LOUISVILLE, Ky., and
REDMOND, Wash., Oct. 21, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- On Monday, Humana
and Microsoft Corp. announced a strategic partnership focused on
building modern health care solutions for Humana members aimed at
improving their health outcomes and making their health care
experiences simpler to navigate. Using the power of Microsoft's
Azure cloud, Azure AI, and Microsoft 365 collaboration
technologies, as well as interoperability standards like
FHIR®,1 Humana will develop predictive
solutions and intelligent automation to improve its members' care
by providing care teams with real-time access to information
through a secure and trusted cloud platform.
Humana will empower doctors to deliver personalized, proactive
health care by providing a holistic view of their patients,
ensuring preventive care, keeping up with medication schedules and
refills, and offering perspective on social barriers to health,
such as food insecurity, loneliness and social isolation. In
addition, Humana will leverage Microsoft technologies for health
care-tuned natural language understanding and speech recognition to
improve administrative and clinical workflows to make health care
easier for members and clinician partners.
As a first step in the seven-year partnership with Microsoft as
Humana's preferred cloud provider, Humana will modernize its
technology platforms and aggregate data on Microsoft Azure,
enabling a truly longitudinal view of its members' health
histories, to facilitate Humana's members and their care teams
having complete health records at their fingertips when and where
they need it.
"Achieving our goal to provide better care experiences and
improve our members' health requires strong partnerships that allow
us to be smarter, safer and faster in delivering care," said
Heather Cox, chief of Digital Health
& Analytics at Humana. "The technologies to empower our members
to get ahead of their health issues and equip doctors with
information exist today. Our partnership with Microsoft gives us a
secure space and modern platforms to put these technologies to work
for patients and their trusted providers."
Humana will also enable efficiencies by standardizing
productivity and collaboration tools for its 41,600 employees on
Microsoft 365. For example, Microsoft Teams enables healthcare
professionals to use a secure hub for coordinating patient care.
Humana employees can use Microsoft Teams to assist members, to
centrally manage and securely share patient interaction history and
files, and to communicate by chat and voice with care team members
and health plan administrators to improve quality of care.
"With an estimated 10,000 people joining the Medicare system
daily, we have a tremendous opportunity to address the growing
demands on the health care system by improving health outcomes and
lowering costs," said Greg Moore,
M.D., Ph.D., corporate vice president of Health Technology and
Alliances at Microsoft. "We're excited to combine Humana's industry
expertise with Microsoft's Azure cloud, Azure AI and voice
capabilities to remove barriers, promote health care data
interoperability, and create solutions to ensure this growing
population gets the right preventative, acute and long-term care
for the best health outcomes."
Beyond enhancing Humana's technology platforms, this partnership
will also address two core innovation areas. Humana will leverage
Microsoft Azure and Azure AI to develop on-demand and virtual
medical services. In addition, Humana will deliver a more
integrated health care experience across all touchpoints with Azure
AI and voice capabilities to personalize patient care.
"The next step for medical records is to go beyond the
collection of information to the delivery of insights," said
William Shrank, M.D., chief medical and corporate affairs officer
at Humana. "Microsoft technologies offer Humana the ability to
apply sophisticated analytics to our members' records and, in turn,
provide clinicians and care teams with the opportunities to make a
difference in patients' health."
With Azure AI, Humana will be able to instantly translate the
many different languages of an individual's electronic health
record and decipher nonelectronic parts, such as socio-economic
determinants of health, and store them alongside the rest of the
patient's information. With this technology, Humana will develop
health care-specific clinical intelligence capabilities, such as
equipping home health solutions with voice technologies that enable
care workers to be more productive, and will allow Humana to
proactively capture and address important barriers to health.
As part of the strategic partnership, the companies have
committed to a multiyear research and development (R&D)
investment to build new insights and advance Humana's focus on
value-based care. This investment will include direct funding,
dedicated R&D teams and specific co-developed projects. The
companies will also explore the building of next-generation health
care experiences to transform the industry and care delivery.
About Humana
Humana Inc. (NYSE: HUM) is
committed to helping our millions of medical and specialty members
achieve their best health. Our successful history in care delivery
and health plan administration is helping us create a new kind of
integrated care with the power to improve health and well-being and
lower costs. Our efforts are leading to a better quality of life
for people with Medicare, families, individuals, military service
personnel, and communities at large.
To accomplish that, we support physicians and other health care
professionals as they work to deliver the right care in the right
place for their patients, our members. Our range of clinical
capabilities, resources and tools – such as in-home care,
behavioral health, pharmacy services, data analytics and wellness
solutions – combine to produce a simplified experience that makes
health care easier to navigate and more effective.
More information regarding Humana is available to investors via
the Investor Relations page of the company's web site
at www.humana.com, including copies of:
- Annual reports to stockholders
- Securities and Exchange Commission filings
- Most recent investor conference presentations
- Quarterly earnings news releases and conference calls
- Calendar of events
- Corporate Governance information
About Microsoft
Microsoft (Nasdaq "MSFT" @microsoft)
enables digital transformation for the era of an intelligent cloud
and an intelligent edge. Its mission is to empower every person and
every organization on the planet to achieve more.
1 FHIR® is the registered trademark
of HL7 and is used with the permission of HL7.
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SOURCE Microsoft Corp.