Microsoft announced its new service to help healthcare companies store patient data in the cloud and a Healthcare Bot service that will be integrated with Electronic Health Records.
The tool will be based on Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform, which it describes as a secure end-to-end platform that organizations can use to store and analyze sensitive data.
“Healthcare leaders are thinking about how they bring their data into the cloud while increasing opportunities to use and learn from that data,” Microsoft wrote in a blog.
With its new healthcare push, Microsoft aims to create a system that makes health records more easily accessible and sharable between clinicians, researchers, and patients, Bloomberg reports. The corporation also sees its integrated healthcare storage as a way to attract companies to Microsoft, over its competitor Amazon Web Services.
Both Microsoft and Amazon faced backlash over contracts with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, to provide the agency with cloud storage for biometric information.
Microsoft will not only provide healthcare organizations with an accessible storage and information sharing platform, but the company is also making its healthcare bots available to more healthcare organizations. The Microsoft Healthcare Bot service will include chatbots, and features like medical content and terminology and a built-in symptom tracker, the company announced Thursday.
The bots will also help patients find clinical trials for new drugs and therapies, or answer questions about their prescriptions, according to Bloomberg.