Region of Southern Denmark and Microsoft Denmark partner over health innovation and patient care

The healthcare sector in the Region of Southern Denmark is moving toward a radical transformation when nine new hospitals and hospital units at a total cost of 1.5 billion USD are to be built over the next 10 years. To enable the best possible conditions for health innovation and patient care, the Region of Southern Denmark has partnered with Microsoft. Their cooperation will be anchored in the Science Park in Odense, which aims to develop the intelligent health technologies of the future.

DENMARK, 11-9-2013 — /EuropaWire/ — On Friday 10 September 2013, Carl Holst, Chairman and CEO of the Danish Regions, and Niels Soelberg, CEO Microsoft Denmark, sign an agreement to examine how new technologies and solutions can provide benefits in the future of hospital operation.

– In the Region of Southern Denmark, we have for a long time benefitted from cooperating with the private sector, and we are therefore very pleased to be able to make an agreement with a company like Microsoft, which is one of the world’s leading companies, with a great focus on quality, innovation and creativity, says Carl Holst.

The parties have agreed on a common platform for development, where the Region of Southern Denmark can benefit from Microsoft’s large networking and development opportunities, while Microsoft gets a strong partner in the Danish health sector. This agreement is an example of how Microsoft, together with partners, helps develop innovative and scalable solutions that enable a connected health ecosystem for predictive, preventive, more sustainable and personalized care.

– The Region of Southern Denmark is a leading region in relation to welfare innovation. We believe that technology can transform the healthcare system and patient care, and innovative initiatives like this are necessary to make this possible. Among other things, we and the Region will test the latest health technologies – including technology and solutions that allow that patients themselves to take greater part in their own care and more easily obtain and share patient information, says Niels Soelberg.

Neil Jordan, Worldwide General Manager of Health Industry at Microsoft, who was also present at the signing, elaborates.

“We see great opportunities in working with Region of Southern Denmark,. We can both benefit from direct contact with patients, clinical and IT staff to implement and test Health IT solutions in a real life Lab, to ensure that health innovation brings real impact for better health” says Neil Jordan.

Strong public-private cooperation

The possible synergies in public-private partnerships is a key reason why the Region of Southern Denmark focusses so intensely on welfare technology in healthcare. Carl Holst is pleased and proud that the Region of Southern Denmark has evolved into a national flagship for welfare technology, and he sees several benefits to be gained.

– We have good experience with joint investments in welfare technology, which gives patients better treatment, makes hospitals more productive and not least strengthens regional business development, he says.

As part of the business development strategy in the region, The Southern Danish Growth Forum focused on welfare technology – and the Region’s and Microsoft partnership will give a number of local companies new business opportunities.

– We need partnerships with large companies such as Microsoft for our investments in development and commercialization to succeed. With Microsoft onboard, also smaller local companies are able to benefit from Microsoft’s much larger and global value chain, says Carl Holst.

Niels Soelberg agrees.

– This partnership gives access to many small and medium-sized companies as well as entrepreneurial businesses in Denmark. It gives means to promote local development and innovation, which makes a real difference and improve healthcare outcomes, says Niels Soelberg.

For more information, please contact

• Carl Holst (V), Regionsrådsformand, Region Syddanmark, Tel. +45 4032 5210
• Jakob Højbjerg Andersen, PR Manager, Microsoft Danmark. Tel.: +45 5157 8317, email: a-jaand@microsoft.com

Facts about the agreement

The Region of Southern Denmark and Microsoft’s agreement has four focus areas:

1. Seamless Health Communication and Collaboration (enabled by Unified Communication – UC ): The Region of Southern Denmark (RSD) and Microsoft will explore the possibilities of reducing the healthcare costs, enabling more innovative processes and improving healthcare outcomes by using a UC solution. Microsoft will to the greatest extent possible give access to UC-specialists as well as supplying the region with devices with pre-installed UC solutions.

2. Application of Natural Interfaces for Better Health (including application of gaming for health and wellness purposes): The availability of Natural User Interfaces (NUI) will significantly change the way we interact with our computers. There are many and new emerging ways in which we will be interacting with “computers”, information, and data for various purposes, amongst which health, wellness, prevention and rehabilitation. RSD will be able to test, review, assess and identify the best examples on NUI applied to health, encompassing process innovation in the operating theatre, rehabilitation, exergaming, wellness and prevention. Microsoft will facilitate an envisioning workshop, which should lead to the identification of best areas of application of NUI into a hospital, community centre as well as citizens’ home or municipality services’ offerings. It is the intention of RSD and Microsoft to engage in 2-3 tailored projects to implement NUI, testing the solution in the Centre to assess the benefits, collect feedback and prepare the ground for deployment at scale.

3. Enabling Patient Centric Platform, Applications and Processes: RSD, Microsoft and partners will review Apps and solutions to help re-design and transform clinical processes of work in health organizations, health data access, reporting, sharing and storage, agenda and appointment scheduling, case management and interaction with patients. RSD and Microsoft will review and test the latest solutions and innovation to enable patients to proactively manage their health, share and access data and connect seamlessly to preventive, wellness and lifestyle solutions for better outcomes. One of the concepts to be explored could be how to make the patient more comfortable with her care team as that is often a source of anxiety in patients and how to support seamless monitoring and caring at home, after hospital discharge. The Microsoft Research work on “Designing Patient-Centric Information Displays for Hospitals” highlights opportunities for technology innovation in this area.

4. Managing Patient Relationships for Pediatric Diabetes (enabled by the CRM Platform): RSD, as many other health organizations, is seeking to offer patient-centric environments driven by the desire to increase focus on patient satisfaction, prevention, quality of care, and patient well-being. Because customer relationship management (CRM) solutions are designed to help organizations manage relationships based on customer needs, health organizations are beginning to choose them to help improve their patient satisfaction and meet process efficiency goals. RSD can study the example and experience of early adopters like the University College London Hospital, which have applied the CRM technology to manage pediatric diabetes. To facilitate implementation of a similar pediatric diabetes management solution in RSD, Microsoft can support RSD in organizing a study visit to UCL, help understand the implementation pathway and benefits, design the implementation roadmap for a pilot project in one of the hospitals of RSD