On Wednesday of the Microsoft Inspire week, all done virtually to great success, I tuned in for a session on Healthcare, an industry that has been disrupted hugely by the COVID crisis. The challenges that face the healthcare industry are mounting and with rising costs, they are bracing themselves for the worst with worldwide disruption.

The main conversation from Tom McGuiness, Corporate Vice President for Worldwide Commercial Healthcare, was how Microsoft and partners were stressing the importance of managing organizations from moving to a reaction model to a future planning model. Healthcare leaders must make the difficult transition of dealing with the crisis and then dealing with the move to a restored future. This means a great deal of scenario planning and impact assessment. This shift to a mindset of reinventing the organization to deal with the future will help healthcare organizations navigate to a secure and stable future.

The approach from Microsoft has been to listen deeply to customers so that they can expand investments and support. We have already seen some of this in the UK with the introduction of Microsoft Teams to the NHS for free. One thing that also struck me was the importance of the patient. As with other sectors that have moved to consumer or customer-centric, healthcare now sees good patient experience at the center of what technology should be striving to achieve. The following 5 key areas were mentioned:

• Enhance patient engagement
• Empower health team collaboration
• Improve clinical operational insight
• Protecting health information
• Reimagine healthcare

The industry needs to change from being reactive to proactive where patients are not having to engage throughout, rather able to receive relevant information and updates automatically. An alarming stat was that 80% of patients were unsatisfied with their patient experience. This is a huge percentage and shows that Healthcare has a long way to go. One way to achieve this is the introduction of Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare.

The Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare is coming this year. It looks to achieve a single source of truth. Organisations can pull existing data through Azure API and structure it into a common data model for healthcare. Microsoft wants to enable customers to bring their own data systems, beyond clinical records, into their platform to create a single source of truth and provide a full picture of the patient. The ability to tailor Power Platform applications and Dynamics 365 to center them around productivity and engagement. This then allows for the development of unique offerings with three main opportunities for partners. The ability to:

• Unlock
• Accelerate
• Build

Build is something that AlfaPeople have already achieved with our application Eva. A product built on Dynamics 365, utilizing the Power Platform, integrating with Teams and built on industry standards. A real show of what is possible with Microsoft technology.