Telehealth has transformed the healthcare landscape since its widespread adoption in 2020. According to Rock Health, it has become the preferred channel for receiving care for minor illnesses, especially among previously underserved groups of patients. Naturally, many healthcare organizations started transforming their service provision model to include virtual care.
While many telehealth platforms offer quite a narrow set of features and don’t always integrate well with other software like hospital management or CRM systems, Microsoft provides a more holistic solution. Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare enables care providers to tie together their major healthcare workflows, including virtual care. In this article, MS Cloud experts will explore this platform’s capabilities for streamlining virtual care provision and enabling healthcare providers to set up and run a virtual hospital.
Configurable virtual care platform
Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare offers secure video conferencing, messaging, and image exchange, as well as personnel and patient management tools necessary to provide comprehensive telehealth services. Medical care providers can set up a portal where patients input their personal data and symptoms, schedule appointments, and communicate securely with doctors via video or text messages. While most telehealth platforms have similar capabilities, MS Cloud allows for more customization and automation.
Customizable yet familiar user interface
Healthcare companies can design and configure patient access portals to reflect their branding, including logos, color schemes, and other visual elements. This customization ensures that the patient experience is consistent with the healthcare provider’s brand, helps build trust, and enhances patient engagement. At the same time, medical personnel and patients already familiar with Microsoft products will be able to quickly learn how to use the virtual care portal.
Intelligent automation
Microsoft allows the integration of a Health Bot into any solution based on Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare. This bot was developed in collaboration with OpenAI to reduce the number of routine patient management tasks. It can answer typical patients’ questions and gather patients’ information vital for scheduling an appointment, like name, age, and the list of symptoms.
Based on the symptoms, the bot can suggest which specialist a patient should consult with, automatically check the recommended specialists’ availability, and schedule an appointment. This significantly frees up customer service representatives, allowing them to focus on patients with unordinary questions or requiring more involvement due to their condition. The health bot also contributes to enhanced patient satisfaction, as they can receive medical advice and schedule a visit at their convenience.
Flawless integration with external patient data sources
Virtual care isn’t limited to remote consultations with doctors and nurses. It includes remote patient examination and monitoring, analysis of additional laboratory tests, and management of treatment prescriptions. Therefore, virtual care providers must routinely transfer patient information to other organizations like laboratories or pharmacies and acquire data from medical devices.
The more time healthcare organizations‘ personnel spend manually transferring data from the EHR, lab software, or other third-party patient data sources into their telehealth platform, the less time they have to focus on the quality of their care services. Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare is specifically designed to seamlessly connect to various digital healthcare solutions, such as electronic health records systems, remote patient monitoring devices, electronic prescription management solutions, and medical image processing software, and ingest data from them.
Thanks to such solid integration potential, doctors can access valuable patient details directly from the telehealth software during the virtual visit. This data allows them to establish an accurate diagnosis and check patients’ treatment to avoid drug interference or adverse reactions, ultimately making virtual care as effective as in-person care.
A software suite for all major healthcare processes
Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare allows healthcare organizations to not only add telehealth to their services but also create a custom virtual hospital ecosystem, making it an organic extension of their physical facilities. This Microsoft platform provides all the tools needed to run major administrative processes, as well as remote and on-premises medical activities. Moreover, the platform allows these processes to be synchronized across the healthcare organization, even if the care and administrative teams are physically apart.
MS Cloud provides healthcare organizations with the means to implement the following healthcare and business solutions:
- a portal for patients to schedule appointments, manage their information, and communicate with their care provider,
- a video conferencing platform for conducting telehealth sessions,
- a CRM system for marketing and sales automation,
- a hospital management system for optimizing resource and facilities utilization and improving collaboration among care teams,
- a medical analytics solution to enhance diagnostic and clinical decision-making,
- billing and payment software for receiving payments from patients online.
All of these systems use data stored in one place—Microsoft Dataverse, which lies at the core of Microsoft Cloud. This reduces possible mistakes and double data entries and speeds up care delivery.
In conclusion
Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare is a powerful solution that offers all the systems needed to provide virtual care services interconnected within one ecosystem. In addition to being highly flexible and allowing healthcare organizations to customize it to their needs, it aims to solve current healthcare industry challenges such as poor interoperability between different types of software, inefficient patient data usage, and discrepancies between virtual and in-office care provision. However, the number and variety of in-platform features that enable these robust capabilities also pose a challenge for adopters. Partnering with MS Cloud experts is advisable for care providers who want to maximize the benefits of their Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare investment without overspending.
