Bringing mobile, social, and health together to improve care

When you think Microsoft Office, you might be thinking Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. The new Office is so much more. It’s personalised, cloud-connected, and enables productivity and collaboration scenarios in health that simply weren’t possible before.

Over the next few weeks on our Worldwide Health blog, I’ll cover the highlights of the new Microsoft Office for Health and discuss how it can help health organisations increase efficiency while addressing requirements for flexibility, control, and security. Let’s start at the beginning—with how the new Office allows health professionals to use mobile devices and social media more in their work.

Productive, fluid experiences across devices

Health professionals love their mobile devices. And they want to be able to use their favorite productivity tools on their mobile devices so they can work when, where, and how they need to, including wherever their patients are. The new Office lets them use familiar Office applications on smartphones, tablets, desktops, PCs, Macs, and more, as well as on popular browsers. It’s a productive, synced experience across browsers and devices. And Office documents can automatically be saved to SkyDrive in the cloud, so health professionals can always access their latest work and collaborate in real time, regardless of the devices they’re using.

For example, a clinician can use a mobile device to take notes in OneNote while on a home visit, and those notes can then be accessed by colleagues back at the clinic almost immediately. Notes taken in the field will sync automatically across mobile devices, tablets, PCs, and Macs. And no matter who edits the notes, formatting and styles remain intact regardless of the device being used - whether PC, Windows Phone, iOS, or Android phone.

Enterprise social media

Just as health professionals love the flexibility of mobile devices, they also love the convenience of communicating and collaborating on social media. The new Microsoft SharePoint provides an experience that’s very similar to the social media experiences health professionals are used to in their personal lives. But since the SharePoint experience is on a corporate network instead of a public network, health organisations can adopt social media to increase productivity without compromising the security of their data.

With SharePoint and its enterprise social networking newsfeeds and content sharing, team members can share an update to a document or discussion, or ask a question the same way they would update their Facebook status. It’s a fast, easy way for health professionals to collaborate. They can stay connected by following sites, content, and conversations, and are better equipped to share ideas, clinical insights, and best practices with colleagues.

Next week on the Worldwide Health blog, I’ll discuss how the new Office for Health streamlines care team collaboration and patient communication. In the meantime, if you want to learn more about the new Office for Health, visit the Microsoft Office for Health website.

By Sumit Virmani, Director, Health for Microsoft Worldwide Public Sector

 
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