Heroes of the Dorm™ Leads Tespa’s College Esports Lineup in 2018
Signups now open for college esports tournaments featuring Blizzard Entertainment’s Heroes of the Storm®, Hearthstone®, and StarCraft® II
This year’s programs offer more opportunities—and scholarships—for college gamers across U.S. and Canada than ever before
IRVINE, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)– Student gamers everywhere can now matriculate in a full schedule of college esports programs, as Tespa, Blizzard Entertainment’s college esports network, has revealed its lineup of tournaments and events for this year, including the fourth edition of Heroes of the Dorm™. With programs for Hearthstone® and StarCraft® II in addition to Heroes of the Storm®, Tespa will award more than $1 million in scholarships and prizing by the end of the 2017-18 academic year.
Now in its fourth year, Heroes of the Dorm is introducing regional play. More than $500,000 in scholarships and prizes are up for grabs in this premier collegiate esports competition. Regional winners and other top teams on the national leaderboard will be seeded into the 64-team National Championship bracket. The battle for the Heroes of the Dorm National Championship—and for the scholarship money each player receives for the remainder of their college careers—will be fierce. Fans can watch all the action on both www.twitch.tv/blizzheroes and www.mlg.com.
In a one-of-a-kind broadcast partnership with Raycom Sports, Heroes of the Dorm will have a dedicated, nationally-syndicated program during a five-week period of competition. Raycom will produce the weekly, one-hour Heroes of the Dorm program, featuring schools competing in the tournament’s Atlantic Coast Region. The original series, which will cover competition as well as spotlight player and team stories, will be broadcast across Raycom Sports’ syndicated network of affiliates in more than 50 markets in the United States.
“With intense student competition and an epic tournament bracket featuring schools across the United States and Canada, Heroes of the Dorm showcases the kind of excitement that can only come from college esports,” said Mike Morhaime, CEO and cofounder of Blizzard Entertainment. “We look forward to cheering on all of the talented players who will be competing in Heroes of the Storm, as well as Hearthstone and StarCraft II, for their share of Tespa’s biggest scholarship prize pool ever.”
Starting today, eligible college gamers in the United States and Canada can sign up to compete in Heroes of the Dorm at www.heroesofthedorm.com. See the full schedule below:
Tournament Stage
Date
Registration Opens
January 22
Registration Closes
February 5
Regional Play Begins
February 6
Live Broadcasts Begin
February 14
Regional Championships
March 11
Bracket Reveal
March 19
Round of 64 Begins
March 28
Heroic Four/Finals
April/May
Hearthstone Collegiate Championship
Teams vying for the 2018 Hearthstone Collegiate Championship will have their hands full as they battle for their share of $150,000 in scholarship prizing. Each team of three will have to battle through a seven-week regular season and the regional playoffs to make it to the single-elimination championship bracket. Fans can watch the tournament live on www.twitch.tv/playhearthstone.
Eligible college gamers in the United States and Canada can sign up to compete in the Hearthstone Collegiate Championship at compete.tespa.org starting today. See the full schedule below:
Tournament Stage
Date
Registration Opens
January 22
Registration Closes
February 15
Matches Begin
February 19
Tespa Collegiate Series—StarCraft
The first ever Tespa Collegiate Series—StarCraft will award $35,000 in total scholarship prizing to the top performers in the 16-team league. Teams of three players will battle it out in StarCraft II twice a week during the eight-week regular season, with four teams joining the tournament via the open qualifiers. Matches will be broadcast on www.twitch.tv/starcraft and www.mlg.com. Eligible college gamers in the United States and Canada can sign up for qualifiers at compete.tespa.org starting today. See the full schedule below:
Tournament Stage
Date
Registration Opens
January 22
Qualifier 1
February 10
Qualifier 2
February 11
Matches Begin
February 17
About Blizzard Entertainment, Inc.
Best known for blockbuster hits including World of Warcraft®, Hearthstone®, Overwatch®, the Warcraft®, StarCraft®, and Diablo® franchises, and the multi-franchise Heroes of the Storm®, Blizzard Entertainment, Inc. (www.blizzard.com), a division of Activision Blizzard (NASDAQ: ATVI), is a premier developer and publisher of entertainment software renowned for creating some of the industry’s most critically acclaimed games. Blizzard Entertainment’s track record includes twenty-one #1 games* and multiple Game of the Year awards. The company’s online-gaming service, Blizzard Battle.net®, is one of the largest in the world, with millions of active players.
*Sales and/or downloads, based on internal company records and reports from key distribution partners.
