Honeywell to leverage Microsoft Azure cloud platform and connect Microsoft Dynamics 365 to Honeywell Forge, enabling predictive maintenance applications with closed-loop maintenance workflows in the buildings industry
The integration of Honeywell Forge and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Field Service will provide closed loop maintenance for building owners and operators.
CHARLOTTE, N.C., and REDMOND, Wash., October 22, 2020 — Honeywell (NYSE: HON) and Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) announced today that Honeywell will bring to market its domain-specific applications built on the Microsoft cloud platform to drive new levels of productivity for industrial clients.
With the integration of the AI-driven autonomous controls of the Honeywell Forge enterprise performance management software with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Field Service, customers will be able to access operating data that includes workflow management support to improve performance and energy efficiency within the enterprise environment. Workers in the field will benefit from real-time access to critical data that will help them prioritize, analyze and solve problems more quickly.
The first area of focus will be in automating maintenance for building owners and operators. To optimize their buildings’ energy, performance and comfort, they often need to pull data from a variety of sources that are not normalized and inform remote and dispersed workforces. Facility managers must determine what problem to fix, when to fix it and who to assign to the job, which can be very difficult without having the necessary asset know-how and work order management capability.
“Honeywell’s partnership with Microsoft will deliver new value to our customers as we help them solve business challenges by digitizing their operations,” said Que Dallara, president and CEO, Honeywell Connected Enterprise. “Working with Microsoft, Honeywell will bring solutions at scale – powered by AI-driven insights and immediate access to data – that will help our customers work more efficiently than ever before.”
Honeywell Forge delivers cost savings, improved energy efficiency and a better occupant experience to customers. For example, at Crown Towers Perth in Australia, the Honeywell Forge Digitized Maintenance solution provided faster inputs on potential maintenance issues versus traditional annual maintenance schedules and helped reduce reactive work orders by 90%.
In the heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) operation alone – which is known to account for up to 60% of total energy consumption in commercial buildings* – an AI-automated account system such as Honeywell Forge Energy Optimization can save between 10% and 20% in energy costs.**
Dynamics 365 Field Service allows companies to remotely detect and address potential issues early to avoid unnecessary downtime or operational inefficiencies by analyzing IoT data and to improve proactive service offerings through AI-infused IoT alerts and work orders. Leveraging the global scale of Microsoft’s cloud will enable Honeywell to quickly bring new offerings to market while helping customers meet regional security, privacy and compliance requirements.
“To achieve resilient operations and sustainable growth, businesses need to partner to fully unlock the opportunities of cloud, AI and IoT technologies. By integrating Honeywell and Microsoft services, companies turn IoT data into critical business insights and actions to optimize operations and deliver new customer value faster,” said Judson Althoff, executive vice president, Microsoft’s Worldwide Commercial Business.
Working with Microsoft, Honeywell is already delivering the following Honeywell Forge SaaS solutions that will address what customers need now to return to work and, in the future, to operate safely and efficiently, including:
Digitized Maintenance – Offers a panoramic view of the performance of facilities and assets using near real-time analytics. This provides important information about critical equipment issues before they become big repair or even replacement problems.
Energy Optimization – A cloud-based, closed-loop, machine-learning solution that continuously studies a building’s HVAC energy consumption patterns and automatically adjusts to optimal energy saving settings without compromising occupant comfort levels.
OT Cybersecurity – Honeywell Forge Cybersecurity provides continuous threat detection with minimal disruption of services. The robust software solution simplifies, strengthens and scales industrial cybersecurity operations across the enterprise.
The companies are also exploring more ways to bring innovation to customers by integrating Honeywell Forge solutions with Azure services such as Azure Digital Twins and Azure edge capabilities. Digital twins allow businesses to easily model and create digital representations of connected physical environments to deliver products that meet fast-changing market needs while saving operational costs. Using edge computing, customers can run AI, machine learning and business processes directly across plants, warehouses, machines and appliances for quicker actions without the need for a constant internet connection.
Learn more about the partnership on Honeywell.com.
About Microsoft:
Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT” @microsoft) enables digital transformation for the era of an intelligent cloud and an intelligent edge. Its mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.
About Honeywell:
Honeywell (www.honeywell.com) is a Fortune 100 technology company that delivers industry specific solutions that include aerospace products and services; control technologies for buildings and industry; and performance materials globally. Our technologies help aircraft, buildings, manufacturing plants, supply chains, and workers become more connected to make our world smarter, safer, and more sustainable. For more news and information on Honeywell, please visit www.honeywell.com/newsroom.
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Contacts:
Media
Nati Katz Microsoft Media Relations
Honeywell, External Communications WE Communications for Microsoft
Sitting beside their son during one of his weeks-long hospital stays over the Christmas holidays a few years ago, David and Kirsty Hill had plenty of time to worry and think.
As 12-year-old George lay in an isolation room, receiving antibiotics to treat a bacterial infection related to his cystic fibrosis, a progressive genetic disease that damages the lungs and digestive system, the couple thought about what managing their younger son’s disease involved — the daily regimen of medications and nebulizers, the yearly stints in the hospital, the frequent interruptions to school and work, the dread and worry each time George developed a cough.
David and Kirsty were actively involved in cystic fibrosis charities, running half-marathons and doing 100-mile bike rides to raise funds and awareness. But could they do more? As a domain solution architect for Microsoft UK, David was using his technical skills daily to benefit customers. How, he wondered, could he channel those abilities and tap the expertise of his colleagues to use technology to improve the quality of life for George and other people with the disease?
Those musings in a lonely hospital room led to what could be a groundbreaking approach to managing cystic fibrosis — a solution called Project Breathe that seeks to give patients greater control over their health, might reduce the need for time-consuming and risky hospital visits, and could even prolong life.
The smartphone-based solution allows people with cystic fibrosis to monitor their health at home with devices that measure key indicators such as lung function, blood oxygen levels and activity. That data is then stored in the cloud and can be accessed by clinicians on a dashboard using Power BI, Microsoft’s data visualization platform, to look for trends and determine when patients are becoming unwell. By tracking their own data, patients can intervene earlier and potentially head off serious, lung-damaging infections.
The solution was developed through a consortium involving Microsoft, the U.K.-based Cystic Fibrosis Trust, the University of Cambridge, Royal Papworth Hospital in Cambridge, Microsoft Research and Magic Bullet, a social enterprise company Kirsty Hill runs whose purpose is to improve quality of life and outcomes for people with CF.
The consortium launched a research project on Project Breathe in 2019 to investigate the viability of home monitoring for cystic fibrosis patients. The project was humming along and showing promising results when the coronavirus pandemic hit, bringing the need for remote health monitoring acutely into focus.
Health authorities advised patients with cystic fibrosis, who are particularly vulnerable to respiratory infections, to isolate at home. In-person clinics were canceled across the U.K. and the Project Breathe team shifted into high gear to make its app more broadly available to people who suddenly found themselves trying to manage their cystic fibrosis at home.
“We realized we were sitting on this solution that was restricted to a 100-person research project and thousands of people could benefit from it,” Kirsty Hill says. “Suddenly there was an opportunity to have a much bigger impact.”
Cystic fibrosis, or CF, causes the body to develop thick mucus that can clog lungs and lead to infections and respiratory failure. Better screening and treatments have greatly improved life expectancy, but the disease requires time-intensive daily regimens and is often unpredictable, causing frequent disruptions in patients’ lives — including routine clinics every four to six weeks that involve a multidisciplinary team of specialists and take the better part of a day.
John Winn has cystic fibrosis and says Project Breathe “is incredibly close to my heart.” Photo by Jonathan Banks.
John Winn, a principal researcher at Microsoft Research in Cambridge and part of the Project Breathe team, understands the burden of CF as well as anyone. Winn has cystic fibrosis, and when the pandemic struck, he moved out of the house he shares with his wife and two young children near Cambridge and into a rental home a few minutes away.
He isolated alone there for four months with a supply of food so he didn’t have to come into contact with other people, eating meals with his family twice a day over video chat. Winn moved back with his family for the summer but is prepared to isolate alone again during the school year if need be.
