare consultations. These providers need to access systems on personal laptops, mobile devices, and temporary devices in temporary care sites. It’s important that devices and individuals are authenticated to protect sensitive data and apps.

Imprivata Confirm ID for Remote Access improves security by enabling multi-factor authentication for remote network access, cloud applications, Windows servers and desktops, and other critical systems and workflows. Imprivata Confirm ID for EPCS (electronic prescribing of controlled substances) supports Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA)-compliant two-factor authentication methods so providers can quickly prescribe drugs using EPCS workflows. To support healthcare organizations during this crisis we are offering Imprivata Confirm ID licenses for free.

Simplifying role-based access identity management

As the number of patients increases, hospitals are rapidly re-assigning workers within the organization, while on-boarding clinicians from lower utilized hospitals. Healthcare organizations need easy and secure ways to manage user roles as they scale up and provision temporary workers.

Imprivata Identity Governance is an end-to-end solution with granular, role-based access controls and automated provisioning and de-provisioning. Streamlined auditing processes and analytics enable faster threat evaluation and remediation. These capabilities allow IT to respond to the needs of the organization without sacrificing security. Imprivata Identity Governance ensures that, on day one, the right users have the right access to the right on-premises and cloud applications, and the audit trail to prove it.

Imprivata Identity Governance can now be hosted in an Azure environment, unlocking scalability and flexibility for healthcare enterprises.

Making healthcare technology available to everyone

The following resources can help hospitals and clinics move quickly to support patient care beyond the four walls of the hospitals:

Learn more

Solutions like the Imprivata Identity and Access Management platform, Microsoft Azure AD, and Microsoft Teams are helping keep healthcare workers productive and safe as they confront the current crises. As healthcare evolves, Microsoft and Imprivata will continue to innovate together to further enhance scenarios for in-person and remote access.

Learn more about Microsoft’s COVID-19 response and Imprivata’s COVID-19 response.

Read about capabilities in Teams that support healthcare workers and other integrations between Microsoft and Imprivata.

In recent weeks, the world has been on a steep learning curve when it comes to remote health care. What can we learn from those who have been managing patients remotely for some time?

For the one-third of Europeans living with a chronic illness, frequent trips to the doctor are simply a part of daily life. Improving the management of these and other conditions outside hospitals and clinics can have a significant positive impact on national health budgets, health care professionals’ schedules and patients’ overall wellbeing – helping them to live better, not just longer.

To this end, Microsoft customers and partners across Europe are developing remote health care solutions that allow patients to manage conditions from the comfort of their own homes, while still staying in close contact with health care providers.

From hospital room to living room

In Finland, nephrologist Dr. Virpi Rauta is leading Helsinki University Hospital’s (HUS) efforts to enable patients with chronic kidney diseases to undergo life-saving dialysis treatment at home, rather than having to travel to the hospital on average three times per week. This reduces the cost of health care delivery, but also improves patient safety and quality of life. One-third of all her patients now have their dialysis treatment at home, but Dr. Rauta would like to see this share increase.

“Before they reach the stage of needing dialysis, chronic kidney disease patients typically progress slowly, within months,” she says. “This ‘pre-dialysis’ phase is when we need to be educating them about their specific options. By analyzing patient data, we can start to predict this group’s risk factors – and better advise on the right course of treatment.”

Dr. Rauta’s project aims to identify patients suitable for home dialysis at an early stage and remotely monitor current patients. The data is then analyzed using Microsoft Azure cloud services, generating actionable insights that doctors can use to tweak and tailor treatment plans as needed. The project is part of a wider HUS CleverHealth Network initiative to produce artificial intelligence (AI) assisted solutions for early disease detection, automated diagnostics and treatment selection, and comprehensive home care.

Dr. Rauta explains why this is so valuable: “The more patients undergo dialysis at home, the less we see them in hospital. This is good, but it does mean that I might only see some patients twice a year – and I know very little about what happens in between appointments. Remote monitoring and data analysis can bridge that gap and ensure treatment stays on track.”

While patients with chronic kidney disease are typically in their 50s or 60s, this isn’t the only age range for which technology is generating new insights for remote disease management.

Obstetrician and gynecologist Dr. Saila Koivusalo leads another CleverHealth Network project at HUS, this time focused on improving the management of gestational diabetes. To improve the treatment and monitoring of these patients, the team has been developing an application to measure, monitor and analyze a mother’s key health indicators, such as glucose levels, physical activity, nutrition, stress, sleep and weekly weight. This data is stored and analyzed using Microsoft Azure cloud technology.

