Microsoft in Healthcare

Bill Keay leads Microsoft's mobility efforts in healthcare as a member of its Healthcare group. Microsoft has been committed to improving healthcare worldwide since 1997, when it formed this team to help the healthcare industry and its partners realize its potential for improving productivity, safety, and quality through proven innovations in integration, greater value, and reduced complexity.

Why is Microsoft interested in healthcare?

Today, healthcare is facing some very big challenges to reduce costs, increase operational efficiencies, and improve overall quality of care. Healthcare costs are increasing more than 12% to 15% a year and are threatening to consume 20% of our GNP in the next five years. We believe that many of these business challenges can be addressed through better access to resources—specifically, informational resources.

What can Microsoft do to help improve healthcare?

One way to reduce costs in healthcare is to improve the level of automation and integration within today's healthcare systems. For example, the average hospital runs more than 150 distinct systems, of which very few are capable of working together to share key information necessary for improved patient care and better operational efficiency. Add to this the need to communicate claim information on a patient with the outside systems from insurance organizations and the issues are compounded. Microsoft, in conjunction with our healthcare partners, believes that by leveraging the data within these systems to be exposed as a non-proprietary format (i.e., XML), both the people who deliver healthcare and those who receive it will gain access to any information, at any time, and on any smart device, thus leading to a dramatic increase in the quality of healthcare.

What other areas of healthcare do you see where Microsoft could drive improvements?

Beyond the ability to integrate disparate system information, the ability to reduce the reliance on paper-based forms offers the single biggest area for improvement in healthcare. Approximately 70% of healthcare transactions today are paper-based, resulting in high administrative costs and difficulty accessing critical patient information at the time of care. In addition to the costs of manually filling out and storing all this paperwork, the process is prone to errors. Automating the process using electronic forms offers a number of advantages: Pre-populated forms are faster to complete, saving time for caregivers to see a greater number of patients; limited data entry fields on e-forms yield higher quality information; personnel normally on staff who transcribe this information into an organization's system(s) can be eliminated or redirected. Some healthcare industry analysts believe the $90 billion the healthcare industry currently spends in administrative costs could be slashed to $5 billion or less by moving from paper-based systems.

How do you see the Windows Mobile Pocket PC and Smartphone platforms driving improvements in these areas of healthcare?

Healthcare can't afford to take place in front of desktop computers. Healthcare workers today need access to information at the point of care. These individuals need smart, handheld devices that can access information from any number of sources—Internet Web sites, XML data from internal applications, applications on the device, etc. Microsoft's Windows Mobile platforms not only leverage the ability to integrate with desktop messaging and PIM information over wireless and wired connections, but our platforms are smart devices that are able to consume XML data, along with other sources of information, to provide critical information to caregivers or information workers when they need it. Mobile devices are playing a critical role in the improvements in healthcare today.

Can you share with us where these platforms have driven significant improvements in healthcare?