Microsoft announced June 26 that it has hired two prominent healthcare executives, signaling its intention to become more of a player in value-based care.
In a blog post on the Microsoft website, Peter Lee, corporate vice president of Microsoft Healthcare, announced that Jim Weinstein and Josh Mandel have joined the company.
Mandel, Microsoft Healthcare’s new Chief Architect, recently led the health IT ecosystem work at Verily (Google Life Sciences). He is a member of the research faculty at the Boston Children’s Hospital Computational Health Informatics Program, where he served as lead architect for SMART Health IT. He also is a visiting scientist at the Harvard Medical School Department of Biomedical Informatics. In his new role, Lee said, Mandel will work with customers, partners and the open standards community to lay the groundwork for an open cloud architecture to unlock the value of healthcare for the entire health ecosystem.
Weinstein, Microsoft Health’s new Head of Innovation and Health Equity, most recently served as CEO and president of Dartmouth-Hitchcock and the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Health system in New Hampshire. He is the past director of the Dartmouth Institute, home of the Dartmouth Atlas of Health Care. He is also the co-founder and inaugural executive director of the national High Value Healthcare Collaborative, which brings together some of the nation’s top healthcare systems to share data, develop insights and advance the causes of better healthcare outcomes. His book “Unraveled” looks at the broken healthcare system and how it might be repaired with patient-based clinical insights. Lee said Weinstein would work with him in developing the strategic vision for Microsoft Healthcare, and would provide leadership that is grounded in decades of health industry experience.
Lee said Microsoft has developed an initial "blueprint" intended to standardize the process for the compliant, privacy-preserving movement of a patient’s personal health information to the cloud and the automated tracking of its exposure to machine learning and data science, for example to support external audit. “This is a small first step, but progress toward an open architecture that ultimately will benefit doctors, nurses and clinicians in how they interact with patients, and also allow more time for patients to spend face-to-face with their care providers,” Lee said in the blog. “It also opens up research opportunities for this data to be shared, and to be done under the same compliance and regulatory standards which protect your health data today; all with the goal of leading to advancements in medical science.”