By tracking expectant mothers’ health at a granular level, Dr. Koivusalo can ensure women get the right guidance at the right time. “Very often, women experiencing gestational diabetes feel alone in dealing with their condition because, while they get good guidance, they usually get it too late,” she says. “If we can contact expectant mothers earlier, we can ensure everyone receives the same standard of care.”

Dr. Koivusalo warns that experiencing diabetes in pregnancy can increase both the mother and baby’s risk of developing chronic diabetes in future, so addressing it early is critical. While this project is still in a pilot phase, Dr. Koivusalo sees its potential for supporting at-risk women at all stages of pregnancy – from when they are simply planning, through to postnatal care and follow-up.

Starting at the heart

The maxim “prevention is better than cure” has also been adopted by Portugal’s Cova da Beira Hospital Center, which is using a cloud-based health tracking solution developed by Microsoft partner HopeCare to monitor patients at risk of heart failure.

Chronic heart failure affects 380,000 people across Portugal and is the leading cause of hospitalization among those aged 65 or over. This has increased by 33% in the last decade. Hospital admissions are mostly caused by a sudden worsening of heart failure symptoms such as breathing difficulties, swollen legs or fatigue. Such incidents, known as decompensation attacks, are scary – but they can be predicted and sometimes even prevented through close and regular health monitoring.

To this end, Cova da Beira has been trailing the use of HCAlert, a remote monitoring tool that collects, stores and analyzes patient data related to body temperature, blood oxygen level (SaO2), blood pressure, heart rate, weight and activity, in the Microsoft Azure cloud. A triage algorithm enables clinicians to identify which data points are most relevant and flags up any vital parameters that are not aligned with plans for the patient in question.

Since the solution was launched, clinical teams have seen a significant drop in hospital admissions (-62%), overall length of hospital stays (-48%), mortality rate (-42%) and emergency room visits (-85%), among the pilot patient groups. Most importantly however, both doctors and patients feel supported.

“It’s good to feel accompanied by someone at all times – I know I’m being monitored and if anything is out of the ordinary, a nurse calls me to check in,” says Alberto Galvão, a 74-year-old who has an implantable cardioverter defibrillator (ICD).

From a clinical perspective, cardiologist Luis Oliveira describes how remote monitoring supports his work: “If it’s something simple, I can call the patient, ask how they are feeling and suggest an adjustment to the treatment if needed. Whereas if the data suggests that it may be something more serious, we’ll tell the patient to come straight to the hospital.”

At Microsoft, our goal within healthcare is to empower people and organizations to address the complex challenges facing the healthcare industry today. We help do this by co-innovating and collaborating with our customers and partners as a trusted technology provider. Today, we’re excited to share progress on the latest innovations from Microsoft aimed at helping address the most prevalent and persistent health and business challenges:

• Empower care teams with Microsoft 365: Available in the coming weeks, the new Bookings app in Microsoft Teams will empower care teams to schedule, manage and conduct virtual visits with remote patients via video conference. Also coming soon, clinicians will be able to target Teams messages to recipients based on the shift they are working. Finally, healthcare customers can support their security and compliance requirements with the HIPAA/HITECH assessment in Microsoft Compliance Score.
• Protect health information with Azure Sphere: Microsoft’s integrated security solution for IoT (Internet of Things) devices and equipment – is now widely available for the development and deployment of secure, connected devices. Azure Sphere helps securely personalize patient experiences with connected devices and solutions. And, to make it easier for healthcare leaders to develop their own IoT strategies, today we’re launching a new IoT Signals report focused on the healthcare industry that provides an industry pulse on the state of IoT adoption and helpful insights for IoT strategies. Learn more about Microsoft’s IoT offerings for healthcare here.
• Enable personalized virtual care with Microsoft Healthcare Bot: Today, we’re pleased to announce that Microsoft Healthcare Bot, our HITRUST-certified platform for creating virtual health assistants, is enriching its healthcare intelligence with new built-in templates for healthcare-specific use cases, and expanding its integrated medical content options. With the addition of Infermedica, a cutting-edge triage engine based on advanced artificial intelligence (AI) that enables symptom checking in 17 languages Healthcare Bot is empowering providers to offer global access to care.
• Reimagine healthcare using new data platform innovations: With the 2019 release of Azure API for FHIR, Microsoft became the first cloud provider with a fully managed, enterprise-grade service for health data in the Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) format. We’re excited to expand those offerings with several new innovations around connecting, converting and transforming data. The first is Power BI FHIR Connector, which makes it simple and easy to bring FHIR data into Power BI for analytics and insights. The second, IoMT (Internet of Medical Things) FHIR Connector, is now available as open source software (OSS) and allows for seamless ingestion, normalization and transformation of Protected Health Information data from health devices into FHIR. Another new open source project, FHIR Converter, provides an easy way to convert healthcare data from legacy formats (i.e., HL7v2) into FHIR. And lastly, FHIR Tools for Anonymization, is now offered via OSS and enables anonymization and pseudonymization of data in the FHIR format. Including capabilities for redaction and date shifting in accordance with the HIPAA privacy rule.

