What Microsoft is doing in healthcare research

Technology has transformed our lives as consumers, but it's only just starting to make a difference to our health: you can look up your symptoms online, track your heart rate with a smart watch and expect your doctor to look up your previous prescriptions. In the future though, technology might give us precision medicine personalised to our own immune systems and genetics. Before that, it can make healthcare more efficient – giving doctors more time to look after patients. As AI and machine learning become more important in medicine, Microsoft is taking existing investments in its healthcare data platform, cloud-scale databases and AI tools and using that as the basis of Healthcare NExT – a set of partnerships to develop solutions that have the right tools for healthcare, at a scale that can help treat and protect everyone. It's based on the MSR NExT initiative for turning research into new lines of business that created new Microsoft products like the Bot Framework and Azure Sphere; in 2015, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella decided to take the same approach to healthcare and the first pieces are now starting to emerge.