Elevate healthcare delivery with Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare

In the post-COVID-19 environment, providers and other healthcare organizations face complex challenges. They contend with staffing shortages, employee burnout, rising costs, an evolving regulatory environment, new care delivery requirements, and shifting business models. Protecting data security in healthcare is also a pressing concern.

In response, providers are increasingly embracing the cloud to speed digital transformation, boosting their agility, resiliency, and ability to deliver the best care possible.

In the e-book “Enhancing healthcare delivery with cloud solutions,” discover how to create and sustain a competitive advantage in the digital era. The e-book outlines four key ways to realize better patient outcomes while increasing operational efficiencies with a cloud-first approach.

You’ll also get insights into how to:

• Equip providers and patients with innovative tools.
• Streamline care delivery with strategic solutions.
• Plan and execute strategies for implementing new healthcare solutions.
• Drive positive change with Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare.

What do patients expect from healthcare delivery?

Rapid, continuous change is unquestionably now the norm across the healthcare ecosystem. Yet while COVID-19 prompted a new period of evolution in healthcare delivery, change has always been inherent in healthcare and IT.

Even prior to COVID-19, consumers began seeking more convenient, individualized, and equitable healthcare services. Providers, in turn, began looking for ways to deliver them.

Today’s consumers expect personalized experiences across the patient journey, from initial contact to post-treatment follow-up. They’re engaged in making decisions about their health and healthcare spending, and they expect quick, easy access to their medical information. In addition, they increasingly rely on telemedicine, remote monitoring, AI-powered health bots, and other types of virtual care.

In a recent consumer survey, 80 percent of respondents indicated that they had accessed care through telemedicine. Groups traditionally underserved within healthcare showed notable increases in adoption. Also, for the first time, telemedicine surpassed in-person visits as the preferred channel for prescription refills and minor illness care.¹

These survey results speak to the fact that consumers want and expect to take advantage of new avenues for healthcare delivery. Healthcare leaders are prudent to take notice. Often, if a provider can’t meet a patient’s expectations for convenient, affordable services, the patient will seek out one that will.

Respond to patient and business needs with agility

As patient expectations continue to evolve, the onus is on providers to give patients the care they need—where, when, and how they want it. A provider’s ability to offer personalized care in healthcare builds brand trust and loyalty, which in turn drives profitability and continuity of care.

Providers must also generate useful medical insights and make them available—often at the point of care—to clinicians, patients and their families, and other stakeholders. In addition, the healthcare industry is shifting to value-based care, which links payments to patient outcomes and service quality, equity, and cost. To be reimbursed, providers need to provide metrics tracking their healthcare performance improvements.

These changes come at a time when data created, shared, and stored across healthcare ecosystems continues to grow exponentially. Providers are faced with the challenges of protecting sensitive data from cyberattacks and data theft in ways that adhere to multiple regulations and requirements.

In 2022, the United States Department of Health and Human Services received reports of more than 700 healthcare data breaches, ranking it as the second worst year ever.² Data breaches can not only threaten patient safety by delaying diagnoses and treatments because of unexpected IT system outages, they also can result in huge financial losses for healthcare organizations, including through insurance premiums increases, lawsuits, and regulatory fines.

In short, today’s providers need greater flexibility to respond to ever-changing patient and business needs. With the right cloud platform, they can:

• Quickly develop, deploy, and scale new, innovative applications.
• Streamline workflows and reduce expenses using AI and automation.
• More effectively deal with worker shortages and cost issues.
• Securely connect and analyze large volumes of disparate data.
• Minimize upfront healthcare technology investments.
• Free time for IT teams to focus on strategic business needs.

Optimize healthcare delivery and improve patient outcomes

Providers that take a cloud-first approach are better prepared to solve problems and act on opportunities for growth. This greater agility and resilience arises in large part from improved collaboration and innovation.

First, providers can support more effective collaboration by using an open, secure cloud foundation to unite information, people, and processes. By pulling clinical, demographic, behavioral, and other data from multiple sources into the cloud, they can create 360-degree, longitudinal views of patient journeys. They can also reduce time to insights with AI and advanced analytics, as well as accelerate digital access with cloud storage.

Second, providers with cloud infrastructure can drive rapid, continued innovation in healthcare. This includes launching novel solutions and tools and automating high-value workflows. In addition, healthcare organizations that innovate are more apt to sustain performance improvements and establish themselves as industry leaders. They can also more easily build strategic partnerships and make acquisitions that create competitive advantage, such as by expanding their data assets and core capabilities.

Through increased collaboration and innovation, teams across provider organizations can optimize healthcare delivery and improve patient outcomes. Consider these examples:

• Frontline clinical workers use connected, secure devices to consult with specialists at the point of care—and more quickly diagnose patient conditions.
• Care managers coordinate patient aftercare by using web portals to connect with families and payors.
• Revenue-cycle managers minimize unpaid bills by streamlining collections through automation.
• Sales and marketing professionals tap into individual and population group insights to better target—and engage with—consumers.
• IT operations work with healthcare technology vendors to build solutions tailored for specific care systems.

Most important, by offering patients more personalized, convenient, and affordable services, providers empower patients with greater control over their healthcare.

Move forward confidently with Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare

Teaming with the right cloud partner is essential to a successful digital strategy. With Microsoft, your organization can maximize the value of your existing Microsoft Cloud and other cloud investments and also add new capabilities from the Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare.

Wherever you are in evolving your legacy infrastructure and merging data across avenues of care, accelerate your transformation with Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare. It provides trusted capabilities that make it easier to overcome challenges efficiently, adapt quickly, and strengthen competitiveness.

Learn more

To discover more ways to empower healthcare team collaboration, elevate patient engagement, improve clinical and operational insights, and protect healthcare information, get the e-book “Enhancing Healthcare Delivery with Cloud Solutions.”

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¹Consumer adoption of digital health in 2022: Moving at the speed of trust, Rock Health.

²2022 Healthcare Data Breach Report, The HIPAA Journal.

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Source: Microsoft Industry Blog