Peter Lee, Corporate Vice President of Microsoft Healthcare, says “It’s a historic time right now with whole health industry moving to the cloud.”
Peter Lee and Aneesh Chopra, former Chief Technology Officer of CareJourney, discussed how the healthcare industry and all of the cloud providers including Microsoft, Google, Amazon, IBM, Salesforce, and Oracle are in agreement on data standards that are making this move to the cloud possible.
Peter Lee, Corporate Vice President of Microsoft Healthcare, and Aneesh Chopra, former Chief Technology Officer of CareJourney discuss this revolutionary move to the cloud by health providers:
It’s a Historic Time
It’s a historic time right now with the whole health industry moving to the cloud. We now have viable new standards for health data and there’s some pretty smart policy that you had a direct hand in creating. It all seems to be coming together right now. – Peter Lee
A Wonderful Opportunity to Show Leadership
The consumer right to access their health information and to make sure it’s available when and where it’s needed is really a bedrock principle that’s having an impact in all aspects of this. Physicians, health plans, and health systems are all trying to figure out how to communicate to consumers and how to use that infrastructure to better serve them through care teams and others. I think it is a wonderful opportunity to show some leadership. – Aneesh Chopra
All of the Major Cloud Providers Came Together
It was a pretty high point in my career to be on stage holding hands with my counterparts from Google, Amazon, IBM, Salesforce, and Oracle. It was pretty awesome. The idea is can we intervene in just the right way so that when health data moves to the cloud we will be in a more interoperable place. – Peter Lee
Embracing a Common Language and Architecture
The fact that we are not going to be Betamax versus VHS, that we preemptively said that the industry when it makes this move is going to embrace a common language and common architecture. I think that’s kind of a big deal. The more important thing is that none of this is going to happen on its own. We are going to have to have people participate.- Aneesh Chopra
Health Responders Currently Can’t Access Health Data
We heard some amazing stories, even from Seema Verma, the CMS Administrator, about what danger we put ourselves in when we get ill or something happens and the people who respond and try to help us can’t access health data. It doesn’t flow and it’s not liberative. It’s just something that we need to work together to fix. – Peter Lee
This is a Unique Moment
Everyone’s known this has been a challenge and it’s been a challenge for decades but the moment seems to be right. There is this transition to the cloud, there’s a regulatory clarity from both political parties that says with one voice we want open API’s with no special effort.
Frankly, a commitment from the major EHR vendors as well as the health systems and other stakeholders should say we’re willing to participate and we’re willing to work together. That’s a unique moment that we’ve got to take advantage of for the industry.- Aneesh Chopra
There is Some Marketing But It’s Also Authentic for Microsoft
The HR vendors, that whole industry, has done an amazing job over the last 15 years getting everything to be digital. Now that that’s been accomplished, an amazing accomplishment that was, we now need to get the value out of that data. Really open it up, really enable it to be the thing improves costs and improves outcomes.
For us, it’s also just a chance for Microsoft to play a positive role in all of this. Sure, there are big business opportunities, but when you think about Microsoft today and how open it is, the ethos to empower people and organizations, there is some marketing there but it’s also an authentic real thing for us. – Peter Lee
The Time is Now
The fact that there is a table that’s been set with all the key players including the EHR vendors and the cloud providers and even organizations like Apple saying let’s all agree that this is a path let’s start to get to work on, setting up clinical notes and all the other data that has not yet been run through a standards process.
That’s why I think the opportunity for everyone to participate is now. If you have use cases if you have an opportunity to know how to move your data to a more open environment the window of opportunity is today.- Aneesh Chopra