Microsoft formally established a healthcare group and named two people to lead the enterprise, GeekWire reports.
Here are five things to know:
1. The new group is called Microsoft Healthcare and falls under Microsoft's AI and Research division. It gives a formal name to Microsoft's years of work in the healthcare sphere.
2. Microsoft Healthcare is a result of Healthcare NExT, an initiative Microsoft launched in 2017 to take on healthcare projects alongside companies in the space. Employees who had been working on Healthcare NExT will now work for Microsoft Healthcare.
3. Jim Weinstein, the former CEO of Lebanon, N.H.-based Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, was hired as Microsoft Healthcare's vice president and head of innovation and health equity.
4. Joshua Mandel is tasked with establishing "open cloud" architecture as Microsoft Healthcare's chief architect. Mr. Mandel is a researcher and former Google Life Sciences IT ecosystems lead.
5. Microsoft Healthcare will adopt Healthcare NExT's research-focused work and employ "the cross-company strategy for healthcare and life sciences," Microsoft Healthcare NExT Head Peter Lee said in a blog post. Mr. Lee is also corporate vice president of Microsoft Research and AI.
"Unfortunately, even with advances in data protection and governance, healthcare data is not easily accessible by the researchers and doctors who need it to help us all realize the potential," Mr. Lee said. "We are taking concrete steps with 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."