Microsoft Looks to Business Tools for Health Care Craig Mundie, Microsoft's chief research and strategy officer, demonstrated some applications on Thursday that apply current technologies to problems facing the health care industry. Technology developments aimed at businesses can help the medical field more than many people in Health Care may think, he said. For example, health care organizations often say that they have so much data, including patients' medical, billing and insurance information, that it will be a challenge for technology companies to build applications around the data, Mundie said. But Mundie discovered that, in fact, the data collected by some businesses far surpasses that of health care groups. Similarly, every day, consumers upload a volume of data in Facebook photos that equals all of the hospital's data, he said.



Beth Israel was the largest single health care system in terms of data that Microsoft could find in the U.S. in order to make this comparison, he said. The volume of medical data is set to grow, though, as an increasingly tech-savvy population begins to use devices that collect health information and transmit it to back-end databases. By combining such user-generated data with information produced in the clinical care environment, "we'll be enlightened," Mundie said. His researchers are working on ways to analyze that data and apply machine learning to improve care and reduce costs in Health Care. Microsoft did one experiment in which it used machine learning to look at 10 years of data from a hospital to try to predict whether a patient was likely to be readmitted to the hospital.

It used all the data from the hospital, including clinical data and billing information. Microsoft's tool looked at data for people who had congestive heart failure and found many of the same correlations that doctors look for to determine if the person was likely to require readmittance. He also showed off ways that health workers could use Microsoft's Kinect sensor, currently used in conjunction with the Xbox 360 game console. Mundie showed an example where a health care worker could use voice commands to sift through patients to identify those who might be eligible to be entered into a new program. That could allow a health care worker to review a recorded video of the session to look for clues that individuals may not be engaged by the sessions, Mundie said.

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