Microsoft tools to help Providence St. Joseph improve outcomes, cost

A new alliance between Microsoft and Providence St. Joseph Health aims to accelerate the digital care transformation of healthcare.

The initiative aims to combine Microsoft’s cloud, artificial intelligence, research capabilities and collaboration tools with the clinical expertise of the Providence system, which operates 51 hospitals and 800 clinics. A primary goal is to improve outcomes and cost of care.

Microsoft brings its Azure cloud computing service for building, testing, deploying and managing applications and services via Microsoft data centers.

The alliance seeks to accelerate industry-wide adoption of the cloud and improve clinical and operational decision-making by using Azure and adopting interoperability standards such as FHIR to integrate secured siloed data sources, improving industry compliance.



Providence St. Joseph Health initially will deploy at one of its facilities in Seattle and near Microsoft, and begin the work to scale innovations across the delivery system that include parts of Alaska, California, Montana, New Mexico, Oregon and Texas.

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The delivery system will standardize productivity and collaboration tools for its 119,000 caregivers and will improve their support of patient engagement using technologies such as Dynamics 365, a Microsoft cloud platform to support enterprise resource planning and customer relationship management applications.

“Providence St. Joseph Health has been on a journey to transform health care and achieve a vision of health for a better world,” says Rod Hochman, MD, President and CEO at the delivery system. Together, we’ll support doctors, nurses and all caregivers by equipping them with innovative tools that will make it easier to do the important work of improving lives.”

By partnering with Microsoft, Providence St. Joseph hopes to can focus on clinical and operational objectives while realizing improvements in the organization’s ability to better deploy data that informs the choices and actions that clinicians take, says Venkat Bhamidipati, executive vice president and chief financial officer at Providence.

“Providence St. Joseph is in the middle of a broad transformation, and the alliance with Microsoft will help us fully modernize our IT solutions, bringing the power and flexibility of the cloud to an industry that traditionally lags behind in modernizing its technology,” contends BJ Moore, executive vice president and chief information officer.