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.

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