Becker's Hospital Review

165 165 PRACTICE MANAGEMENT THOUGHT LEADERSHIP Where the Providence, Microsoft 'hospital of the future' partnership stands 1 year later: 3 Qs with CIO B.J. Moore By Jackie Drees S ince announcing its stra- tegic alliance to build a high-tech hospital with Microsoft in July 2019, Providence has zeroed in on innovations in patient care delivery, virtual communi- cation tools and artificial in- telligence across its Renton, Wash.-based health system. When Providence revealed the collaboration, health system CEO Rod Hochman, MD, referred to it as a "hospi- tal of the future," according to a CNBC report. While still in the project's infancy, Providence said it planned to adapt an existing facility in Seattle near Microsoft's headquarters to build the new high-tech hospital. The project, however, has a "much broader" focus, Provi- dence Executive Vice President and CIO B.J. Moore told Becker's Hospital Review. "While the concept of 'hospital of the future' caught so much attention when our strategic alliance was announced a year ago, the reality is that our focus is much broader. From the beginning we defined this within our strategic framework of simplify/modernize/innovate," Mr. Moore said. "In the inno- vate space, we are focused on the future of care delivery, a future that has the patient, not the site of care, at the center; with innovations on how care is delivered." Since partnering with the tech giant, Microsoft has pushed forward cloud adoption and deployed initiatives such as Mi- crosoft Teams, which has helped employees manage remote work during the pandemic. Here, Mr. Moore discusses some of the project's key accomplishments over the past year and its future goals. Editor's note: Responses have been lightly edited for clarity and length. Question: Where is the high-tech hospital project at today? Is it operational or, if not, when do you plan to open? B.J. Moore: While the concept of 'hospital of the future' caught so much attention when our strategic alliance was announced a year ago, the reality is that our focus is much broader. From the beginning we defined this within our strategic framework of simplify/modernize/innovate. In the innovate space, we are focused on the future of care deliv- ery, a future that has the patient, not the site of care, at the center; with innovations on how care is delivered. For exam- ple, around telehealth and home monitoring scenarios, and innovation on the way we enable care providers for greater experience and outcomes. An example emerging from the collaboration with Microsoft is natural language processing and cancer treatment. We will showcase some of the partnership in an acute care setting, time and location to be determined, but you will see the innovations from the Microsoft strategic alliance in many facets within our health system. Q: What have been some of the project's biggest accom- plishments over the last year? BM: Some of our biggest accomplishments include complet- ing the deployment of Microsoft 365 across all our 132,000- plus caregivers in May. This was a huge achievement that was instrumental in allowing us to successfully manage the sudden transition to remote work and suspension of travel for thousands of our caregivers due to COVID-19. Having complete coverage of collaboration and productivity tools could not have been timelier. The COVID-19 crisis took center stage earlier this year and it strengthened our strategic alliance. Working together we embraced opportunities for fast response and innovation. Examples of this include oursymptom assessment chat bot using Microsoft Healthcare Bot service and emergency re- sponse and decision-making tools. The progress we made in Microsoft cloud adoption already yielded substantial benefits in simplifying and modernizing our ecosystem. For example, the work to retire our data cen- ters has helped us identify many applications to be retired, and we have already started to see the benefits of not hav- ing to keep upgrading servers and leases. Perhaps more im- portantly we are now able to deploy and bring solutions to production with much greater agility. An example of this is our machine learning and modeling of personal protective equipment, supplies, hospital beds and COVID-19 trends and predictions. Q: What are some of your goals for the hospital or what do you hope to accomplish in the next year? BM: We are looking to further accelerate our efforts to move to the cloud and leverage Azure across the ecosystem. This includes continuing to simplify our ecosystem, rationalizing a large number of applications, modernizing our internal en- gineering practices and continuing to build and develop our organization and information system culture around cloud computing. Keep building on the momentum we have with users em- bracing Microsoft Teams and the Microsoft 365 suite. We, like many others, are undergoing a long-term transforma- tion of the work environment and the way people collab- orate. We want to be intentional about how the tools con- tinue enabling best practice scenarios across a number of persons in the administrative and clinical environments. We will continue to innovate together on building the future of healthcare delivery. This includes areas such as Microsoft Teams in telehealth scenarios, IoT and remote patient mon- itoring, and other innovations in machine learning, artificial intellegence and analytics. n

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