About Microsoft in healthcare and life sciences
Microsoft is having a profound impact throughout the healthcare and life sciences industries. Our innovative technology and partner solutions range from streamlining the way patient orders are recorded in hospitals, to enabling health plans to compete in a consumer-focused market, to helping pharmaceutical companies get greater returns on their research and development (R&D) investments. These solutions provide business value by helping to make critical information immediately available to the key decision-makers who need it while making it easier and less time consuming for people and teams to effortlessly connect with the people, information, and the business processes they need to improve the quality of patient care and personal health.
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The challenges
Rising costs and increases in competition and regulation have created unprecedented challenges across the entire spectrum of healthcare and life sciences organizations.
The challenges that people in these industries face include:
| • | Medical clinicians and administrators strive to deliver high-quality, cost-efficient care. At the same time, they juggle demands on their time and attention from government regulators, health insurers, colleagues, and patients. |
| • | Health plans are under unprecedented market pressures to improve the health of their members, improve quality of care and customer experience, and control rising medical costs. |
| • | Life sciences companies—such as manufacturers of pharmaceuticals, biotechnology, and medical devices—are being pinched by higher research and development costs and more stringent regulations. |
In such hypercompetitive marketplaces, quick and effortless access to relevant information, people, and insights is a critical component of success. But if knowledge is the life blood of the healthcare and life sciences industries, it is a commodity that can often be extremely difficult to access, let alone share.
Frequently, data is stored in dozens if not hundreds of separate systems within the same organization that often span multiple software platforms. Add the typical requirement that information be shared between different enterprises and amongst various teams, and the retrieval and synthesis of data along with the ability to collaborate become daunting tasks.
The Microsoft vision
Microsoft understands that people, not processes, are the key to success, whether success is measured by healthy patients or a healthy bottom line. It is crucial that workers in the healthcare and life sciences industries have access to the information they need to guide their actions, that information be available when those workers need it, from wherever they happen to be, and that collaboration for decision making is seamless and intuitive.
To this end, Microsoft has developed the Knowledge Driven Health vision which encompasses the needs of healthcare providers, health plans, and the life sciences community, the major verticals of the healthcare and life sciences ecosystem. Fulfilling the vision relies on innovative technology—including both out-of-box Microsoft products and custom solutions developed with Microsoft partners—that enables workers to connect with the information they need; use that data to collaborate with other people, departments, and enterprises; and then develop business intelligence that informs their business decisions.
Once implemented, the Knowledge Driven Health vision can have a significant impact in each of these verticals:
| • | Healthcare providers: Create a standards-based technology framework capable of integrating the hundreds of separate and disconnected systems for creating and storing information that can exist in a single hospital. When given the information they need, healthcare workers are able to deliver the best patient care in the most cost-effective way. |
| • | Health plans : Transform health plans from transaction-based enterprises into highly collaborative, knowledge-driven organizations that enable consumers, providers, and employers to make informed choices that improve personal health, the quality and affordability of care, the customer experience, and their bottom lines. A faster time to market for new innovative products and services and an expanded capacity to handle more complex customer interactions with fewer staff are other positive outcomes from improved technology in this area. |
| • | Life sciences community: Facilitate seamless collaboration between industry professionals, customers, and business partners. That can lead to breakthrough results in business performance, research and product innovation, and supply chain optimization. |
The technology
By combining the price and maintenance-cost advantages of the Microsoft Windows platform, applications, and online services with commodity hardware and rapid application-development tools, Microsoft delivers some of the best cost economies in the industry.
Microsoft's ability to deliver value starts with the initial technology investment and extends to implementation, training, and ongoing support. In addition, Microsoft's support for open standards and interoperability with non-Microsoft applications allows enterprises to continue to get full value from their existing information technology (IT) investments.
Key facts
| • | The Microsoft healthcare and life sciences group has served the industry for more than 10 years. |
| • | The group includes more than 500 Microsoft employees worldwide. |
| • | The products and solutions created by the group reflect Microsoft's unmatched focus on technological innovation—and the company's $6.8 billion USD annual investment in R&D. |
| • | Team members include doctors, nurses, pharmacists, and other clinical staff with experience working for healthcare and life sciences organizations. |
| • | The Microsoft healthcare and life sciences group is made up of five subcategories to better address the specific needs of each key industry: providers, health plans, pharmaceuticals, biotechnology, and medical devices. |
Next steps