Frictionless exchange of health information in FHIR makes it easier for researchers and clinicians to collaborate, innovate and improve patient care. As we move forward working with our customers and partners and others across the health ecosystem, Microsoft is committed to enabling and improving interoperability and required standards to make it easier for patients to manage their healthcare and control their information. At the same time, trust, privacy and compliance are a top priority – making sure Protected Health Information (PHI) remains under control and custodianship of healthcare providers and their patients.

We’ve seen a growing number of healthcare organizations not only deploy new technologies, but also begin to develop their own digital capabilities and solutions that use data and AI to transform and innovate healthcare and life sciences in profoundly positive ways. Over the past year, together with our customers and partners, we’ve announced new strategic partnerships aimed at empowering this transformation.

For example, to enable caregivers to focus more on patients by dramatically reducing the burden of documenting doctor-patient visits, Nuance has released Nuance Dragon Ambient eXperience (DAX). This ambient clinical intelligence technologies (ACI) is enriched by AI and cloud capabilities from Microsoft, including the ambient intelligence technology, EmpowerMD, which is coming to market as part of Nuance’s DAX solution. The solution aims to transform the exam room by deploying ACI to capture, with patient consent, interactions between clinicians and patients so that clinical documentation writes itself.

Among health systems, Providence St. Joseph Health is using Microsoft’s cloud, AI, productivity and collaboration technologies to deploy next-generation healthcare solutions while empowering their employees. NHS Calderdale is enabling patients and their providers to hold appointments virtually via Microsoft Teams for routine and follow-up visits, which helps lower costs while maintaining the quality of care. The U.S. Veterans Affairs Department is embracing mixed reality by working with technology providers Medivis, Microsoft and Verizon to roll out its first 5G-enabled hospital. And specifically for health consumers, Walgreens Boots Alliance will harness the power of our cloud, AI and productivity technologies to empower care teams and deliver new retail solutions to make healthcare delivery more personal, affordable and accessible.

Major payor, pharmaceutical and health technology platform companies are also transforming healthcare in collaboration with us. Humana will develop predictive solutions for personalized and secure patient support, and by using Azure, Azure AI and Microsoft 365, they’ll also equip home healthcare workers with real-time access to information and voice technology to better understand key factors that influence patient health. In pharmaceuticals, Novartis will bring Microsoft AI capabilities together with its deep expertise in life sciences to address specific challenges that make the process of discovering, developing and delivering new medicines so costly and time-consuming.

We’re pleased to showcase how together with our customers and partners, we’re working to bring healthcare solutions to life and positively impact the health ecosystem.

To keep up to date with the latest announcements visit the Microsoft Health News Room.

About the authors:
As Corporate Vice President of Health Technology and Alliances, Dr. Greg Moore leads the dedicated research and development collaborations with our strategic partners, to deliver next-generation technologies and experiences for healthcare.

Vice President and Chief Medical Officer Dr. David Rhew recently joined Microsoft’s Worldwide Commercial Business Healthcare leadership team and provides executive-level support, engaging in business opportunities with our customers and partners.

As Corporate Vice President of Healthcare, Peter Lee leads the Microsoft organization that works on technologies for better and more efficient healthcare, with a special focus on AI and cloud computing.

Tags: Azure Sphere, IoT, Microsoft 365, Microsoft Healthcare, Microsoft Healthcare Bot

Microsoft is expanding the ecosystem of FHIR® for developers with a new tool to securely ingest, normalize, and persist Protected Health Information (PHI) from IoMT devices in the cloud.  