About Tespa
Tespa is the premier college gaming network in North America, dedicated to creating a home for gamers on every campus. Recognized as the leader in college esports, Tespa cultivates student communities that host epic gaming events on campuses in the United States and Canada, and plans to distribute more than $1 million in scholarship prizing in 2018 through intercollegiate leagues. Tespa has had more than 5000 teams from more than 1400 universities compete in its college tournaments and has empowered student leaders to become entrepreneurs in the gaming industry.
About Raycom Sports
Charlotte, N.C.-based Raycom Sports is a leader for compelling storytelling, production, and content distribution across all platforms. With an award-winning production team, Raycom creates original feature programming such as Football Saturdays. Raycom is the syndicated rightsholder of Atlantic Coast Conference men’s basketball and football since 1982, and manages live television broadcasting, original programming, archival footage, mobile applications, social media, the official ACC website and the ACC Official Corporate Champions program. Raycom also serves as the digital content, marketing, video and broadcast production partner of The Basketball Tournament (TBT). Raycom manages client activations and hospitality at ACC FanFest at the ACC Football Championship and ACC Basketball Tournaments.
Raycom Sports’ parent company Raycom Media, owns and/or provides services for 65 television stations and 2 radio stations located in 20 states covering 16% of U.S. television households.
Cautionary Note Regarding Forward-looking Statements: Information in this press release that involves Blizzard Entertainment’s expectations, plans, intentions or strategies regarding the future, including statements about the dates and features of Heroes of the Dorm 2018, the Tespa Collegiate Series—StarCraft, and the Hearthstone Collegiate Championship, are forward-looking statements that are not facts and involve a number of risks and uncertainties. Factors that could cause Blizzard Entertainment’s actual future results to differ materially from those expressed in the forward-looking statements set forth in this release include unanticipated product delays and other factors identified in the risk factors sections of Activision Blizzard’s most recent annual report on Form 10-K and any subsequent quarterly reports on Form 10-Q. The forward-looking statements in this release are based upon information available to Blizzard Entertainment and Activision Blizzard as of the date of this release, and neither Blizzard Entertainment nor Activision Blizzard assumes any obligation to update any such forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements believed to be true when made may ultimately prove to be incorrect. These statements are not guarantees of the future performance of Blizzard Entertainment or Activision Blizzard and are subject to risks, uncertainties and other factors, some of which are beyond its control and may cause actual results to differ materially from current expectations.
Blizzard Entertainment, Inc. Christy Um Director, Esports Communications 949.955.1380 x61251 christy.um@blizzard.com or David Gordon Global PR Manager, Esports 949.955.1380 x13506 dgordon@blizzard.com or Sara Zaidi Global PR Manager 949.955.1380 x61091 szaidi@blizzard.com
Finally, it’s time for the first snapshot of the year! While most of the Java team has been on holiday, we’ve still managed to cram some things into this snapshot such as smokingly hot Campfires, Cartography Table functionality and Lectern functionality. Enjoy!
A full summary of the content available in this snapshot can be found in the changelog on Minecraft.net, the following is a short summary:
Added Campfire
Added Cartography Table functionality
Added Lectern functionality
Performance improvements
Fixed bugs
Added teammsg command which sends a message to all players on your team
CAMPFIRES
Come one, come all, and toast your buns around the campfire!
Decorative fireplace without fire spread
Cooks up to four foods, but slowly
Acts as a smoke signal you can see very (VERY!) far away when a hay bale is below (hint: think note blocks!)
Cosy light source
Can be lit/unlit
CARTOGRAPHY TABLE FUNCTIONALITY
Fancy UI which more closely represents what the recipes actually do functionally
Provides an easier and simpler way of cloning, extending, and locking of maps
Map locking allows you to lock maps in the Cartography Table with a glass pane so that they can no longer be modified
LECTERN
Ermahgerd berks… holder… thingy?
Right-click empty lectern to place book
Right-click lectern with book to open
Current page is persistent and shared between all readers
Emits redstone pulses when page is changed
Use comparator to get book reading progress
To get snapshots, open your launcher and go to the “launch options” tab. Check the box saying “Enable snapshots” and save. To switch between the snapshot and normal version, you can find a new dropdown menu next to the “Play” button. Back up your world first or run the game on in a different folder (In the “launch options” page).
Please report any and all bugs you find in Minecraft to bugs.mojang.com.
Snapshots can corrupt your world, please backup and/or run them in a different folder from your main worlds.
Share your thoughts on how 1.14 is shaping up in the comments below!
This week at Bungie, Lord Shaxx is screaming sweet nothings into our ears.
