39 How are partners adding value to the HLS space and how is Microsoft helping to nurture new entrants to the field? Microsoft depends on our partner ecosystem to bridge the last mile from our tools and platforms to solutions that our customers can use to achieve their organisational goals. For our startup partners in HLS, this includes everything from helping providers to improve patient outcomes with clinical support tools to optimising clinical trials and everything in between. Through our Founders Hub startup programme, we are supporting new entrants in the market with tools and resources, including free access to GitHub for software development and the Microsoft Cloud, $2,500 of OpenAI credits and up to $150,000 in Azure credits. Startups also receive a variety of product benefits, personalised mentoring from our experts, and go-to-market support. What recent successes have startup partners achieved within the HLS industry? There are so many to choose from and I’ve shared many in previous issues of this magazine. However, we recently published a case study with AI tooling company BeekeeperAI, which enables AI algorithm development within a zero-trust framework for healthcare predictions. The EscrowAI solution allows the use of sensitive data, without de-identification, to be part of the AI training and testing process. It does this by creating a trusted execution environment in which content is not visible to either data stewards or AI developers, but delivers verifiable results. BeeKeeperAI was able to enhance its solution by adding Azure Confidential Ledger to record algorithm and data set relationships. Originally spun out of University of California in San Francisco, the company is working directly with leading pharmaceutical companies globally to accelerate their safe and responsible use of AI for healthcare services. Another recent partner success involved Pangaea Data’s product platform helping the UK’s National Health Service (NHS) to identify cachexia patients. Pangaea Data combines AI and medical guidelines to characterise patients across 7,000 hard-to-diagnose conditions. The platform mimics the manual review process used by clinicians without transacting patient data, enabling the connection to a larger population of undiagnosed, misdiagnosed and miscoded patients across hard-to-diagnose conditions for monitoring, screening, therapies and trials. The NHS collaborated with two pharmaceutical companies from the USA and Japan to identify cachexia patients at an earlier stage. NHS clinicians applied Pangea Data’s platform to a data set of 8,484 patients who had previously been evaluated using traditional resources such as the ICD (International Classification of Diseases) or symptom-based searches. The platform correctly identified the 41 known cachexia patients and an additional 253 patients that were not identified previously. The earlier discovery of these patients helped halve the cost of treatment from £10,000 ($12,600) to £5,000 ($6,280) per patient, resulting in an annual saving of £1 billion ($1.26 billion) for the NHS due to the identification of 200,000 such patients who are missed in the UK annually. Additionally, it has improved patient outcomes and justified the allocation of healthcare resources with empirical evidence. This enabled healthcare providers to deliver quality care more efficiently and cost-effectively to a larger patient population. What lies ahead for you, your team, and your partners? What innovations can we expect to see being delivered as we move into 2024? We will continue to see more AI solutions moving into the clinical realm, where they will be used for everything from diagnostics to imaging and digital therapeutics. There will also be greater adoption of personalised medical treatments, whether it’s bespoke implants, chronic condition management or medications. And while we don’t talk much about the metaverse anymore, we are seeing growing adoption and applications of virtual and augmented reality, especially in mental health. Lastly, we will see changes in care delivery systems as more routine visits move towards telehealth, freeing up in-person appointments for more urgent and complicated illnesses. “Microsoft depends on our partner ecosystem to bridge the last mile from our tools and platforms to solutions that our customers can use to achieve their organisational goals”
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