Healthcare is an industry that touches all of us, given the most basic of human goals: we all want to lead healthy lives. Last year we embarked on Healthcare NExT, a Microsoft initiative which aims to accelerate healthcare innovation through artificial intelligence and cloud computing. By working side-by-side with the healthcare industry’s most pioneering players, we are bringing Microsoft’s capabilities in groundbreaking research and product development to help healthcare providers, biotech companies and organizations around the world use artificial intelligence (AI) and the cloud to innovate.

If you are a doctor or you work in the health area, we recommend you to use the fleet graphics for commercial vehicles, this way you can reach out more people and move around.

It’s exciting work with unique challenges, and in the lead-up to next week’s Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) conference, we’re announcing a number of solutions, projects and AI accelerators that we believe will help make intelligent health possible, with more details below:

• Microsoft Genomics: The general availability on Microsoft Azure, providing researchers and clinicians with highly accelerated, cloud-powered genomic processing services. The flagship partner for this launch is St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital.
• Microsoft Azure Security and Compliance Blueprint: HIPAA/HITRUST – Health Data & AI: The general availability of an end-to-end application development foundation to help health organizations move to the cloud with greater simplicity, compliance, security and industry-standard compatibility.
• AI Network for Healthcare: An expansion of the Microsoft Intelligent Network for Eyecare, now AI Network for Healthcare, to create an AI-focused network in cardiology, in partnership with one of the largest health systems in India, Apollo Hospitals.
• Microsoft 365 Huddle Solution Templates: The publication of new developer templates that extend Microsoft Teams, so health teams can benefit from state-of-the-art collaboration tools to drive quality and care outcomes in Microsoft 365.
• Project Empower MD: Project EmpowerMD, a research collaboration with UPMC, will create a system that listens and learns from what doctors say and do, to dramatically reduce the burden of note-taking for physicians.
• Project InnerEye: Announcing new integrations with TeraRecon and Intuitive Surgical.

We will also continue progress on current Healthcare NExT research-based projects like our Health Bot project as well as our partnerships with UPMC and Adaptive Biotechnologies.

Several themes emerge at the convergence of healthcare and technology. The explosion of data, incredible advances in computational biology, genomics and medical imaging have created vast amounts of data well beyond the ability of humans to comprehend. Clinicians and care teams are yearning to swivel their chairs from the computer and pay more attention to the patient, yet still they spend two-thirds of their time interacting with burdensome IT systems. And healthcare organizations everywhere still struggle with the lack of operational and regulatory clarity in managing and analyzing the datasets that they are generating every day. Providing cloud- and AI-powered tools will unlock the vast potential at these points of convergence. It’s why our focus is threefold: developing foundations for precision health care, enabling the health industry’s move to the cloud, and empowering the people that make healthcare work.

Developing foundations for precision healthcare
Today, we are introducing the general availability of the Microsoft Genomics service, on Azure, which provides researchers, data scientists and clinicians cloud-powered genomic processing services to handle the data-rich workloads. The flagship partner with us on the launch of Microsoft Genomics is St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, which is leading the way the world understands, treats and cures childhood cancer and other life-threatening diseases. In collaboration with our partners at DNAnexus, the service is an implementation of the Broad Institute’s Best Practices pipeline and enables users to take advantage of the power of Azure to handle cloud-scale genomics workloads.

From a genomics standpoint, few projects have produced this amount of data, and services and partnerships like this will help organizations like St. Jude do the great work they do, quicker and more efficiently. You can read more about this here.

Microsoft Genomics joins other precision healthcare initiatives at Microsoft including Project Premonition, and perhaps our most ambitious project, our recently announced collaboration with Adaptive Biotechnologies to decode the human immune system.

Enabling the health industry’s move to the cloud
In parallel to helping lay foundations for precision medicine, we continue work to enable health data to live in the cloud, be properly structured and labelled, and allow its analysis by data and AI technologies. To that end, we are announcing general availability of a new Azure Security and Compliance Blueprint. The Azure Security and Compliance Blueprint: HIPAA/HITRUST – Health Data & AI provides a secure and automated foundation to build applications that manage sensitive and regulated data. Our aim is to make it easier for health organizations to move to the cloud and do so in a way that unlocks the full potential of data analytics and machine learning on that data. We are thrilled that leaders like IRIS and KenSci are using the blueprint to accelerate application development today.

