Microsoft Healthcare NExT moves AI-Healthcare to Cloud

Microsoft forms a new team for its already announced healthcare venture, Healthcare NExT (New Experiences and Technologies). NExT is a company-wide initiative that was kicked off last year, the project was intended to encourage health industry partnerships and also bring together Microsoft’s AI, research and cloud solutions to focus on healthcare.

The new Microsoft Healthcare team will be facilitated by two veterans Jim Weinstein and Joshua Mandel. Weinstein (former CEO, Dartmouth-Hitchcock Health) joins Microsoft as the VP of the new healthcare project and will work with healthcare organizations to move the system to cloud. Mandel, former Google Executive, is the Chief Architect in this venture who is responsible for creating open cloud architecture for all healthcare partners.

This healthcare project aims at maintaining patient profiles over the cloud, push doctors and medical services to the cloud, and eventually has AI analyzing the data. “At Microsoft, we’re confident that many aspects of the IT foundations for healthcare will move…to live in the cloud,” explains Peter Lee, head of Microsoft Healthcare. “We are taking concrete steps with an initial ‘blueprint’ intended to standardize the process for the compliant, privacy-preserving movement of a patient’s health information to cloud…and…its exposure to machine learning and data science.”

Analysts predict that the AI use in healthcare is rapid and will grow to thrive successfully over the next decade generating huge savings for the US healthcare economy. With IBM, Google, Alibaba, and many others in the race already, Microsoft is sure to make a broader impact in this stream.