Since Winn’s lung function is diminished by about 30% because of the disease, contracting COVID-19 would pose a serious risk for him, he says. Being able to manage his health at home and stay out of the hospital is critical.
“In the last few years we’ve seen a huge step forward in the drugs available to treat CF, but the processes around managing the disease and the practice of managing it in clinics has not really changed much in 20 years,” Winn says. “Project Breathe is about revolutionizing that.
“I’m very, very excited about it. This project is incredibly close to my heart.”
Dealing with CF was already challenging for Caroline Powell, a busy teacher who lives near Cambridge. She has frequent lung and chest problems, takes about 80 pills a day and has “always had to work hard” at her health. Each time she has a medical appointment or requires hospitalization, Powell worries about who will cover for her and about arranging lessons for her students. After her son was born almost a year and a half ago, those concerns intensified.
“I don’t want him coming to hospital with me all the time or being away from me when I’m hospitalized,” Powell says. “That’s now my biggest incentive to make everything more manageable.”
When Powell heard about Project Breathe during a routine clinic visit to Royal Papworth Hospital in late February, she was eager to try it. She hoped the approach might allow her to head off hospitalizations and avoid some of the clinics she was attending every four weeks. Having more insight into her health also appealed to her.
Project Breathe is helping Caroline Powell gain better insights into her health. Photo by Jonathan Banks.
The Project Breathe kit, which is provided to study participants, includes a free smartphone app, a Fitbit to track activity and sleep, an oximeter that measures oxygen levels in blood and a spirometer that gauges lung function. That data is automatically uploaded to the app, and patients also enter self-reported data on how much they are coughing and how they’re feeling overall. By monitoring her data collected through the app over a period of weeks, Powell realized she needed to start on a course of antibiotics to treat a lung infection. After the pandemic lockdown started in the U.K., she had her first virtual clinic with a CF specialist nurse at Royal Papworth who was able to access her data through the Project Breathe dashboard, which provides graphs and other visual information, and get a clearer picture of her condition.
“We were able to go into a lot of detail because she had all my information there and she’d read over my data,” Powell says. “Unlike a physical clinic where they just use the data from that one appointment, she was able to spot the pattern of my symptoms increasing.”
Powell hopes the Project Breathe approach can enable earlier interventions that will help keep her out of the hospital and minimize disruptions to her life.
“It’s really helpful to give me insights into my own health and spot these patterns of deteriorations before it’s too late,” she says. “So far, it’s really proving to be useful in that way.”
Janet Allen is the director of strategic innovation for the U.K.-based Cystic Fibrosis Trust, which ran an earlier study on the feasibility of home monitoring for CF patients. Led by Andres Floto, a University of Cambridge professor of respiratory biology, in collaboration with Winn, the SmartCareCF study enrolled 148 patients across seven sites, who monitored their health daily for six months.
Allen sees Project Breathe as the way of the future, an approach that empowers people with CF to manage their health care and challenges dated standards of care.
“SmartCare CF has shown the power of providing health care data to individuals who understand and know their own condition, and initial data from the Project Breathe pilot has shown that technology can be safely harnessed to disrupt health care models,” she says.
“The idea that you have to go to hospital even when stable to have your chronic condition managed, whatever that condition is, in this day and age shouldn’t be required. There is a definite need for (Project Breathe).”
After that hospital stay with his son a few years ago, David Hill returned to work in early 2017 and met for coffee with a couple of Microsoft colleagues, Giri Tharmananthar and Tom Chapman, and relayed his idea of using technology to create a remote monitoring system for people with CF.
Kirsty Hill, left, and David Hill are part of the team that created Project Breathe. Photo by Jonathan Banks.
Hill had a chance meeting with Allen at Microsoft and learned that for every 10 CF patients who attend clinics, eight typically did not need to be there and the other two needed medical attention weeks earlier. His goal for creating a self-monitoring system was twofold — to help patients avoid time-consuming clinic visits if they were well and identify declines in their health so they could be treated earlier.
“It was kind of a light-bulb moment, that if we could do something to solve both of those problems, it would improve quality of life,” says Hill, who lives in Reading, west of London. “We built the solution around solving those two problems.”
Tharmananthar was part of a small innovation team incubated at that time in Microsoft Digital that had been looking into solutions for digital health care. The vision of using technology to enable patient-driven health care beyond traditional medical settings had been around for 15 years or more, Tharmananthar says, but hadn’t made much concrete, sustainable progress. Hill’s idea seemed like a promising opportunity.
“Everything Dave wanted to do for cystic fibrosis was a tangible example of this thing we’d been talking about, which is a patient-centric platform that allows clinicians to access patient data,” he says. “There’s a concept of treatment pathways in health care, but it’s usually about the condition, and we wanted to put the patient at the center of it.”
As the project moved forward, Microsoft employees from across the company volunteered their time to help, Tharmananthar says, inspired by the personal story behind Project Breathe and the potential to make a difference.
“It really embodies that thing that Satya (Nadella, Microsoft’s CEO) talks about,” he says. “It’s not about what you do for Microsoft. It’s about the impact you can have in the world with what Microsoft can bring. It really does speak to that.”
With initial funding from Microsoft Digital, Innovate UK and the Cystic Fibrosis Trust, a small team led by Kirsty Hill, with support from Microsoft employees and input from health care professionals and CF patients at Royal Papworth Hospital, developed the Project Breathe app and a back-end solution that securely stores patient data in Azure. The app and solution, built entirely with Microsoft technology, have since been extensively developed and are operated by Magic Bullet for several health organizations in the U.K.
During the SmartCareCF study, Floto and Winn, with help from a Ph.D. student, used patient data to develop a predictive model that uses machine learning to detect signals which might be hidden in the data and can indicate when a patient is becoming unwell. The model is now being tested as part of the current Project Breathe study at Royal Papworth.
The study, which Floto oversees, initially enrolled 95 patients at Royal Papworth and was quickly scaled up after the pandemic hit to include two additional sites in Wales and Scotland, with around 500 patients expected to be enrolled by the end of the year. Plans for the coming year include adding a fourth site in the U.K. and working with Cystic Fibrosis Canada to implement a research study in Toronto.
“Project Breathe is about turning the previous study into a reality, in terms of actually changing clinical practice,” Winn says.
Andres Floto is leading a study on home monitoring for cystic fibrosis patients. Photo by Jonathan Banks.
The first phase of the study aims to prove that home monitoring is safe and effective; later phases will involve testing novel new devices and capabilities with the solution and applying the predictive model to determine when patients are becoming sick. Early results show that the model can identify a decline in a patient’s condition an average of 11 days earlier than antibiotics would typically be started, Floto says. And almost all patients in the study have been able to skip clinics by using the app and reviewing their data with a clinician.
“We think Project Breathe may be a great solution to realize the widespread rolling out of virtual clinics,” Floto says. “If we can intervene earlier, we should be able to protect the lungs from long-term, ongoing damage.”
For Kate Eveling, who enrolled in the study in July 2019, being able to skip clinics has not only reduced the three-hour round trips required to attend them but alleviated her worries about going into hospitals.
“It’s just a scary thing. For me, it gives me a lot of anxiety,” she says. “I definitely think (the Project Breathe approach) is the future of CF clinics. It’s made things a lot easier.”
The novel coronavirus has raised new questions about what the future standard of care for CF patients might look like — whether there will be a return to in-person clinics at some point, more of a reliance on remote clinics, or a mix of both.
“The impact of COVID-19 is that everybody’s been forced to use a completely remote model for an unknown length of time,” Kirsty Hill says. “And what became apparent immediately is that patients already enrolled in Project Breathe have a huge advantage in that doctors can have a data-informed discussion with them, whereas for everybody else, there was no data reference to discuss.”
Britain’s National Health Service (NHS) is providing funding to supply spirometers to thousands of cystic fibrosis patients throughout the U.K., giving CF patients at least one of the pieces of equipment needed for the Project Breathe solution. The team hopes to find funding to cover the costs of making the solution’s back-end available to clinics beyond the study, which the NHS currently doesn’t cover. Ultimately, the goal is to enable Project Breathe to collect patient data passively and eliminate the need for self-monitoring, but reaching that point will require additional funding.
