While hospitals collect massive amounts of data, 97% of it goes unused, according to Microsoft.
The World Economic Forum estimates that hospitals produce an estimated 50 petabytes of data annually — roughly the equivalent of 10 billion music files — but don't do anything with all but 3% of it, a Microsoft executive wrote in the Oct. 10 blog post.
So the tech giant created a healthcare-specific data analytics platform with Microsoft Fabric to tap clinical insights from all that "locked away" information. Chicago-based Northwestern Medicine is one of the first U.S. clients, planning to employ Fabric for clinical data integration, information exchange mandates, and to decipher insights with artificial intelligence.
"We’re excited to work with Microsoft to leverage Fabric's healthcare data solutions to build a highly capable and adaptive health system in a secure architecture," said Doug King, senior vice president and CIO of Northwestern Medicine, in an October news release. "Fabric will allow us to better understand our clinical environment and patients at a more granular level, delivering the data that is needed to ensure we provide our patients with high-quality, compassionate care in a timely manner."