Untethered Healthcare

Redmond, WA -

Attending the 2009 Microsoft Healthcare User Group 2009 meeting September 2nd and 3rd in Redmond reminded me of why I like Seattle in the fall. Bright clear sunny days – at least some of the time – and lush green everywhere.

Microsoft has been working in the healthcare space for more than a decade. MSHUG was formed in 1996. For the time and effort and investment some companies might expect more of a presence by now, but I would not bet against Microsoft long term.

For pure technology, the demos of the Surfaces product were fun. Forty-eight input multi-touch, table-top computing. I could easily picture a family physician dragging and dropping images and teaching videos to help explain to a pediatric care issue to a family. The corporate video of their image of the future took this idea and spread it to every glass surface in an office: windows, walls, tables. In the Microsoft future, computer displays are part of the furniture.

Probably the most impactful presentation I saw was by Dr. Rajeev Chandry of the Mayo Clinic. He is in charge of Mayo’s platform for connected health. Dr. Chandry, who is a primary care physician, said that sixty percent of their clinician’s time is spent looking for information. EMRs and practice management systems do not handle the problems referring physicians encounter when data needs to travel with the patient. “Specialists typically deal with 229 referring docs, all with different systems,” said Chandry. Mayo cares for 140,000 patients. His solution was to deploy Microsoft Amalga. He claims it took only three IT staff to capture the data from Mayo’s different systems. Amalga allows him to set rules that indicate what type of follow-up a patient needs in a particular time frame.

Amalga enables Mayo to do things like get a list of all patients that need to be contacted in the next thirty days. Red, yellow, and green status lights indicate things like the level of diabetes control. Currently the secretaries and nurses are using the system, not the physicians. “This turns the nurses into care managers and takes the search burden off the physicians,” said Dr. Chandry. I’m sure the devil is in the details and there was some animated disagreement from the audience about Chandry’s claims of ease of importing data from disparate systems, normalizing the data, and pushing updates back out to the silos. I have some skepticism in this area also. But if Microsoft does anything well, it is to incite passion in it’s users.

Mayo’s next step is to connect Amalga to Microsoft HealthVault for help with chonic disease management. They are going to have to work to keep up with Google spinoff Keas in this regard.