In the meantime, as coronavirus cases are again ticking upward in England and other countries, Project Breathe participants like Sammie Read are getting insights into their health from the safety of home. For years, Read was spending two weeks in the hospital about every three months being treated with antibiotics for infections caused by CF. She takes more than 40 pills a day and follows a daily routine of nebulizers, exercise and physiotherapy.
By monitoring her health at home, Sammie Read has been able to avoid hospitalizations and skip clinic visits. Photo by Jonathan Banks.
About five years ago, Read became so stressed between juggling work and caring for her school-aged son that her health spiraled dangerously downward. On her husband’s urging, she quit her job.
“With CF, it’s quite unpredictable. You can have a perfectly good day and be fine and the next day it’s like bang, you can’t breathe,” says Read, who lives in a rural area near Stowmarket, England. “It’s sort of like you’re just walking on eggshells.”
A longtime patient at Royal Papworth and a participant in the SmartCareCF study, Read heard about the Project Breathe study, enrolled and began monitoring her health at home.
By tracking her data and making adjustments as needed — exercising a little more if her lung function drops, starting antibiotics at home when an infection is coming on — Read went 18 months without being hospitalized. Even before the coronavirus halted in-person clinics, she was able to skip some of her scheduled visits after remotely reviewing her data with a nurse.
These days, with her son moved out of the house and her health more stable, Read is thinking about going back to work.
“Project Breathe has made a massive impact on my life,” says Read. “It’s definitely made my life easier. You’re in control, rather than CF being in control of you.”
Top image: David Hill, left, looks on while his son George uses a spirometer to gauge his lung function. Photo by Jonathan Banks.
Sustainable aviation fuel supplied by industry leader SkyNRG signals new approach for business travel
SEATTLE and REDMOND, Wash. — Oct. 22, 2020 — Microsoft Corp. employees who fly between their global headquarters in Redmond, Washington, and California on Alaska Airlines will fly more sustainably thanks to the use of sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) to cover their business travel. The SAF, supplied by SkyNRG, is an important option for the aviation industry to reduce CO2 emissions on a life-cycle basis. This first U.S. partnership of its kind is a model for other companies and organizations committed to reducing the environmental impact of business air travel.
The agreement applies to CO2 emissions from Microsoft employee travel between Seattle-Tacoma International Airport to San Francisco International Airport, San Jose International Airport, and Los Angeles International Airport — the three most popular routes traveled by Microsoft employees on Alaska Airlines. Under a separate partnership agreement, Microsoft will purchase SAF credits from SkyNRG, and the SAF will be delivered to the airport fueling system used by Alaska Airlines. The companies will explore expanding the program in the future.
“After a decade advancing sustainable aviation fuel, this partnership marks a significant milestone in the work to make SAF a commercially-viable aviation fuel alternative,” said Brad Tilden, CEO of Alaska Airlines. “SAF enables us to fly cleaner and reduce our impact on the environment. However, we cannot do this alone — we must work together with other industries and business leaders like Microsoft and SkyNRG, among others who are thinking big, to achieve our goals and grow the marketplace for SAF.”
“We are excited to partner with Alaska Airlines to make business air travel a little greener by using sustainable aviation fuel supplied by SkyNRG to reduce the carbon impact of the flights Microsoft employees fly most,” said Judson Althoff, executive vice president of Microsoft’s Worldwide Commercial Business. “We hope this sustainable aviation fuel model will be used by other companies as a way to reduce the environmental impact of their business travel.”
Microsoft, Alaska Airlines and SkyNRG hope this partnership sets an example for other companies and organizations to purchase SAF, and support the development of the SAF industry by creating a stable demand signal, increasing supply and reducing the cost of SAF. The three companies are also supporting the development of a global environmental accounting standard for voluntary corporate SAF purchases through their participation in a pilot project of the World Economic Forum’s Clean Skies for Tomorrow initiative. The companies plan to hold supplier and corporate forums to share learnings and increase interest in using SAF to lower the carbon emissions from business travel.
Alaska Airlines is one of the most fuel-efficient airlines in the U.S. with a strong commitment to sustainability. It was among the first airlines to use SAF in passenger travel, flying nearly 80 flights over the past 10 years. With a fuel-efficient fleet and use of modern technology in the flight deck, Alaska Airlines has reduced its intensity target of greenhouse gas emissions by 16% since 2012. Learn more about the partnership at https://blog.alaskaair.com/company-news/fly-greener/alaska-microsoft-reducing-carbon-footprint/.
Microsoft has ambitious sustainability goals, including a commitment to be carbon negative by 2030 and remove from the environment more carbon than they have emitted since its founding by 2050. The purchase and use of SAF contributes to the company’s sustainability goals.
For more than a decade SkyNRG has led the development in creating a SAF market, taking a no-compromise approach to sustainability. Replacing fossil jet fuels with SAF is what SkyNRG aims for, guaranteeing social and environmental sustainability throughout the supply chain.
“The emergence of a SAF production system and market is a once-in-a-century opportunity to launch a new energy source for an entire industry, guided by strong sustainability standards from day one,” said Theye Veen, managing director, SkyNRG. “We are very pleased to be joined by leading companies Microsoft and Alaska Airlines in this next step.”
As part of Microsoft’s partnership agreement with SkyNRG, Microsoft will become the newest member of Board Now, a coalition of leading companies that aims to accelerate the transition to sustainable air travel. Organizations commit to reducing carbon emissions from flying and directly contribute to the development of new SAF production capacity.
Background on sustainable aviation fuel
Rather than being refined from petroleum, SAF is generally produced from sustainable resources, like waste oils and agricultural residues. It can even be produced from carbon captured from the air. SAF is an important solution for the aviation industry to reduce CO2 emissions and can also contribute to other positive social and environmental benefits, such as job creation and biodiversity. SAF results in a reduction in carbon emissions across its lifecycle. The SAF supplied by SkyNRG under this agreement is produced in the U.S. by World Energy using waste oils and delivers a carbon reduction of approximately 75% compared with fossil jet fuel. SkyNRG guarantees the sustainability of the fuel it supplies through its certification from the Roundtable on Sustainable Biomaterials (RSB), the most complete and robust standard for verification of sustainable practices, and its independent Sustainability Board, which includes representatives from WWF International, the European Climate Foundation, Solidaridad Network and the University of Groningen.
About Alaska Airlines
Alaska Airlines and its regional partners serve more than 115 destinations across the United States and North America, providing essential air service for our guests along with moving crucial cargo shipments, such as food, medicine, mail and e-commerce deliveries. With hubs in Seattle; San Francisco; Los Angeles; Portland, Oregon; and Anchorage, Alaska, the airline is known for low fares, award-winning customer service and sustainability efforts. With Alaska and its Global Partners, guests can earn and redeem miles on flights to more than 800 destinations worldwide. Learn more about Alaska at newsroom.alaskaair.com and blog.alaskaair.com. Alaska Airlines and Horizon Air are subsidiaries of Alaska Air Group (NYSE: ALK).
About SkyNRG
SkyNRG is the pioneer and global leader for sustainable aviation fuel. Having supplied over 30 airlines on all continents, it is SkyNRG’s mission to make SAF the new global standard, driven by sustainable practices throughout the supply chain. Further information can be found on: www.skynrg.com and www.boardnow.org.
About Microsoft
Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT” @microsoft) enables digital transformation for the era of an intelligent cloud and an intelligent edge. Its mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.
Note to editors: For more information, news and perspectives from Microsoft, please visit the Microsoft News Center at http://news.microsoft.com. Web links, telephone numbers and titles were correct at time of publication, but may have changed. For additional assistance, journalists and analysts may contact Microsoft’s Rapid Response Team or other appropriate contacts listed at https://news.microsoft.com/microsoft-public-relations-contacts.
Today, I am sharing Microsoft’s 2020 Diversity and Inclusion report, which comes at a time marked by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, amplified acts of racial injustice, and the reality of global uncertainty.
