Microsoft Collaborative Health Solutions Streamline Information Flow, Control Costs, and Improve Patient Care
On This Page
Microsoft Collaborative Health Solutions Streamline Information Flow, Control Costs, and Improve Patient Care
Executive Summary
The healthcare industry continues to face intense challenges, including rising costs, declining profitability, and widespread inefficiency. Meanwhile, a fast-changing regulatory environment and pressure to improve quality, safety, and access are driving an extraordinary set of transformations across the industry.
New technologies are the catalyst for many of these changes. They also offer new opportunities to improve the quality and control the cost of healthcare. Microsoft Collaborative Health solutions are helping healthcare providers meet these challenges.
The way information is created, stored, and shared within the healthcare industry today limits the ability of doctors, nurses, clinicians, and administrators to share information and work together. Healthcare professionals are bogged down with paper-based processes, manual data entry, and isolated information systems that do not communicate.
Through Collaborative Health, Microsoft and its partners give healthcare and life science professionals tools that streamline the way they enter, access, and share data, resulting in improved health at reduced costs. As a pioneer in the field, Microsoft understands how people use digital information technologies in their daily lives and has applied that knowledge to the issues faced by healthcare providers, health plans, and life sciences organizations.
Healthcare: The Opportunity for Change
When it comes to healthcare in the United States, the facts speak clearly:
| • | The United States is the world leader in total healthcare spending but ranks 48th in life expectancy. |
| • | Healthcare spending continues to rise dramatically with $2.7 trillion the projected figure for 2010. |
| • | Mounting hospital costs account for one in four U.S. dollars spent on healthcare today, with medical errors adding greatly to the price of healthcare. |
These are serious and complex issues. Shifting the tide requires fresh approaches to out-dated administrative procedures that have been in place for decades. Microsoft launched Collaborative Health to provide healthcare institutions with tools that help them streamline information flow, control costs, and improve the quality of patient care.
Solutions for the Three Branches of Healthcare
For these three branches of the healthcare ecosystem, we provide solutions that simplify the collection and sharing of information and eliminate the barriers to collaboration.
| • | Healthcare Providers: Get instant access to patient information when and where it’s needed, a vital step in efforts to improve patient care and reduce costs. |
| • | Health Plans: Deliver more value to customers faster and with fewer resources than the competition. |
| • | Life Sciences Organizations: Bridge the gap between disconnected, disparate systems, enabling researchers and scientists to access information seamlessly, improve scientific and business productivity and collaboration, and transform bio-science data into medical and pharmaceutical insights. |
Key Characteristics of Microsoft Collaborative Health
In developing solutions for Collaborative Health, we’ve joined with our partners to focus on four key characteristics:
| • | Simplicity by Design: Microsoft Collaborative Health Solutions are easy to learn and use and integrate smoothly into everyday workflow. |
| • | Improved Productivity: Get more done through strong integration between the tools that healthcare providers use and the back-end server products where data is stored and processed. |
| • | Greater Value: Get more for your money with the combination of price advantages of the Microsoft Windows platform, the ability to use commodity hardware, and a comprehensive set of rapid application development tools from Microsoft. |
| • | Integrated Innovation: Tightly integrated products make full use of Web services allow caregivers to connect easier to the information they need at the point of care. |
Customer Successes on the Microsoft Platform
Microsoft Collaborative Health is helping healthcare institutions around the world streamline information flow, reduce costs, and improve the quality of patient care. Ingolstadt Hospital in Germany is one example.
An electronic data entry solution based on Microsoft technologies helped this major regional healthcare facility reduce errors in patient data entry and medical treatment. The solution also helped reduce costs by streamlining data flow and decreasing patient wait time throughout the treatment cycle.
At the University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center, a digital diagnostic imaging management and retrieval solution from Stentor, based on Microsoft technology, is expected to deliver savings of $30 million over eight years. And at Alamance Regional Medical Center in Burlington, North Carolina, an integrated electronic medical record system built on the Microsoft platform by Eclipsys has reduced lab order duplication by 58 percent, at an annual cost saving of more than $100,000.
For More Information
To discuss the best option for your organization, contact the Microsoft sales office nearest you:
