Microsoft
and its partners can drive health care innovation by focusing on
adapting horizontal technologies to fulfill consumers' health care
demands rather than developing industry-specific solutions, according
to a company official.
"The future lies in developing consumer-driven applications that
leverage horizontal technologies," Steve Aylward, general manager of
Microsoft’s Health and Life Sciences Industry group, told attendees at
Microsoft's Healthcare and Life Sciences Developer Conference April 22
in Atlantic City, N.J.
Aylward said the industry had been mainly focused on the
perspectives of the payor and the provider—the "cathedrals" of health
care—to the detriment of individual consumers of health information and
services, who have very different needs.
Health care consumers demand the types of self-service, anytime
access to resources and information that they were used to from other
consumer-driven industries, such as banking and financial services and
even retail, he said. They’re looking for the ability to view and
modify health information online, and to communicate with physicians
and clinical caregivers via e-mail, text messaging and instant
messaging.
Peter Neupert, corporate vice president of Microsoft's Health
Solutions Group, said consumers are using the Web to make their
interaction with other types of personal information in the physical
world easier, but that kind of interaction doesn't happen in health
care.
"There's a lot of things we do in retail [and] financial services
that we can't do when we're interacting with the health delivery
system," Neupert said.
Consumers already have access to—and are intimately familiar
with—technologies that allow them to manipulate personal information
and communicate and collaborate any time, anywhere. For Microsoft and
partners in the health care and life sciences field, "the future is in
developing health care tools and applications for the technology
consumers use in their everyday lives," Aylward said, adding that the
opportunities are huge for partners to develop applications that drive
collaboration between patients, clinicians and administrators, and
making those technologies available to every health care consumer.
That horizontal strategy is apparent in Microsoft's HLS fiscal year
2008 update and product release schedule, Aylward said. While updates
were slated for Windows, Windows Server, SQL Server, Office and Office
SharePoint, none of those technologies specifically related to HLS.
"All these solutions are horizontal. Together we have to keep
developing solutions from across the stack and making them work in
HLS," he said.
Architecture 