This year’s report focuses on three core areas in addition to the data: the ways that diversity and inclusion is integrated into our employee pandemic response, our commitments to addressing racial injustice, and our investment in the Allyship at Microsoft learning path. The report also includes:
For the first time, our data on the number of employees in the U.S. who self-identify as having a disability;
An expanded look at our global equal pay data including 10 of the largest markets outside of the U.S.;
A closer look at our Inclusion Index and the various ways we receive insights on how employees experience our efforts to strengthen our culture of inclusion; and
A more global mix of employee voices and experiences across a range of communities, identities, and geographies.
The data shows steady progress
Microsoft started publicly sharing its annual workforce demographics in 2014. This year’s report reflects the trends and learnings over our five most recent demographic data disclosures.
The following data reflects Microsoft only; it does not include our broader family of companies[1] (LinkedIn, GitHub, and our minimally integrated gaming studios), nor does it include new acquisitions and joint ventures.
Diverse representation: Overall, we have seen some modest gains since 2019 including among women who now represent 28.6% of the global Microsoft workforce, an increase of 1.0 percentage point since last year. However, racial and ethnic minority communities have largely seen incremental progress and there is still much work to be done.
Black or African American employees represent 9% of our U.S. workforce, up 0.3 percentage points since 2019.
Hispanic and Latinx employees represent 6% of our U.S. workforce, up 0.3 percentage points since 2019.
Native American, Alaska Native, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander employees represent 7% of our U.S. workforce, and this number has remained the same since last year.
Asian employees, which include more than a dozen different ethnic groups, represent 7% of our U.S. workforce, an increase of 1.6 percentage points compared to 2019.
We see clear opportunity to improve representation across all levels and roles, especially for Black and African American and Hispanic and Latinx employees. We are prioritizing our recent commitments to strengthen our intentional career planning and talent development efforts on the path to senior leadership.
Black and African American employees are 9% of our U.S. workforce and 5.2% of individual contributors, but only 2.9% of managers, 2.6% of directors, and 2.9% of partners + executives.
Hispanic or Latinx employees are 6% of our U.S. workforce and 6.8% of individual contributors, but only 5.4% of managers, 4.8% of directors, and 4.4% of partners + executives.
According to a survey of Microsoft’s employees in the U.S., 1% self-identify as having a disability. Learn more about why we’re including this data and how it will guide us moving forward from Microsoft Chief Accessibility Officer Jenny Lay-Flurrie.
Continuing to accelerate leadership and talent development, systems of accountability, and strengthening our culture of inclusion are in addition to the comprehensive work we already have underway.
Our pandemic response
When the COVID-19 pandemic started to rapidly shift how we live and work, it amplified differences in our lived experiences, revealing many social inequities that could previously remain hidden from work. When school closures and caregiving restrictions upended family dynamics and divisions of labor, we supported our workforce through caregiver leave programs, which gave all employees flexible time off to help manage remote learning transitions and balance care for loved ones. We also supported our employees through the transition to remote work by helping to cover costs of ergonomic office furniture and ensuring that everyone could access a variety of tools and resources to support mental well-being and mental health. Empathy for one another has been essential as we each navigate this challenging year and balance work life.
Our commitments addressing racial injustice
In June, our CEO Satya Nadella outlined our commitments to increase diversity in representation and strengthen our culture of inclusion within our company, engage our ecosystem to drive change, and strengthen the communities in which we live and work. These efforts, focused on addressing the unique experience of Black and African American communities in the U.S., include short- and long-term, multi-year, sustained actions to accelerate our diversity and inclusion work.
We are early in our journey – only a quarter has passed since we shared our commitments, but our actions have been intentional and steadfast. While our representation goals span a five-year commitment, we are taking steps forward and wanted to share a few examples of our updates:
In an effort to increase representation within our company and strengthen our culture of inclusion, we are expanding our internal programs for midlevel and director level employees, which provide opportunities for career advancement while also helping to support managers in nurturing diverse talent. This builds on the work we have already established in career and talent development.
As we look to engage our ecosystem, we are working with partners in banking and business to create opportunities. One example is the Clear Vision Impact Fund, which we launched in partnership with Black-owned and operated Siebert Williams Shank Bank, with an initial $25 million anchor investment. The fund will support the growth and operating capital in small- and medium-sized businesses, with a focus on minority-owned businesses.
To help strengthen our communities, in August we announced a community skills program that will provide $5 million in grants to nonprofits serving communities of color. We are also expanding the pipeline of diverse talent through ongoing work with Historically Black Universities and Colleges (HBCUs), and we have created a new grant program to help HBCU faculty advance their work around data and computer science.
Our progress will be ongoing, and we will continue to provide our employees updates in our Town Hall and employee Q&As and on our intranet.We will also provide comprehensive updates on our progress in future annual diversity and inclusion reports.
Understanding our investment in allyship
At Microsoft, we believe everyone at every level plays a role in creating a diverse and inclusive work environment, and that allyship behavior is key. An ally is someone who makes the intentional decision to understand, empathize, and act in support of someone else. It is not an identity – rather it is a lifelong commitment and practice.
Grounded in neuroscience, the Allyship at Microsoft learning path helps us understand ourselves and encourages us to take responsibility for our individual learning. What started in July 2019 as a voluntary learning program has since evolved into a required training that provides our more than 160,000 global employees a shared language and understanding of the role we each play in creating a culture of inclusion. This is especially important for a global organization, and at a time when there are many interpretations in broader society of what allyship means. We are already seeing positive progress as our communities adopt the training: By September of this year, just two months after the first four introductory courses of the program were made mandatory for all core Microsoft employees, 24% – or more than 35,000 members of the workforce – had completed those modules.
I encourage you all to read the full report to explore much more detailed data, insights, employee stories, initiatives and learnings.
Since 2017, Microsoft’s Tech for Social Impact initiative has been working to empower the nonprofit sector. As part of that effort two years ago, we released our Common Data Model for Nonprofits, a set of best practices represented as data entities, attributes, and relationships.
The Common Data Model is essentially a Rosetta Stone that helps nonprofits relate data across applications and platforms, and it is the foundation for all of the technology we create for the sector.
Nonprofits represent a wide diversity of mission types and beneficiaries served, but these organizations share many scenarios common to all. Every nonprofit has to fundraise and partner with constituents and donors. At the same time, donors want to understand how their contributions drive impact. This requires nonprofits to support strong, diversified funding portfolios grounded in transparent data and reporting.
Our top priority is getting technology into the hands of nonprofits to help them be more successful. The tech sector has a responsibility to provide an easier and less costly path for nonprofits to modernize its fundraising and constituent management programs. And with the impact COVID-19 has had, there has never been a more critical time to deliver on that vision.
Fundraising and Engagement is a comprehensive solution designed to help fundraisers, marketers, and development operations staff transform the way they work with workflows and business logic to match their priorities.
The solution supports the most common fundraising scenarios across multiple donation types and channels—including major and annual giving, recurring gift and membership programs, opportunity and designation management, and household and life event management.
Marketers can leverage campaign, package, and appeal workflows, along with insights and campaign segmentation tools available on the Microsoft platform, to execute informed campaigns. Finance, database administrators, and business analysts will love that payment processing, data management, and business intelligence are powered by Microsoft Azure and Microsoft Power BI.
The Common Data Model removes the silos between all of these activities. Since alignment of funding to programs and projects is at the core of the solution, it can deliver proactive insights and business intelligence to transform reporting, strengthen existing relationships and uncover new opportunities for growth.
The solution leverages Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales Enterprise and Azure, and as part of Microsoft’s ecosystem of products, it integrates with Microsoft Teams, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance, Power BI, and Microsoft Power Platform through the Common Data Service to deliver the most robust digital platform available to nonprofit organizations.
Nonprofits can now transform how they manage their full lifecycle of fundraising. This is an incredibly powerful application that allows organizations to truly digitize their operations without requiring substantial investments in customized solutions.