Last year we announced a consortium with world-class eyecare providers in India, the United States, Australia and Brazil towards earlier screening and detection of eye diseases through Azure Machine Learning, to reduce avoidable blindness. With over 285 million people visually impaired and 55 million blind worldwide, upward of 70 percent of visual impairment is avoidable. Over a quarter million patient trials in India have been conducted using our AI models and are now being adopted by Government for Public Health Screening Programs, hospitals and medical systems. Today we are excited to announce an expansion of the AI Network for Healthcare, with a focus on cardiology, in partnership with one of the largest health systems in India, Apollo Hospitals. Together, we will be developing and deploying new machine learning models to gauge patient risk for heart disease in hopes of preventing or reversing these life-threatening conditions.

Empowering the people that make healthcare work
Health experts want to spend more time with patients – and less on burdensome, tedious tasks. To ease this pain point, we’re announcing tools and projects aimed at helping clinicians and care teams better serve patients, make their lives easier and reduce burnout.

The Health Team Huddle Templates, available today, are developer templates that extend Microsoft Teams by digitizing the huddle to create a single place to interact as a team. This can drive quality and care outcomes by scaling best practices, driving continuous improvement of care, and centralizing health teams’ ideas. More information on the Huddle Templates is available here.

Project EmpowerMD, a research collaboration with UPMC, aims to create an AI-powered system that can capture and integrate medical expertise at scale by listening and observing doctors doing their work as they meet their patients. The EmpowerMD architecture is a learning system that captures and synthesizes patient-physician conversations while maintaining privacy and compliance, and supporting applications such as the automatic production of encounter notes. The goal is to allow physicians to spend more face-to-face time with patients, by bringing together many services from Microsoft’s Intelligent Cloud including Custom Speech Services (CSS) and Language Understanding Intelligent Services (LUIS), customized for the medical domain. We have made great progress on building a rich medical knowledge graph and a recommendation system, all developed on an Azure-powered architecture for secure sharing of speech data with our healthcare partners. More information including a video is available here.

Announced in private preview at RSNA, Project InnerEye uses state-of-the-art machine learning and computer vision to turn medical images into measurement devices, to amplify a clinician’s ability to personalize treatment, spend more time with their patients, and for hospitals to save costs. InnerEye goes beyond the research lab through cloud-based image segmentation services that integrate with third-party software products to enhance the clinical workflow of healthcare professionals such as radiation oncologists, surgeons, radiologists and medical physicists. And the proof is in the partners and integrations: InnerEye is being made accessible through the world’s first AI-results viewer for radiology, Northstar, from TeraRecon. Intuitive Surgical, a global leader in robotic-assisted, minimally invasive surgery, is working with the InnerEye team to explore machine learning applications to improve surgical outcomes.

Infusing technology and healthcare to achieve more
Our mission at Microsoft is to empower every person and organization to achieve more, and with that in mind, our ambition is that innovators will be able to use AI and the cloud to unlock biological insight and  break data from silos for a truly personal understanding of human health and in turn, enable better access to care, lower costs and improved outcomes.

We’re excited to meet many of you next week at HIMSS18 and share more about what we are working on. Please be sure to stop by our booth No. 3832 to see our solutions in action, and follow our HIMSS18 story on @Health_IT to learn more.

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Today I had the pleasure of joining the prime minister of Ireland (or Taoiseach, as we say in Irish), Leo Varadkar, and my colleague Cathriona Hallahan, the managing director of Microsoft Ireland, to officially open our new $165 million, 365,000-square foot campus in Dublin – fast becoming a digital hub of Europe.

This new campus, One Microsoft Place, brings together 2,000 of our most talented employees in Ireland under one roof as they work to make our shared mission a reality – to empower every person and organization on the planet to achieve more.

During my last visit back in April, I was lucky enough to join the amazing advocate Sinéad Burke and speak to 800 young girls at an event Microsoft Ireland hosted for Girls in ICT (Information and Communications Technology) Day. Our message that day was one we at Microsoft truly believe – that if you pursue a career in technology, you can absolutely change the world. I have no doubt that some of the girls I met on that trip are going to grow up and change the world right from inside this building.

That’s what the new campus at One Microsoft Place is all about. It’s a place designed to help our team do their best work – fueling innovation and creativity, and inspiring everyone who visits. By embracing new ways of working, this space will empower our employees, optimize operations and help Microsoft more deeply engage with the local community.

