Azure Health Data Services Announced

Microsoft has added a new health service to Azure to support protected health information and new data models. The Azure Health Data Service is a Platform-as-a-Service capability that helps bring together all the health information, health data stores, and unstructured health data into a unified data store. The service adheres to the Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FIHR) structures. In addition, it supports streaming health data from devices like Fitbit, Google Fit, and Apple HealthKit. By bringing this data together into a unified store, complex health data questions and queries can be answered in minutes where it previously would have taken days or weeks to answer. Details on these announcements can be found here

Why This Matters

• This new service is built around the patient’s experience while allowing health organizations to answer queries that may have required days to months to gather manually. 
• Based on the ability to discover data and stream health device data, health organizations can create new services and insights to improve healthcare or offerings for customers
• This service is part of the new Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare where new industry-specific solutions and services are being created. Customers investing in the Cloud for Healthcare can begin using this new service quickly.