Customer spotlight: Right To Play
MISSION CRM’s work with Right To Play offers an early look into the value of this new solution. Since 2017, Right To Play has been working with MISSION CRM to digitize its operations in support of an outreach initiative to acquire new donors.
Before working with MISSION CRM, Right To Play had been handling the initiative manually, leading to challenges and delays. Payment confirmation often took a full day, and the organization had a difficult time projecting revenues, adding high volumes of new donors, and rolling out programs to help more children.
Fundraising and Engagement has automated many processes and improved workflows to allow Right to Play to focus on relationships and programs. Today, donor information is imported directly into the system, so Right To Play can dynamically assess revenue streams. The solution also facilitates greater transparency with stakeholders about program results and challenges. Donors know exactly where their dollars are going and the impact they are having.
Fundraising and Engagement has enabled Right To Play to scale from 100 to more than 3,000 new stakeholders per month, managing a broad and international portfolio of donors, engaging them in new ways—and building better programs and serve more than two million children each and every week.
Partnership with MISSION CRM highlights opportunity for ISVs
Right To Play’s story shows how the shift from paper or manual processes to truly digital workflows can improve both operational efficiency and programmatic efficacy, while allowing an organization to more quickly and transparently tell that impact story to donors.
Historically, realizing that kind of digital transformation in a nonprofit has come with a unique set of challenges. Nonprofits haven’t had a wealth of choice in configured solutions. Many have had to adopt a hodgepodge of applications for different fundraising needs.
This patchwork approach obscures insights, creates manual workarounds, and is expensive to maintain. Integrating applications to create efficiency and insight can require costly development or significant manual effort every month. Many nonprofits are unable to make those investments.
MISSION CRM was one of the first ISVs that engaged with Microsoft around the Common Data Model concept to solve this problem. In partnering to build Fundraising and Engagement, Microsoft and MISSION CRM bring together a mature data model built on the most secure, scalable platform to raise the standard of what technology can deliver to the sector and really light up any nonprofit organization.
Delivering this on a rich cross-cloud ecosystem makes it easy for partners to integrate with and innovate from a trusted platform supported by Microsoft. Partners effectively require only a single integration point with Microsoft to provide interoperability and exchange of data. This allows Microsoft and its partners to innovate towards productivity, online collaboration, rich data insights, operations and financials, and program design.
Three years of TSI: looking ahead
Three years ago, we started the Tech for Social Impact initiative. At the time, Microsoft worked with about 60,000 nonprofits worldwide. Today, we work with more than 200,000 organizations, and our engagement with the sector overall has deepened dramatically.
And we’re just getting started. As a platform company, Microsoft is committed to building a vibrant ecosystem with diverse expertise to deliver the most effective range of solutions. We have fostered strategic partnerships with industry-leading technology companies including Blackbaud, whose world class fundraising solutions are powered on Azure and enhanced with connectors that make it simple to integrate Blackbaud’s fundraising solutions with applications on Microsoft Power Platform and in Microsoft Office 365.
Other partners are delivering integrated solutions as well, including Adobe through our participation in the Open Data Initiative. Still others have aligned their existing solutions to the Common Data Model, including Unit4 with Oracle’s NetSuite not far behind. We have 20 launch partners such as m-hance, Barhead, Quantiq, and Avanade who are building industry-specific solutions on the Common Data Model that are interoperable with Fundraising and Engagement.
Our goal is to create an ecosystem of solutions aligned to Common Data Model. As beneficial as the Common Data Model is, it still is only a model. To truly realize its promise, it needs to be used and adopted widely. Taken together, our nonprofit partner ecosystem now has more than 200 ISVs, developers, and systems integrators supporting nonprofits worldwide.
In this challenging time, we recognize that it’s not just about the technology. Applications tailored for nonprofit workflows go a long way to reduce the cost of modernizing the digital ecosystem at any charitable organization, just as important is the ability to adopt and effectively use this technology. That is why we combine all of our technology offerings with free training and affordable, ethical pricing. To help nonprofits get started with Fundraising and Engagement, we are announcing a grant available by end of this calendar year. Qualified nonprofits can get Dynamics 365 Sales Enterprise free for up to five users, as well as Microsoft Power Apps (per App plan) free for up to 10 users. Sign up for alerts to receive a notification when the offers are ready.
The solution we are announcing today is part of this broad commitment to the nonprofit technology ecosystem. We are committed to working with tech companies large and small to align their solutions to Common Data Model, and we’ll have more of those to announce later in 2020.
Ultimately, people don’t go to work for a nonprofit to worry about technology. They are focused on the mission of their organizations. Working with our partners around the world, Microsoft is delivering tools for nonprofits that reflect their business and those priorities right out of the box.
Learn more
To learn more, join us October 27, 2020 for the “Introducing Fundraising and Engagement for Dynamics 365 Sales” launch event. In this virtual session with live Q&A, you’ll get a deep dive into Fundraising and Engagement with Microsoft experts and Microsoft partner MISSION CRM, see a demo, and hear a panel discussion with Big Brothers Big Sisters of Canada on the impact this solution is having on their organization.
Inclusive, student-centered learning environments increase success by empowering every learner to achieve more, regardless of their ability. This year, many students are missing the in-person support they would typically receive with the shift to remote and hybrid learning. For one school, this was an opportunity to prove how innovation, dedicated educators, and the right tools can help all students find success.
Hamlin Robinson, a Seattle-based school serving students with dyslexia and other language-based learning differences, understood that it would need accessible, inclusive technology to help its students succeed during remote learning. As we recognize Dyslexia Awareness Month, we’re spotlighting Hamlin Robinson’s commitment to supporting students, across a wide range of learning needs.
The school was drawn to Microsoft Teams because of its built-in Learning Tools like Immersive Reader, which helps improve reading comprehension for students with visual impairments, hearing loss, cognitive disabilities, and more. The tool uses proven learning techniques to create a tailored experience to meet the unique learning needs of every Hamlin Robinson student. Through the Immersive Reader, students gain confidence and independence as they grow their reading skills. Students with dyslexia, in particular, benefit from features that range from Focus Mode, which helps sustain attention and improve reading speed, to Read-Aloud Math, which helps students both see and hear math equations out loud.
Hamlin Robinson students are noticing the difference. The tutor of one seventh-grader at the school said her student feels less pressured when typing using Immersive Reader than when writing by hand. The typing allows the student to share his thoughts more freely, knowing he can refine them more easily than if he was using a pencil and eraser. “His ideas are flowing in ways that I have never seen before,” the tutor noted.
As we spread awareness about learning differences this October, we believe the right tools, technologies, and educators can enable success in any learning environment. To learn more about Hamlin Robinson’s approach to accessibility, read the full story of the school’s transition to remote learning. And if you don’t have Microsoft Teams yet, remember that students and educators at eligible institutions can sign up for free.
When you reach out an empty hand to pick an apple from a tree, you’re met with a variety of sensations—the firmness of the apple as you grip it, the resistance from the branch as you tug the apple free, the weight of the apple in your palm once you’ve plucked it, and the smooth, round surface under your fingertips.
In recent years, steady progress in haptic controllers from Microsoft Research has moved us toward a virtual reality (VR) experience in which those feelings will be on par with the awe-inspiring and realistic visual renderings being produced today by head-mounted displays. With previous devices such as NormalTouch, we can simulate a virtual object’s surface inclination and texture on the tip of an individual’s index finger. CLAW enables a person to feel she’s grabbed an object between her fingers to explore its compliance and elasticity, and TORC allows a new level of dexterity, parallel to real life. Using these prototypes, an individual can feel the skin of a virtual apple, squeeze the virtual fruit, and move it around in her hand. However, to facilitate a complete interaction with that apple in its virtual surroundings, we also have to take into account the dynamics of the objects in the space. Now, with Haptic PIVOT, we bring the physics of forces to VR controllers. Worn on the wrist, PIVOT is a portable device with a haptic handle that moves in and out of the hand on demand.