For the past two years, I’ve had the opportunity to work closely with the Irish team as they continue their quest to transform. Because of my family ties, I’ve always known how special this country is, but the last two years have also taught me just how special this team is – representing 71 different nationalities, with people of all ages, backgrounds and beliefs.

Ireland is the only location outside our headquarters in Redmond, Washington where every part of Microsoft is represented – from the team that operates our Dublin data center, to our engineering and product groups, operations and sales. The work that is undertaken here is helping to power the digital transformations of corporations, governments, schools and non-profits – not just in Ireland and the European Union, but all around the world.

And since establishing the EMEA (Europe, Middle East, Africa) Digital Sales team in Dublin, we’ve watched that impact accelerate beyond anything we could have hoped for. From its establishment a year ago, the organization has grown to almost 700 people, attracting top talent from across Ireland and around the globe.

Microsoft has now been a part of the Dublin community for more than 30 years, and One Microsoft Place is both a celebration of our shared history, and an investment in our shared future. Thank you to everyone who made this beautiful campus possible – the Taoiseach, our customers and our partners in the local community. But above all, thank you to the incredible employees of Microsoft Ireland. We can’t wait to see what you accomplish here.

To get a glimpse of or new campus at One Microsoft Place in Dublin see: https://www.microsoft.com/en-ie/aboutireland, or on Twitter, search for the #MicrosoftLifeIreland hashtag.

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We’re excited to announce Microsoft for Startups, a new program that delivers access to technology, go-to-market and community benefits that helps startups grow their customer and revenue base.  We are committing $500 million over the next two years to offer joint sales engagements with startups, along with access to our technology, and new community spaces that promote collaboration across local and global ecosystems. Startups are an indisputable innovation engine, and Microsoft is partnering with founders and investors to help propel their growth.

Grow with unparalleled access to customers. Microsoft for Startups takes a unique approach to connect qualified startups with new customers and channel partners. Microsoft has over 40,000 sales representatives and hundreds of thousands of partners whose goal is to drive adoption of Microsoft cloud solutions into companies of all sizes and industries worldwide. The program provides dedicated resources to prepare startup marketing and sales teams to effectively sell their cloud solutions to enterprise organizations in partnership with Microsoft’s global sales organization and partner ecosystem.

Build on a trusted cloud that scales with you. The program provides startups with up to $120,000 in free Azure credits, enterprise grade technical support and development tools – supporting the languages of their choice, such as Node.js, Java and .NET.  In addition, qualified startups also get access to productivity and business applications, including Office 365 and Microsoft Dynamics 365.

Connect to the right resources at the right time.  Microsoft for Startups helps startups at every stage in ecosystems around the world:

• Microsoft Reactors are physical spaces where entrepreneurs, developers, investors and the business community can come together to interact, learn and share. Over the next month, we will open the doors on new Microsoft Reactor spaces in London, Sydney, Tel Aviv, Berlin, Shanghai and Beijing. These spaces join our existing locations in Redmond, Seattle, San Francisco and New York.
• Microsoft ScaleUp (formerly Microsoft Accelerators) is an immersive global program that offers late-stage and series A startups who have the greatest propensity to take advantage of Microsoft’s growth programs, such as co-marketing and co-selling opportunities, hone their infrastructure and build their businesses.
• Microsoft Ventures is Microsoft’s strategic venture capital investment team whose mission is to be an active partner at key stages of a startup’s growth, typically investing between Series A and D.

Startups inspire us by pushing the envelope of the possible and building products that improve our personal and professional lives. Microsoft is excited to partner with startups to empower every person and organization on the planet.

To learn more, please visit Microsoft Startups.

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In today’s Microsoft second quarter earnings call, CEO Satya Nadella showcased how customers are using our technology to create digital business solutions. The 56 percent year-over-year growth in commercial cloud revenue — with broad-based growth across geographic markets and industry segments — is fueled by customer and partner success.

Just this week, we announced news with Publicis Groupe, Columbia Sportswear and PTC. Communications and advertising giant Publicis Groupe is building its new AI-powered platform, Marcel, on Microsoft Azure and Office 365 to empower its 80,000 employees worldwide. Columbia Sportswear, innovator in active outdoor apparel, announced its choice of Dynamics 365 and Azure to its enhance worldwide consumer experience. Plus, PTC, a leader in product lifecycle management solutions that include Internet of Things (IoT), augmented reality and 3D computer-aided design for the industrial sector, has selected Azure as its preferred cloud platform.

Below are more customer highlights from this quarter.

