Plan and prepare for Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare in 2023 release wave 1

Overview

Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare provides capabilities to manage health data at scale and makes it easier for healthcare organizations to improve the patient experience, coordinate care, and drive operational and clinical efficiency.

Priorities in the upcoming wave focus on enhancing patient engagement and empowering health collaboration by reducing friction in existing user experiences, releasing previews, and unlocking new scenarios.

• Enhanced patient engagement is focused on personalizing care by leveraging patient data and insights to engage with the patient when, where, and how they want, using AI-based form recognition technologies, integration into Dataverse, and patient journey workflows.
• Empowered health collaboration provides planning tools to care managers, improving the notes creation and consumption experience, and delivering unified member profiles to extend care management into the payor vertical.

International availability of Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare can be explored through the Industry Cloud availability report.

Updates to Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare 2023 release wave 1

Investment areas

Care coordination
Care coordination and collaboration are the foundation for quality, patient-centric care. Fragmented communication channels, siloed data, and incomplete patient information make it harder for health teams to make informed recommendations. Reduce the administrative burden and help avoid burnout by simplifying complex workflow management and automating tasks. Onboard new members quickly and keep the whole workforce on the same page.

For 2023 release wave 1, we'll continue streamlining care plan creation, schedule management, and coordination for the frontline healthcare workforce. The 360-degree view of patients will be expanded for payors to increase member engagement.

Remote patient monitoring
Remote patient monitoring allows healthcare providers to monitor and collect medical and health data using apps and wireless devices. Through the Azure Health Data MedTech service, healthcare organizations are enabled to gather data from various medical devices and convert them into FHIR resources that can be leveraged from the care management solutions. Reduce readmissions and increase customer satisfaction by monitoring the recovery and rehabilitation data.

For 2023 release wave 1, we'll allow care teams to keep a catalog of devices and view patient biometric data from connected health devices. This would help provide timely information about patients' health trends to care teams to allow for remote care and alterations to care plans.

Virtual health
Bring patients and clinicians together with high-quality audio, video, and screen-sharing meeting experience to help support your virtual visits workflows. Add AI health bots and virtual visits into the care journey and automatically document virtual patient encounters at the point of care. Launch virtual consultations directly from EHR to enable simple, secure collaboration and communication with chat, video, voice, and healthcare tools in a single hub that supports compliance with HIPAA, HITECH certification, and more. Bring virtual visits into the care journey and expand services to more medical specialties.

For 2023 release wave 1, we'll integrate virtual clinic capabilities into the care management solutions.

Patient insights
We continue improving patient insights to provide a more enriched 360-degree patient view that is at the center of many healthcare processes. Leverage insights to improve patient care by connecting data from multiple sources and using predictive analytics for data modeling to identify individual and population trends.

For this release wave, we'll release the current patient trends feature into general availability. The feature can share patient indicators based on computed measures and insights. It includes an AI model for predicting whether patients will miss their next appointment. Missed appointments can have a significant cost for healthcare organizations through wasted time and resources.

Data management
Connect health data coming from disparate sources and in different formats such as structured, unstructured, imaging or device data using the FHIR and DICOM formats to create new opportunities by linking it to solutions for analytics, machine learning, and actionable intelligence.

For 2023 release wave 1, we'll invest in the following:

• Performance improvements for Dataverse Healthcare APIs.
• Supporting additional use cases for virtual health data tables.
• Updating the provider, payor (preview), and life sciences (preview) data models to the latest industry standards.

To learn more about the entire set of capabilities being delivered during this release wave, check out the release plan for Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare below:

For application administrators

User-impacting features to the user experience enabled automatically
User-impacting features should be reviewed by application administrators. This facilitates release change management and enables successful onboarding of new capabilities released to market. For the complete list, look for all features tagged "Users, automatically" in the release plan.

Features that must be enabled by application administrators
This release wave contains features that must be enabled or configured by administrators, makers, or business analysts to be available for their users. For the complete list, look for all features tagged "Users by admins, makers, or analysts" in the release plan.