If Sir Isaac Newton were to have found the inspiration for his laws of motion and gravity from a virtual apple falling from a virtual tree, he would have needed a controller like PIVOT. By grounding PIVOT to the wrist, we’re able to render the momentum and drag of thrown and caught objects, which are governed by Newton’s laws, including simulating speeds of objects upon reaching the hand: The robotized haptic handle deploys when needed, approaching and finally reaching the hand, creating the feeling of first contact—going from a bare hand to one holding an object—thus mimicking our natural interaction with physical objects in a way that traditional handheld controllers can’t. We studied the performance and limits of PIVOT and co-authored “Haptic PIVOT: On-Demand Handhelds in VR” with fellow Microsoft researchers Mike Sinclair and Christian Holz, who is now with ETH Zurich, and Róbert Kovács, Alexa Fay Siu, and Sebastian Marwecki, who were interns at the time of the work. This week, we’re presenting Haptic PIVOT at the 2020 ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST).
Haptic PIVOT serves on-demand control and haptic rendering of virtual objects as the hand reaches for them. PIVOT comprises a haptic handle that is deployed (left) and retracted (right) via a motorized hinge. A passive radioulnar hinge allows for natural hand tilting.
From the physical to the virtual—on demand
At the core of PIVOT’s design is its hinge mechanism and haptic handle. The haptic handle is interchangeable and can be swapped out for existing controllers. However, for our work with PIVOT, we outfitted a prototype handle with capacitive touch sensors that detect contact and release of objects; a voice coil actuator for providing vibrotactile feedback; and a trigger switch for control input. The haptic handle operates via a modified servo motor (driving the hinge) and can be summoned into individuals’ hands on demand, keeping their hands free when not in use. This capability makes PIVOT ideal for augmented reality or blended scenarios. An individual can be typing on a keyboard, using a mouse, or working with other physical objects in her environment. Whenever needed, a quick flick of the wrist can initiate PIVOT to rotate the handle into the person’s palm so she can interact with virtual objects. The handle can be retracted with another flick of the wrist. Both summoning actions are detected by an internal accelerometer.
Haptic PIVOT leaves individuals’ hands free until they need the controller, at which point a quick flick of the wrist will pivot the haptic handle into their hand. Such on-demand capability can be helpful in augmented or mixed-reality scenarios.
The haptic handle’s motor stops running once the handle has been grabbed, as sensed by the capacitive sensors, and thanks to a passive radioulnar hinge, individuals can move their wrists freely from side to side (up to 60 degrees) and up and down while continuing to hold the handle. To prevent the haptic handle from hitting the thumb as it moves between its resting and activated positions, the motorized hinge is slanted toward the hand, as opposed to perpendicular to it, and a 190-degree range was set to prevent the handle from getting in the way when not in use.
May the forces be with you
The true power of PIVOT shines when interacting with virtual objects. Take picking the apple from the tree as an example. A combination of mechanics, electronics, firmware, and software works together from the moment the apple enters reaching range to the moment it’s resting in the palm of the individual’s hand.
Computer-vision tracking of the hand via a head-mounted display such as Microsoft HoloLens or a consumer VR tracker worn on the back of the hand allows for absolute position tracking so our control system can detect when an individual begins reaching for the target—in this case, the apple. When the apple is within a 30-centimeter radius of collision, PIVOT moves the haptic handle into a preparation position. As the individual’s hand closes in on the apple, within 10 centimeters of it, the handle moves proportionally closer and then finally lands in her palm at the same time she wraps her fingers around the virtual fruit. The handle moves as fast as the individual, providing a very realistic simulation of impact. The four capacitive touch areas along the surface of the handle register that contact with the handle has been made, and a signal is sent via serial communication interface to the virtual hand, which closes around the apple just as the hand grasps the handle. With polling that takes less than 1 millisecond, the interface offers a latency that supports the immediacy needed to delivery haptic response times that align with user expectations.
When reaching out for a virtual object (left), PIVOT rotates its haptic handle toward the individual’s hand in proportion to the distance to the virtual object (right).
As the individual pulls the apple from the tree, she encounters the expected resistance from the branch on which it’s attached as PIVOT uses its motor to pull the haptic handle away from the hand. She experiences the resistance until the apple is detached—an action accompanied by a “thud” sensation generated by the voice coil actuator—at which point, she then feels the impact and weight of the apple in her palm. Instead of pulling the handle away, PIVOT presses it into the palm, creating a sense of momentum and weight. PIVOT can render such forces on the palm and fingers because it’s grounded on the wrist and not in the palm. With a simple rotation of the hand and release of the handle, the individual can drop a bad apple to the ground or a good one into a basket with others. Additionally, when worn on both wrists, PIVOT can facilitate two-handed interactions, such as picking up that basket of apples by the handles. The devices render the feeling of holding by synchronizing the haptic feedback in each device.
Wearing PIVOT on both arms enables haptic feedback for bimanual interactions. Here, the individual is stretching and compressing a basket, which is rendered as synchronized push-pull forces on both hands.
Play ball!
In making the design decision to ground PIVOT to the wrist, one of the first things we considered was baseball. From pitching to a batter to throwing a runner out at second, there’s a lot happening in the arm, and the same could be said of other sports. Introducing the wrist form factor, or design, into our offerings presented an opportunity to provide a wider range of actions without interfering with the physical environment around the player.
With PIVOT, individuals can catch and throw virtual objects. The reaction time of catching a flying virtual object is significantly shorter than grabbing a stationary virtual object (we can simulate the catch of a 55.9-mph throw through visuo-motor illusions!). Like with simulating the grasp of a nonmoving object, the simulation of catching objects requires that PIVOT and the visual input are aligned correctly to accurately render when object meets hand. For high speeds, a larger collision radius can be implemented to increase the responsiveness of the device.
As is the case with dropping an apple into a basket, throwing relies on PIVOT sensing the motion of the hand and the release of the haptic handle, which coincides with the release of the virtual object. Upon release, the handle is driven out of the palm by the motor at the physically correct angular speed, up to 0.55 milliseconds/degree. In other words, the handle can go from grasp to fully retracted (at approximately 190 degrees) in 340 milliseconds, the time it takes to blink an eye. Throwing, catching, and passing objects among people not only enables simulation for sports games, but can also extend to collaboration in the virtual workplace, where factory workers or industrial designers can feel the forces of virtual designs or products in a completely new way, even before manufacturing them.
PIVOT not only enables grasping virtual objects, but dropping, throwing, and catching them, as well.
The ultimate frontier
Touch is the ultimate frontier in rendering. Once you’ve achieved incredibly realistic visual renderings of objects in virtual and augmented reality, next you want to simulate natural interactions with these virtual objects. That’s when haptics takes center stage.
Today, VR’s visual renderings are immersive, sophisticated, and appealing—so much so that when you put on a VR headset and are transported into a virtual world in which an apple hangs from a tree branch, you can’t help but grab it. But when you reach for that apple and don’t feel its smoothness and firmness, the pullback of the branch when you try to pluck it, or its weight in the palm of your hand, the illusion is shattered. With haptic controllers like PIVOT, Microsoft researchers are working to solve the challenge.
Books are amazing things: little worlds of knowledge or fantasy you can pick up and take with you. Libraries have always acted as custodians of that wisdom and wonder – but here in the 21st century, there’s a lot more to what they can offer.
And the role of the public library has evolved over time. “We continue to do all the things that we traditionally did, but we’ve expanded our role as the world has shifted and become more digital,” says Michelle Jeske, the Denver City Librarian and president of the Public Library Association.
As we move online at an even faster rate, knowledge, entertainment and opportunities for education and employment are found on the internet. Those living in well-connected, affluent places may have come to take internet access for granted. But there is a digital divide in the U.S. that has left people at a disadvantage – particularly since the arrival of COVID-19.
Digital divide
Finding ways to overcome that divide in a sustainable, community-led way could help bring the benefits of the internet to those who need it most. One solution is to use technologies such as TV white space to facilitate wireless broadband – as Microsoft’s Airband Initiative is doing. With this program, broadband is brought directly to individuals and, more economically, to a community hub such as a library, which can then act as a wireless hot spot.
