Microsoft Introduces Azure Health Data Services: Protected Health Information on the Cloud

▤ Summary

Microsoft recently announced Azure Health Data Services, a Platform-as-a-Service that allows organizations to upload, store, manage and analyze healthcare data in the open standards FHIR and DICOM. Cartwright adds an example of a query from a clinical case scenario: Give me all the medications prescribed and connected home health device data with all the CT Scan documents and their associated radiology reports for any patient older than 45 with a diagnosis of osteosarcoma over the last 2 years. It includes a DICOM service, DICOMcast technology to extract metadata from DICOM instances, the option to stream data from MedTech devices and the mapping of unstructured data from clinical notes or health documents to FHIR. Charles Poulsen, healthcare industry CTO at Microsoft Australia, highlights the Interoperability of the solution: For those of us helping build solutions for digital health care, the release is very exciting for two reasons: 1) it simplifies and brings together several existing offerings around FHIR, HL7, CDA, DICOM, medical IoT data and unstructured data under a single banner 2) it adds new capabilities like integration with Synapse/PowerBI for analytics over FHIR data, and tools to convert unstructured data into FHIR. Existing Azure API for FHIR customers can continue using the product without change in the pricing structure.

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