Microsoft wants to use its cloud services to revolutionize healthcare

Microsoft’s decision to remove OneDrive’s unlimited cloud storage option earlier this week made many of us doubt the sincerity of the company’s claims that it has a cloud-first strategy, but the company released a a blog post a couple of days ago where it reiterated this claim, as well as its belief that the cloud is the future. In the post, Microsoft discusses how the cloud and the Internet of Things have to potential to revolutionize the medical field, and how it wants to be the company that brings about that revolution.

The future of health includes higher-quality, personalized, preventive and predictive care that’s more accessible and efficient. Microsoft’s bold ambition to build the intelligent cloud comes to life in healthcare thanks to the power of advanced health analytics, Internet of Things (IoT) and Machine Learning. In this blog post, we will be focusing on the Internet of Things. Advanced analytics capabilities combined with the digitization of the physical world (Internet of Things) has tremendous impact when applied to remote monitoring and better treatment of chronic diseases. According to a McKinsey Global Institute 2015 report, IoT has the potential to cut costs by as much as 50 percent in chronic diseases management, equaling to a gain of $1.1 trillion per year in 2025. Use of IoT systems could enable societal benefits worth more than $500 billion per year. Interestingly, most of the IoT data collected today are not used at all, and data that are used are not fully exploited across various sectors – not only health and wellness – as less than 1% of data is currently used, mostly for alarms or real-time control, while more can be used for optimization and prediction.