In 2019, Microsoft Philanthropies donated $400,000 to the Public Library Association to support more widespread connectivity alongside $20,000 each from Microsoft’s Airband and TechSpark initiatives. The money is helping the association deliver much-needed tech equipment – typically laptops and portable Wi-Fi hot spots – to a network of public libraries in communities in rural parts of the country.
The rollout of hot spots has become even more important now, and the PLA has become a key partner to Microsoft in its global aim to give 25 million people access to digital skills training.
“Suddenly, the lifeline for so many people across this country has been cut off,” says Jeske, who, as Denver City Librarian, oversees a system that serves over 4.4 million people a year. “Public libraries had to shut their doors for public health reasons, so it was great that we had this platform to jump off from.”
Some of the support from Microsoft is being used to extend Wi-Fi outside of buildings in libraries that previously didn’t have that ability – so people with their own devices can plug into those access points.
In Denver, Jeske says, “We are now offering laptop use outside of 12 of our 26 locations, because it’s safe.”
Deploying fast broadband infrastructure in places with low population density is expensive for network operators.
Vaughn Public Library in Ashland, Wisconsin, is one of the libraries taking part in the Microsoft program. Nestled on the southern shores of Lake Superior, this town looks much different than it did decades ago, when its business was paper mills. Ashland’s population is now 8,000, down from about 12,000.
The director of library services at the Vaughn Public Library Foundation, Sarah Adams, has recently introduced a program to get people started on the path to digital literacy. She says she is driven by a real passion to improve access to learning and technology for all.
“If you don’t understand how to navigate a form, or maybe just know which website is the actual website you need, you can find yourself locked out of things that might improve your life,” she says.
It’s always exciting to attend an event like HLTH! A time to come together with other healthcare innovators as a community to connect with peers, share, and learn from each other. It’s an opportunity to get a pulse on what’s trending and how we shape the future of healthcare. It’s an opportunity to get a pulse on what’s trending and how we shape the future of healthcare. I encourage you to watch HLTH sessions on-demand at HLTH 2020.
But 2020 has been a year of dynamic change—The world after this pandemic will not be the same as the one that came before it. From remote teamwork and telehealth, to supply management and customer service, to critical cloud infrastructure and security—we are working alongside customers every day to help manage through a world of remote everything.
The whole of the healthcare industry has been impacted by COVID-19 in an unprecedented way. It’s had a substantial impact, and in many ways, it has raised the bar on what we need to collectively deliver as an industry.
We all have the potential to deliver a personalized experience for health consumers, empower health team productivity, improve health data accessibility, and find ways to remove the barriers of health equity and affordability. Across the healthcare ecosystem, we’re seeing organizations bring together compute, data, and artificial intelligence (AI) to help accelerate the response to COVID-19. From diagnostic testing to therapeutics and vaccines. Healthcare providers are triaging patients with our Healthcare Bot service, helping more than 40 million people to access critical healthcare information. Biotech organizations are using our machine learning capabilities to decode the immune system response to the virus, and healthcare providers and hospitals around the world are using FHIR technology in Azure to make data available for research, provide more robust treatment assessments, and deliver first-class telehealth experiences to their patients.
Technology has played an important role in helping to battle the pandemic, and Microsoft will continue to lean in to support efforts where technology can make a difference today and beyond.
Leading through COVID-19 response and recovery
During their HLTH keynote, Microsoft’s own Kurt DelBene EVP, Corporate Strategy, and Toni Townes Whitley, President US Regulated Industries, along with Dr. Nicole Fisher, President, Health and Human Rights Strategies, Global Health and Policy Contributor, Forbes, shared their insights and initiatives that are helping Microsoft employees, customers and partners through the pandemic.
In these types of situations, we must be ready to learn together. Over the past several years one of the hallmarks of our culture has been a learning organization. This is incredibly important as we focus on our employees and our customers. We became digital-first responders supporting customers and partners by leaning in, learning and helping organizations adapt to the disruption, and build scalable modalities of care while safeguarding patients, employees, and assets. From remote teamwork and telehealth, to supply chain management and customer service, to critical cloud infrastructure and security, we are working alongside customers every day to help manage through a world of remote everything.
Our commitment has always been to ensure the tools we provide are up to the task of supporting our customers in their time of need. In that same spirit, we announced our first industry-specific cloud offering, Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare. The offer brings together existing and future capabilities that deliver automation and efficiency on high-value workflows, as well as deep data analytics for both structured and unstructured data, that enable customers to turn insight into action. A robust partner ecosystem extends the value of the platform with additional solutions to address the most pressing challenges the healthcare industry is facing today. In September, we announced the general availability of Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare coming on October 28, 2020. Throughout the publicpreview, we’ve been working closely with customers and partners across the healthcare ecosystem on key use cases, to facilitate integrations into existing platforms and systems of record, to streamline theirworkflows, and ultimately deliver better experiences, insights, and care.
At Microsoft, we will continue to focus on helping everyone get back to their places of work or school, andenabling organizations with the speed and agility to adjust to change, build resiliency that help them weather today’s challenges so they can begin to reimagine tomorrow.
Reshaping the future of disease diagnostic
Julie Rubinstein, President of Adaptive Biotechnologies, and Dr. Greg Moore, Microsoft CVP of Health, highlighted the unreleasedinsights from the growing and largest ImmuneCODE database in their announcement session, “T-cells: The key to SARS-CoV-2 immunity?”ImmuneCODEis one of the largest, most detailed views of the immune response to COVID-19 based on de-identified data generated from thousands of COVID-19 blood samples from patients around the globe. This new data points to T-cells giving us predictive power for early detection and predetermining the body’s immune response.
This is reshaping the future of disease diagnostic with Azure machine learning and AI. Microsoft took the existing partnership with Adaptive and pivoted to use the same technology and antigen mapping and apply it to COVID-19. Recognizing that this approach to the virus is one of a kind, looking at T-cells for the answer for early detection, immune response individual to individual, and for therapeutics and vaccines to determine the best course of action for each patient. Information from ImmuneCODE will continue to accelerate ongoing global efforts to develop better diagnostics, vaccines, and therapeutics for COVID-19. For more information on how to join or get involved in the Adaptive and Microsoft collaboration, check out, ImmuneRace.
Accessibility as a tech opportunity
With the unprecedented shift to a virtual world, it has never been more important to be accessible and inclusive of more than one billion people worldwide with a disability.
October marks the 75th anniversary of the National Disability Employment Awareness Month (NDEAM). Jenny Lay-Flurrie, Chief Accessibility Officer at Microsoft, talked about her own personal journey and gives us a peek into the evolution of accessibility across companies, education, and healthcare.
At Microsoft, we’re making accessibility a core part of our culture and how we design and build our products. People with disabilities have been the catalyst for innovations that have been critical during these times. Live Captions in Teams saw 30X growth in April versus February, Immersive Reader had a 560 percent increase in use, and upcoming wellbeing features in Teams responded to the growing importance of mental health.
Disability is a strength. All these technologies have been powered by insight from employees with disabilities. It’s one of the many reasons why our workforce must reflect the diversity of everyone who uses our technology. You might be surprised what is included as a disability, the majority of disabilities are invisible and include non-apparent conditions such as Cancer, Dyslexia, Autism, Depression, Anxiety, Diabetes, Asthma, and Lupus.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is one of those technologies that can help employers eliminate barriers to employment and it can help people with disabilities develop professional skills and influence workplace culture. Microsoft is an advocate of people with disabilities, committed to influencing the future of technology to ensure global independence and inclusion in society in three areas of focus: employment, daily life, communication, and connection. Read more about AI for Accessibility or our AI for Accessibility grants.
Ethical approaches to AI
Given the global scale of the pandemic, technology will play a critical role in nearly every facet of addressing COVID-19, from using AI to crunch massive datasets to analyzing disease vectors and identifying treatment impacts. We continue to collaborate with nonprofits, governments, and academic researchers on solutions, and bring our experience to the table, providing access to Microsoft AI, technical experts, data scientists, and other resources.