Continuing our commitment to remove the barriers of interoperability in healthcare, we are excited to expand our portfolio of Open Source Software (OSS) to support the HL7 FHIR Standard (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resource). The release of the new IoMT FHIR Connector for Azure is available today in GitHub.

The Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) is the subset of IoT devices that capture and transmit patient health data. It represents one of the largest technology revolutions changing the way we deliver healthcare, but IoMT also presents a big challenge for data management.

Data from IoMT devices is often high frequency, high volume, and requires sub-second measurements. Developers have to deal with a range of devices and schemas, from sensors worn on the body, ambient data capture devices, applications that document patient reported outcomes, and even devices that only require the patient to be within a few meters of a sensor.

Traditional healthcare providers, innovators, and even pharma and life sciences researchers are ushering in a new era of healthcare that leverages machine learning and analytics from IoMT devices. Most see a future where devices monitoring patients in their daily lives will be used as a standard approach to deliver cost savings, improve patient visibility outside of the physician’s office, and to create new insights for patient care. Yet as new IoMT apps and solutions are developed, two consistent barriers are preventing broad scalability of these solutions: interoperability of IoMT device data with the rest of the healthcare data, such as clinical or pharmaceutical records, and the security and private exchange of protected health information (PHI) from these devices in the cloud.

In the last several years, the provider ecosystem began to embrace the open source standard of FHIR as a solution for interoperability. FHIR is rapidly becoming the preferred standard for exchanging and managing healthcare information in electronic format and has been most successful in the exchange of clinical health records. We wanted to expand the ecosystem and help developers working with IoMT devices to normalize their data output in FHIR. The robust, extensible data model of FHIR standardizes the semantics of healthcare data and defines standards for exchange, so it fuels interoperability across data systems. We imagined a world where data from multiple device inputs and clinical health data sets could be quickly normalized around FHIR and work together in just minutes, without the added cost and engineering work to manage custom configurations and integration with each and every device and app interface. We wanted to deliver foundational technology that developers could trust so they could focus on innovation. And today, we’re releasing the IoMT FHIR Connector for Azure.

This OSS release opens an exciting new horizon for healthcare data management. It provides a simple tool that can empower application developers and technical professionals working with data from devices to quickly ingest and transform that data into FHIR. By connecting to the Azure API for FHIR, developers can set up a robust and secure pipeline to manage data from IoMT devices in the cloud.

The IoMT FHIR Connector for Azure enables easy deployment in minutes, so developers can begin managing IoMT data in a FHIR Server that supports the latest R4 version of FHIR:

• Rapid provisioning for ingestion of IoMT data and connectivity to a designated FHIR Server for secure, private, and compliant persistence of PHI data in the cloud
• Normalization and integrated mapping to transform data to the HL7 FHIR R4 Standard
• Seamless connectivity with Azure Stream Analytics to query and refine IoMT data in real-time
• Simplified IoMT device management and the ability to scale through Azure IoT services (including Azure IoT Hub or Azure IoT Central)
• Secure management for PHI data in the cloud, the IoMT FHIR Connector for Azure has been developed for HIPAA, HITRUST, and GDPR compliance and in full support of requirements for protected health information (PHI)

To enhance scale and connectivity with common patient-facing platforms that collect device data, we’ve also created a FHIR HealthKit framework that works with the IoMT FHIR Connector. If patients are managing data from multiple devices through the Apple Health application, a developer can use the IoMT FHIR Connector to quickly ingest data from all of the devices through the HealthKit API and export it to their FHIR server.

Playing with FHIR
The Microsoft Health engineering team is fully backing this open source project, but like all open source, we are excited to see it grow and improve based on the community’s feedback and contributions. Next week we’ll be joining developers around the world for FHIR Dev Days in Amsterdam to play with the new IoMT FHIR Connector for Azure. Learn more about the architecture of the IoMT FHIR Connector and how to contribute to the project on our GitHub page.

FHIR® is the registered trademark of HL7 and is used with the permission of HL7

Today, Microsoft becomes the first cloud with a fully managed, first-party service to ingest, persist, and manage healthcare data in the native FHIR format. The Azure API for FHIR® is releasing today in generally availability to all Azure customers.

