Microsoft has brought in some big names to assist with its healthcare efforts.
The tech giant hired Jim Weinstein and Joshua Mandel to join its Microsoft Healthcare team, which includes company’s previously announced Healthcare NExT project as well as a focus on strategic partnerships and life sciences.
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Weinstein, the former president and CEO of Dartmouth-Hitchcock, will serve as vice president and head of innovation and health equity. In his role, he’ll help create the strategic vision for Microsoft Healthcare. Additionally, Weinstein will work with healthcare organizations as systems move to the cloud.
Mandel will be Microsoft Healthcare’s chief architect, a role that encompasses working with customers and the open standards community to lay the groundwork for an open cloud architecture. Most recently, he led the health IT ecosystem work at Verily (formerly known as Google Life Sciences).
“Jim and Josh join us at an exciting time, as healthcare processes undergo a digital transformation,” Peter Lee, corporate vice president of Microsoft Healthcare, wrote in a blog post. “This transformation has created a wealth of healthcare data that has potential to help identify diseases earlier, create and improve treatments and improve the lives of patients across the globe.”
Alas, the data is not easily accessible. But Microsoft wants to help solve this problem and assist in bringing health information to the cloud.
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The Redmond, Washington organization has already done a bit of work in the medical space. Earlier this year, it joined forces with DNAnexus and St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital to launch St. Jude Cloud, a platform that gives researchers access to pediatric cancer genomics data.
In 2017, it launched Healthcare NExT, an initiative between Microsoft AI, Microsoft Research other industry players. NExT stands for New Experiences and Technologies. The initial aim of the project was to fuse artificial intelligence, research efforts and the expertise of healthcare organizations. Microsoft’s first partner for the initiative was UPMC.
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