Medical technology company Hill-Rom has collaborated with technology firm Microsoft to expand digital health capabilities.
Image: Hill-Rom and Microsoft have collaborated to expand digital health capabilities. Photo: courtesy of cooldesign / FreeDigitalPhotos.net.
Both firms will involve in the development of advanced and actionable point-of-care data and solutions for caregivers and healthcare provider organizations.
The partnership will provide combined offerings, based on Microsoft Azure, to better analyze real-time sensing data from medical devices and historical medical record information, as well as communicate possible patient risk and hospital protocol actions directly to caregivers at the point of care.
The solutions aggregate Hill-Rom’s broad clinical knowledge and provide operational data from medical devices and Microsoft’s cloud, including Azure IoT and Azure machine learning, to improve patient outcomes.
Hill-Rom is planning to introduce its digital solution offerings for hospitals in the second part of the year.
Hill-Rom president and CEO John Groetelaars said: “Information and connectivity are critical to providing quality healthcare, reducing length of stay, driving efficiencies across the healthcare continuum and providing clinical and economic value.
“Our collaboration with Microsoft will help clinicians identify, communicate and mitigate patient risk in real-time, advancing our vision of connected care to address customer challenges and enhance patient outcomes.”
Hill-Rom‘s connected solutions will incorporate data from its medical devices and hospitals’ electronic medical records via common gateway infrastructure.
The combination of medical device data and Azure machine learning will help evaluate and analyze critical and secure information at the bedside, providing better insights to clinicians to reduce complications and enhance patient outcomes.
The partnership will also provide hospitals with simplified installation, integration, information security and support services for IT departments across the globe, in addition to the localized and cloud-based patient risk identification and communication services.
Microsoft US health and life sciences vice president Chris Sakalosky said: “Microsoft’s AI capabilities make Azure an ideal platform for Hill-Rom’s new digital offerings. The powerful combination of Hill-Rom’s proven applications with Azure will help empower organizations across all industries, and especially in the health market.”