Microsoft is laboring to close the gap between healthcare and other industries when it comes down to the “health” of the technology adoption. In the Redmond company's perspective, members of the healthcare industry are dealing not only with reduced budgets, but also with obsolete technology, strict regulations, and the impossibility to centralize disparate information on patients.

“Healthcare is traditionally years behind other industries when it comes to creating efficiency through technology,” revealed Tim Smokoff, general manager of Microsoft’s Worldwide Public Sector Healthcare division. “Our goal is to change that using what we’ve learned from customers. We’re taking a real-world perspective and putting it together in a way that organizations can really use.”

The software giant doesn't offer a panacea for upgrading healthcare to healthcare 2.0, but it does offer software solutions designed to smooth the transition. The Connected Health Framework Architecture and Design Blueprint (CHF) and the Connected Health Platform (CHP) are a couple of offerings available at no charge, set up to be the foundation of modern system architectures. Both CHF and CHP are essentially solution accelerators offering guidance, best practice and tools to build e-health products.

“If we want to accelerate the uptake of e-health applications, we need to freely distribute an architecture and design blueprint along with bits of code and guidance papers so that people can use them,” Smokoff added. “Partners can easily build their own versions and keep the intellectual property because CHF and CHP are free to use and open to innovate on top of.”

According to Microsoft, the latest versions of CHF and CHP are focused on prevention rather than offering treatment, in order to drive lifetime health. “For the most part, healthcare has been focused on waiting for people to get sick and then curing them,” Smokoff explained. “So much of healthcare costs in developed nations result from the management of chronic disease such as diabetes, obesity and pulmonary disease. Today we’re shifting that focus toward prevention, and technology needs to keep pace.”