- John Bosco, CIO of Northwell Health, told BI why Microsoft's cloud business is becoming a new favorite in healthcare.
- Mainly, it's because the tech giant has other services that are compatible with its cloud offering, like disaster recovery, login management for internal networks, and a host of functions that can read healthcare data.
- Other CIOs shared some of Bosco's sentiments in a survey conducted by JPMorgan.
- Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.
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Microsoft seems to be gaining a bigger foothold in healthcare.
In the past month, it announced deals or extensions with Allscripts to house its electronic health record, Johns Hopkins to make medicine more personalized, and Walgreens to bolster its digital health offerings, just to name a few.
Plus, in a recent survey of 130 chief information officers by JPMorgan, just over half said Microsoft's cloud unit, called Azure, would be the most critical for their tech needs going forward. Others favored cloud offerings from Google or Amazon. The CIOs were from a range of industries, not just healthcare.
John Bosco is CIO of Northwell Health, which has 23 hospitals and more than 700 outpatient facilities, making it New York's biggest hospital system. We talked to Bosco about how the health system uses cloud technology — and why Microsoft is gaining ground.
Northwell's primary cloud vendor is Microsoft, but it keeps electronic health records stored in its own physical data centers, Bosco said. Northwell also uses "a little bit" of Google Cloud, and starting in January, Oracle for its human resources and payroll system, he said.
Northwell uses Azure to help monitor data from its hospitals, and also to power some of Northwell's workplace apps and systems.
In the interview, Bosco shared three reasons why Microsoft's Azure is becoming a favorite in healthcare, based on his experience using it.
The reasons all have to do with the fact that many of Microsoft's other services are compatible with its basic cloud infrastructure, he told Business Insider.
First, Azure does a better job of communicating with the other systems in hospitals using application programming interfaces, or APIs. Lots of pieces of software rely on APIs to exchange healthcare data. For example, they can allow researchers to combine data from different hospitals in a provider's overall network to study it.
While Amazon and Google's have similar capabilities, they're less robust, Bosco said.
"If I need certain API services so that I can have systems in their cloud talking to systems down here, they can provide those kinds of software services," he told BI.
The second reason is Azure's disaster recovery services, he said. If there's a blackout, storm, or other event, Microsoft can save healthcare data when the power goes out and help hospitals get their doctors back online quickly.
That's helpful for Northwell's contingency plans for power outages brought on by winter storms, as one example.
Read more: How tech titans like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft are taking on the the $3.6 trillion healthcare industry.
Third, Microsoft's directory services can let employees log in to many different systems, he said. At Northwell, an employee might sign onto the network in the morning, and then use the payroll system. At each step, she's asked to give her login credentials, which Microsoft verifies.
That's all run via the cloud, so Northwell doesn't need to program the same information into its data centers, Bosco said.
In JPMorgan's survey, the CIOs, who're collectively responsible for $88 billion in annual IT spending, cited similar reasons for favoring Microsoft, as Business Insider's Rosalie Chan reported in June. They like that many of its products, like Microsoft Office 365 and Windows, can bundle together.
Some also said they were already using Microsoft for other reasons, so expanding to Azure is a natural fit. The company owns the most popular workplace applications, after all, and people tend to trust Microsoft more than similarly sized tech companies, per reporting by Business Insider and CB Insights.
To be sure, Amazon's is the biggest cloud provider on the market, boasting healthcare work with Cerner, Bristol Myers Squibb, and the Cleveland Clinic. Google's cloud tools are advanced, though the company is particularly focused on machine learning programs and companies that advance scientific research.
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