During the early days of the pandemic, a heightened public concern along with a readily transmissible respiratory pathogen necessitated that health systems adjust their underlying processes for screening and triage. Providence, a large multi-state multi-hospital health system with a significant presence in the greater Seattle region, applied an artificial intelligence (AI)-based chatbot technology, developed by Microsoft, to address the rising patient concerns about the virus.
By asking a series of questions based on the latest Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) guidelines, the chatbot screened patients for COVID-19 symptoms and/or exposures. Patients with symptoms and/or exposures were subsequently directed to Providence’s telehealth portal for clinical evaluation and possible testing. The bot was facilitating successful and efficient population-level care coordination. This enabled high-risk and/or symptomatic patients to receive a timely remote clinical evaluation, without increasing the risk of virus transmission to other patients or extending the wait-times for those with symptoms.
Since then, Microsoft has delivered the same chatbot technology for hospitals and governments across the globe. Today, more than 45 million people globally have been using this AI-enabled bot technology.
We all know every person is unique, and so are their illnesses. AI enables an entirely new level of personalized treatment by taking into consideration what makes a patient unique, from their genetics to their lifestyle. Precision medicine has the potential to radically improve health and longevity for every patient. This is an inflection point where the healthcare industry has an opportunity to improve the quality and delivery of care by taking a people-centered approach to the research, development, and deployment of AI. To achieve this, as an industry we need to embrace diverse perspectives, continuous learning, and agile responsiveness as AI technology and precision medicine continue to evolve.
But it’s also important healthcare organizations cultivate a responsible AI-ready culture throughout their businesses and put principles into place from implementation to governance with practices, tools, and technologies built on multidisciplinary research, shared learning, and leading innovation. Learn more about Microsoft’s commitment to responsible AI.
It’s a pivotal time to be working in healthcare and HLTH proved it. If you didn’t attend any of the live sessions, I’d encourage you to watch HLTH sessions on-demand at HLTH 2020. And I look forward to seeing all of you at the HLTH 2021 event, where we are sure to gain a whole new set of insights and inspirations for a bold path forward.
A population-level disease monitoring system that employs at-home self-swab kits is being expanded today, at no cost to participants, as part of an infection prevalence study in the San Francisco Bay Area. The system could have broader impact on testing not only for COVID-19, but for other diseases as well.
The service uses the Vera Cloud Testing Platform which continuously aggregates test results and data about symptoms submitted by volunteers to study COVID-19 prevalence in real-time across the region. The system is the result of collaboration by Stanford University with the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Gates Ventures, the University of Washington, Microsoft Research and other private and public institutions.
Vera is a scalable and low-cost “testing-as-a-service” platform that could also be used by public health departments and employers. With its sample self-collection kit and population health monitoring system, it can also be used on a broader scale to help with back-to-school COVID-19 testing for students and staff at schools and universities, an option not readily available today.
“We’re hoping that this can address inequities in testing by reaching underserved populations who are often at the highest risk,” says Stephen Quake, co-president of the Chan-Zukerberg Biohub.
Its impact could extend to other types of testing in the future, such as for other viruses, new strains of flu, or to help monitor diseases, says Stephen Quake, Ph.D., the Lee Otterson Professor of Bioengineering and Professor of Applied Physics at Stanford University, and co-president of the Chan-Zuckerberg Biohub.
“What we’ve learned through this pandemic is that there’s a real mismatch between testing capacity and testing need. Certain parts of the country have more than enough testing capacity, and others do not,” Quake says.
Vera helps address that problem by providing a way for people to collect their own sample at home then mail them for testing to labs that can be based anywhere, he says.
To initially test the platform, Stanford Medicine has been conducting a pilot study known as CATCH – Community Alliance to Test Coronavirus at Home – for the past few weeks, and now is officially launching the full study to monitor the spread of COVID-19 in all 12 counties of the greater Bay Area, with the hope of securing up to 100,000 participants during the course of the flu season.
“We’re hoping that this can help address inequities in testing by reaching underserved populations who are often at the highest risk – people who work in essential occupations and may have difficulty accessing health care facility-based testing,” says Quake. Testing is free to those participating in the CATCH study.
Yvonne Maldonado, M.D., a professor of pediatric infectious diseases and of health research and policy at the Stanford School of Medicine, also a leader of the CATCH study and an advisor to the Vera team, says the platform’s compatibility with any type of COVID-19 test means it has the potential to be adopted by a range of organizations, well beyond the initial CATCH study.
Yvonne Maldonado, M.D., Stanford School of Medicine professor of pediatric infectious diseases and of health research and policy, is one of the leaders of the CATCH study.
“While the CATCH study uses the Stanford laboratory’s RT-PCT assay, you could use an Abbott test, or any other lab or test you want. The software platform allows you to link test results and monitor how infections are spreading through the overall population,” she says.
All Vera participant information and test results are securely protected, Maldonado says, although COVID-19 results are reported to public health departments as required by law. Vera – derived from the Latin word for “truth” – includes a customizable enrollment and testing system, a self-swabbing kit, and a secure participant portal for obtaining results and any other medical follow-up that may be needed.
Microsoft technology, including the Microsoft Healthcare Bot, Azure, Power BI, and Power Platform, was used to help create Vera and CATCH, which adhere to Microsoft’s policies on data and privacy, including during the COVID-19 pandemic. Microsoft’s commercial software engineering team helped scale SCAN’s epidemiology testing platform that Vera is based on. The Healthcare Bot is used by the Centers for Disease Control, as well as thousands of hospitals around the world, to help screen people for potential COVID-19 infection and treatment. Microsoft’s AI for Good program has been supporting the project team as they have scaled up their efforts.
“What’s exciting about Vera is the ability to track this pandemic in real-time to the degree possible, and give people who might not otherwise be reached access to testing,” Maldonado says. This real-time system also enables health care providers and public health agencies to implement more complex testing algorithms, including increasing testing rates as symptoms are reported, as well as programmatic epidemiological sampling plans, tailored to local exposures, demographics and other characteristics over time.
The researchers say the inspiration for Vera was work done earlier this year by the greater Seattle Coronavirus Assessment Network (SCAN), a program that receives funding from Gates Ventures and technical assistance from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and public health authorities.
SCAN uses an at-home kit that allows participants to collect their own sample with a simple swab within the front of each nostril — a far more gentle and less-invasive process than other COVID-19 tests which require a nasal swab to be placed all the way to the back of the throat. The CATCH study uses a similar self-swab method as SCAN.
Vera and CATCH offer “the ability to better understand the disease spread in a given community, which is really very valuable,” says Vikram Dendi, general manager for Microsoft Health NExT. Photo credit: Stanford University.
From SCAN, CATCH shares “the broader population-level epidemiological understanding of the disease,” says Vikram Dendi, general manager of Microsoft Health NExT. “Where is it breaking now? How is it spreading? How many people are symptomatic?
“Being able to do that by sending kits to your home is a very powerful way of ensuring that you can actually have a much better understanding of the pandemic, and also do it in a much more equitable way,” says Dendi.
COVID-19 disproportionately affects people of color as well as those in low-income neighborhoods. But it’s often these communities that have the least access to health care and the greatest barriers to testing. “The design of CATCH as a study intends to try to overcome those kinds of inequities and really develop a very clear and comprehensive picture of how things are evolving,” he says.
From a research and science perspective, Dendi says that Vera and CATCH offer “the ability to better understand the disease spread in a given community, which is really very valuable, and we were very happy to help.”
“It really has quite a bit of potential for not only now, but down the road,” he says. “The promise of return to school, and to have that happen not just for one school, but beyond, is certainly something that we will celebrate as and when that happens.”
Top image: The Stanford Clinical Virology Laboratory will provide testing for a pilot use of Vera with the CATCH study. Photo credit: Steve Fisch.
The first area of focus will be in automating maintenance for building owners and operators. To optimize their buildings’ energy, performance and comfort, they often need to pull data from a variety of sources that are not normalized and inform remote and dispersed workforces. Facility managers must determine what problem to fix, when to fix it and who to assign to the job, which can be very difficult without having the necessary asset know-how and work order management capability.