In the industrial sector, United Technologies Corp. (UTC) builds and services millions of products, from elevators in some of the world’s tallest buildings to aerospace equipment. UTC is using Dynamics 365 and Azure to help its massive field organization better predict and respond to customer needs. Chevron announced Azure as its primary cloud for intelligent, digitized oil fields in order to increase revenues, reduce costs and improve the safety and reliability of operations.

Consumer product companies are innovating with the Microsoft cloud, too. Kohler has built a legacy of blending home comfort and style through innovation. This year marks Kohler’s entrance into the connected home market with a new line of kitchen and bathroom products, Kohler Konnect. For example, with Azure IoT, Kohler Konnect products respond to voice and in-app commands to manage bath temperature or start a shower.

In real estate, CBRE entered the smart building market with a customizable, connected workplace solution to give property investors and occupants a single, seamless access point to building amenities and services. Powered by Azure IoT, the CBRE 360 mobile apps will allow users to locate colleagues and navigate the workplace, reserve workspaces, and access food and beverage services, as well as basic building and high-end concierge services.

In retail, national grocery chain Kroger is leveraging Azure to power its EDGE (Enhanced Display for Grocery Environment) solution — a grocery-store shelf with digital screen displays showing prices, nutritional information and more. The system manages high volumes of data, better connects store management and customers and ensures stock does not run low. Home-improvement company Lowe’s worked with Fellow Robots to deploy autonomous LoweBots to assist with inventory data and shelf intelligence. As the LoweBot scans inventory on the shelves, Azure helps Lowe’s keep constant tabs on inventory and frees store employees to assist customers. Merkal Calzados, Spain’s leading retailer of affordable footwear, has chosen Dynamics 365 for retail, finance, operations, and customer service to transform how it selects and sources product, improve marketing and accelerate omnichannel growth.

One of the world’s largest casual dining companies, Bloomin’ Brands, Inc., chose Azure to help its digital transformation across approximately 97,000 team members and almost 1,500 restaurants. The parent company of Outback Steakhouse, Bonefish Grill, Carrabba’s and Fleming’s Steakhouse, Bloomin’ Brands is using Azure advanced analytics, machine learning and Power BI to enable guest engagement and convenience through mobile apps, websites and e-commerce, including the customer loyalty program.

In the healthcare sector, UMB Healthcare Services, a division of UMB Bank, continues to improve its health savings account (HSA) solution, powered on Azure, by creating a seamless customer experience for 1.2 million HSA accounts. For example, ReceiptVault allows HSA owners to safely manage their health care receipts in one place, which is an important tax requirement.

Aurora Health Care operates 15 hospitals, more than 150 clinics and 70 pharmacies throughout eastern Wisconsin and northern Illinois, Premera Blue Cross is the largest health plan in the Pacific Northwest, and UPMC is one of the largest integrated health care delivery networks in the U.S. These partners are working with us on a new AI-powered health bot project, currently in private preview. Powered by Cognitive Services and enriched with medical content, the bots give customers self-service access to their health-related questions and information.

In the government space, Kansas City’s Azure-powered solution from Opti improves water quality and saves local citizens and companies money. The solution uses a wide range of data to control rainwater entry into the sewer system and could reduce the overall cost of the program by almost a billion dollars over 25 years.

In the world of payment technology, Mastercard selected Microsoft 365 to support a modern workplace that empowers its employees’ teamwork and innovation. One of the largest companies in the payments space, Mastercard connects consumers, financial institutions, merchants and businesses in more than 210 countries and territories to achieve their vision of a world beyond cash. The company is also leveraging Azure for apps, including Masterpass, a digital mobile wallet and rewards program application.

In the auto industry, Volkswagen Group Digital is piloting new forms of workplaces. The company recently deployed Surface Books, Surface Pros, Surface Studios and Surface Hubs in its 10X service design lab and Future Centers, and to run its collaboration application, DEON. DB Schenker, a division of Deutsche Bahn AG, focuses on logistics across air, land, sea freight as well as contracts logistics. The company turned to Windows 10 to help safeguard its business with intelligent, built-in security and to empower the productivity of its global, mobile workforce.

Across the globe, industry leaders are choosing Microsoft to power their business strategies and new products, or support culture change. I am constantly inspired by our customers’ and partners’ digital ambitions and innovation, and I am eager to continue partnering with them on their digital journey.