The core mission in healthcare is to deliver better health outcomes, and the data standard fueling the future of that mission is FHIR. The Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resource (FHIR) has revolutionized the industry in the last several years and is rapidly becoming established as the preferred standard for exchanging and managing healthcare information in electronic format.  Microsoft understands the unique value FHIR offers to enable management of Protected Health Information (PHI) in the cloud, so we’re advancing Azure technology to enable our health customers the ability to ingest, manage, and persist PHI data across the Azure environment in the native FHIR format.

With the Azure API for FHIR, a developer, researcher, device maker, or anyone working with health data—is empowered with a turnkey platform to provision a cloud-based FHIR service in just minutes and begin securely managing PHI data in Azure. We’ve simplified FHIR through this new Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) so customers can free up their operational resources and focus their development efforts on lighting up analytics, machine learning, and actionable intelligence across their health data.

Aridhia and Great Ormand Street Hospital (GOSH) in London, UK are leaders in the healthcare industry who are already leveraging FHIR in the Azure Cloud to power their Digital Research Environment (DRE), serving both historic and current patient records data: 

“We now have a unified API as a basis for designing, testing, and deploying the next generation of machine learning and digital services in the hospital for our young patients. This will also enable rapid and easier collaboration with our international pediatric hospital partners to share specialised tools to improve patient outcomes and experience,” said Professor Neil Sebire, Chief Research Information Officer at GOSH.

“Partnering with Microsoft on the Azure API for FHIR allows us to scale out and accelerate our customers’ use of SMART on FHIR. The managed service is a great additional component in the Aridhia DRE platform, bringing research and innovation closer to clinical impact,” added Rodrigo Barnes, CTO at Aridhia.

Managed FHIR service in the cloud

Normalizing health data in the FHIR format allows you to leverage the power of an open source standard that evolves with the science of healthcare. The FHIR standard is designed precisely for health data flows, so it allows for data interoperability now and sets your ecosystem up for the future as the science of medicine evolves.  Blending a variety of data sets through a FHIR service ushers in powerful opportunities for accelerated machine learning development. As you develop and implement research and efficiency models for your system, data output can be securely and easily exchanged with any application interface that works with FHIR API.

Using the Azure API for FHIR brings your team all the benefits of the cloud – paying only for what you use, delivering low latency and high performance, and providing on-demand, scalable machine learning tools with built in controls for security and intelligence.

Key features of the Azure API for FHIR include:

•    Provision and start running an enterprise-grade, managed FHIR service in just a few minutes
•    Support for R3 and R4 of the FHIR Standard
•    Role Based Access Control (RBAC) – allowing you to manage access to your data at scale
•    Audit log tracking for access, creation, modification, and reads within each data store
•    Secure compliance in the cloud: ISO 27001:2013 certified, supports HIPAA and GDPR, and built on the HITRUST-certified Azure platform
•    Global Availability and Protection of your data with multi-region failover
•    SMART on FHIR functionality

Security for PHI data in the cloud

The cloud environment you choose to manage your Protected Health Information (PHI) matters. Microsoft runs on trust.

We’ve built the Azure API for FHIR so your data is isolated and protected with layered, in-depth defense and advanced threat protection according to the most stringent industry compliance standards. Azure covers 90+ compliance offerings, including International Organization for Standardization (ISO 27001:2013), and the Health Insurance and Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).  You can be confident that the Azure API for FHIR will enable persistence, security, and exchange of PHI data in a private and compliant pipeline.

  “Humana is using Microsoft’s Azure API for FHIR to enable care team access to our members’ digital health records in a universal language and that is guarded by always-on security. By providing access to members’ records, Humana can focus on supporting doctors, nurses, and clinicians and helping our members experience their best lives.” – Marc Willard, VP, Humana

“Using Azure API for FHIR allows us to focus on designing People Compatible™ solutions for healthcare organization of all sizes in this dynamic regulatory environment, with less worrying about security and scalability.” – Pawan Jindal, Founder & President, Darena Solutions

Building the foundations of artificial intelligence in healthcare

While we’re excited to light our cloud on FHIR, we’re even more excited about the foundations FHIR is forging for the future of machine learning and life sciences in healthcare.  We’re actively engaging with a broad set of customers who are pioneering new innovation with FHIR. Whether you’re improving operational efficiency across your ecosystem, need a new secure FHIR-based data store, or want to create richer datasets for research and innovation, the future of health data in the cloud is here, and it’s on FHIR.

Check out Azure API for FHIR and do more with your health data.