- Microsoft and Providence St. Joseph Health have announced a multi-year strategic alliance to accelerate the digital transformation of health care
Microsoft and Providence St. Joseph Health recently announced a multi-year strategic alliance to accelerate the digital transformation of health care. This alliance is going to combine the power of Microsoft’s cloud, artificial intelligence (AI), research capabilities, and collaboration tools with Providence St. Joseph Health’s clinical expertise and care environments.
“Providence St. Joseph Health has been on a journey to transform health care and achieve a vision of health for a better world. We’re excited to accelerate that journey by collaborating with Microsoft. Together, we’ll support doctors, nurses and all caregivers by equipping them with innovative tools and technology that make it easier to do the vitally important work of improving lives,” said Providence St. Joseph Health president and CEO Rod Hochman, M.D.
These two organizations are going to develop a portfolio of integrated solutions designed to improve health outcomes and reduce the total cost of care by combining technologies from Microsoft with Providence St. Joseph Health’s data and clinical expertise. And the alliance will accelerate the health care industry’s adoption of the cloud and enable data-driven clinical and operational decision-making by leveraging Microsoft Azure and industry interoperability standards like FHIR to integrate siloed data sources in a cloud environment that enables security and compliance.
“Our alliance with Providence St. Joseph Health brings together the expertise of one of the largest and most comprehensive health systems in the country with the power of Azure, Microsoft 365 and Dynamics 365,” added Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. “Our ambition is to accelerate Providence St. Joseph Health’s digital transformation and to build new innovations together that are designed to improve health care delivery and outcomes.”
Providence St. Joseph Health is going to deploy next-generation solutions and emerging technologies from Microsoft and its partners at a Providence St. Joseph Health-affiliated hospital facility in Seattle near Microsoft’s headquarters in Redmond, Washington. At the facility, it will enable modern clinical and operational experiences for both patients and providers. And the goal will be to scale these innovations across the entire Providence St. Joseph Health system in a transformation that is going to bring innovative and necessary solutions to additional communities.
“Providence St. Joseph Health is in the middle of broad transformation, and the alliance with Microsoft will help us fully modernize our IT solutions, bringing the power and flexibility of the cloud to an industry that has traditionally lagged behind in modernizing its technology,” noted BJ Moore — EVP and CIO for Providence St. Joseph Health.
Going forward, Providence St. Joseph Health is going to use Microsoft Azure as its preferred cloud platform and standardize productivity and collaboration tools for its 119,000 caregivers on Microsoft 365. And it will continue to improve and support patient engagement using technologies including Dynamics 365. Plus Providence St. Joseph Health doctors and nurses will use Microsoft Teams for more secure communication and collaboration thus enabling them to bring together chat, video meetings/conferencing, and line-of-business applications into a single hub.
Microsoft Corporate VP of AI and Research Peter Lee told Bloomberg that these agreements often include plans for using Microsoft AI to build new applications. “These are possibilities that get unlocked once we have the infrastructure modernized,” explained Lee via Bloomberg.
“At Providence St. Joseph Health, we strive to improve our clinical product, with a focus on delivering the highest levels of clinical outcomes, consumer experience, and financial value. We listen to our patients and caregivers and know that the entire health care delivery industry needs to improve. Partnering with Microsoft, we will be able to focus on our clinical and operational objectives while realizing a step-change in our capabilities as an insights-driven organization. We are excited to better deploy data to inform the choices we make and the actions we take,” commented Venkat Bhamidipati — EVP and CFO for Providence St. Joseph Health.