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Today, I am pleased to welcome PlayFab to the Microsoft family. PlayFab is a complete backend platform provider of services to build, launch and grow cloud-connected games. PlayFab’s tools are designed to be used by game developers across all platforms (mobile, PC and console). This acquisition extends the investments and work we’ve done on Microsoft Azure to provide a world-class cloud platform for the gaming industry.

As Satya Nadella noted in our annual shareholders meeting, “We’re mobilizing to pursue our extensive opportunity in a 100-plus-billion gaming market. This means broadening our approach to how we think about gaming end to end, about starting with games and how they’re creating and distributed, and how they’re played and viewed.”

Over 1 billion people play games, fueling a thriving industry whose ecosystem is evolving and growing quickly. Many industries are moving to the intelligent cloud, and this trend is true in gaming as well.  This means an increasing number of developers are looking to create connected games for mobile, PC and console devices that have a significant emphasis on post-launch operations. However, the cost and complexity of achieving this through custom-built, server-side tools and technologies is high, and PlayFab offers developers a compelling model that scales naturally with their games’ players.

PlayFab’s backend services reduce the barriers to launch for game developers, offering both large and small studios cost-effective development solutions that scale with their games and help them engage, retain and monetize players. PlayFab enables developers to use the intelligent cloud to build and operate games, analyze gaming data and improve overall gaming experiences.

The PlayFab platform is a natural complement to Azure for gaming (Visit azure.com/gaming for more info). Azure, with locations in 42 regions worldwide, provides world-class server infrastructure, allowing creators to focus on building great games with best-available global reach. For gamers, this leads to a higher, faster degree of innovation and better experiences.  

Incorporating PlayFab’s experience, growing network of game developers and powerful gaming-as-a-service platform into our product offering is an important step forward for gaming at Microsoft. PlayFab has served more than 700 million gamers and is currently powering more than 1,200 games with companies like Disney, Rovio and Atari. Its gaming platform powers some of the most prominent titles in the industry, such as “Idle Miner Tycoon,” “Angry Birds: Seasons” and “Roller Coaster Tycoon Touch.”

Together, Azure and PlayFab will further unlock the power of the intelligent cloud for the gaming industry, enabling game developers and delighting gamers around the world.

For more information on PlayFab, you can find a blog post from James Gwertzman, CEO and co-founder, here.

Thanx,
Kareem

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In the U.S. and abroad, fundamental rights and services like voting, healthcare, housing and education are tethered to legal proof of identification – you can’t participate if you don’t have it. Yet nearly one in six people worldwide – the majority of them being women, children and refugees – live without it. The lack of legal documentation not only strips access to critical services, it puts those trapped in the “identity gap” at risk for larger issues including displacement and child trafficking.

As discussions begin this week at the World Economic Forum, creating universal access to identity is an issue at the top of Microsoft’s agenda, and we think technology can be a powerful tool to tackle this challenge. It was last summer that Microsoft took a first step, collaborating with Accenture and Avanade on a blockchain-based identity prototype on Microsoft Azure. Together, we pursued this work in support of the ID2020 Alliance – a global public-private partnership dedicated to aiding the 1.1 billion people around the world who lack any legal form of identity. To say that we were encouraged by its mission would be an understatement. We were inspired by it.

Today, we are excited to share that we are deepening our commitment to this issue by formally joining ID2020 as a founding member. In addition to a donation of $1 million, we will commit resources and expertise to further develop a secure, portable form of digital identity and help implement it across governments and agencies.

In the coming months, Microsoft, our partners in the ID2020 Alliance, and developers around the globe will collaborate on an open source, self-sovereign, blockchain-based identity system that allows people, products, apps and services to interoperate across blockchains, cloud providers and organizations. We will lend the technical expertise of our Identity team to provide guidance as the project scales, empowering people with direct consent over who has access to their personal information, and when to release and share data. We will also help establish standards that ensure this work is impactful and scalable.

Our shared ambition with ID2020 is to start piloting this solution in the coming year to bring it to those who need it most, beginning with refugee populations. Amid a growing refugee crisis, we believe technology can play a powerful role when put in the hands of displaced people and the organizations that are supporting them. Over the last two years, Microsoft Philanthropies has donated $33 million in technology and funding to organizations that aid refugees and empower them to rebuild their lives.

Closing the identity gap is an enormous challenge. It will take the work of many committed people and organizations coming together across different geographies, sectors and technologies. But it’s exciting to imagine a world where safe and secure digital identities are possible, providing everyone with an essential building block to every right and opportunity they deserve.

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