With the return of Crimson Days, flowers fall again in the Tower. Love is in the air. Lord Shaxx is handing out rewards in exchange for Confectionary Hearts. Go see him to load up on bounties, grab a date, and join the dance.
If you want the full scoop on Crimson Days, it’s all right here. Crimson Days will continue until the weekly reset on February 19, so finish those bounties while you can. There is a max-Power Bow to be won by you and your partner!
Trials
Ever since Trials of the Nine went on hiatus back in Season 4, many of you have been asking when it will come back and how it will be evolving. We still don’t have a timeline for when it may return, but we do want to give you an update on our current thinking about Trials. Here is the team to fill you in.
Destiny Dev Team: As longtime Destiny players know, Trials of Osiris was released in May of 2015 as the original high-stakes weekend PvP event. Trials had an amazing impact on our game and our community. It was a pinnacle venue for players to show off their best skills, strategies, and gear. The 3v3 elimination mode combined with the card system created the coveted reward of earning a trip to the Lighthouse.
With the introduction of Trials of the Nine in Destiny 2, we made a few changes to the formula which never really hit the same mark. We were unhappy with its role in the ecosystem. The new activity wasn’t achieving the goal of bringing the community together every weekend. Both Destiny and the online PvP scene have evolved since 2015, so we don’t believe that bringing back the 2015 version of Trials of Osiris would accomplish what our goals are today.
Until we have a solid prototype for a pinnacle PvP endgame activity, Trials is staying on hiatus indefinitely and will not return over the course of the next few seasons. When we have those new plans ready, we’ll be sure to share them with you.
Ironing Board
Next week, after the rose petals have been cleared out by the sweeper bot, Lord Saladin will return to the Tower with a competition fit for Iron Lords. He’s missing out on Crimson Days, so he’ll make up for it with another round of Iron Banner. This is the final Iron Banner for the Season of the Forge, as well as your last chance to collect the Iron Fellowship armor set before this vendor is refreshed next season. The Crimil’s Dagger Hand Cannon and Hero’s Burden SMG will continue to be available next season as post-match drops and rewards from Saladin.
Take a look at the weapons Saladin will have available in his inventory next week.
Iron Banner
Begins: February 19, 2019
Ends: February 26, 2019
Make sure you turn in all of your completed bounties before the end of the season. When the Season of the Drifter begins, they will be removed from your inventory. Your Iron Banner tokens will persist into the next season. Good luck out there, Guardians!
Love Shaxx, Baby
Come rain, sleet, or snow—lots and lots of snow—the Player Support Team will always be there monitoring the Help forums and diagnosing issues.
This is their report.
Crimson Daze
In case you didn’t know it, Crimson Days has returned to Destiny 2. Lord Shaxx invites all players to engage in jolly cooperation, by forging their bonds in the Crimson Days Crucible playlist.
If you have yet to jump into this playlist, don’t worry. Listed below are the key features you should be aware of that set this playlist apart from the standard Crucible experience.
Player Count: Crimson Days Crucible is a 2v2 experience. Players can jump in solo if they choose, or in a pre-made fireteam with a partner.
Reunited: Reunited is a special buff that increases the recharge rate of Guardian abilities for teammates who stick close together.
Falling Apart: Falling Apart is a debuff that grants enemy teammates waypoints to your locations when you and your teammate drift too far apart.
Vengeance: Vengeance is triggered when a player’s teammate is defeated in combat. For a short time, the surviving player is granted significantly increased ability regeneration and receives a small portion of their health back.
If you’re looking for more information on Crimson Days, have a look at our Crimson Days Guide. Players who encounter gameplay issues should report them to the #Help forum.
With Season of the Drifter inbound, we’d like to kick off a new conversation on the current player-impacting issues that are expected to be resolved with Update 2.2.0 in early March.
These issues include:
Black Armory Key Mold: Players can obtain the Black Armory Key Mold only on their first character to receive it from Ada-1. More info can be found here.
Dreaming City Chests: Dreaming City chests do not count toward the Black Armory Key Mold objective.
Obsidian Accelerator: Obsidian Accelerator consumables do not recover to the postmaster when the player’s inventory is full.
“A Cold Wind Blowin’”: The emblem “A Cold Wind Blowin’” cannot be reclaimed from the Collection if stowed.
“Relic Rumble”: The “Relic Rumble” Triumph is currently not achievable.
In Update 2.2.0, this Triumph will unlock when players complete the Nightfall strike “The Corrupted” by defeating Sedia using no more than two relics.
UPDATE 02/15: Previously, we reported that only this triumph’s description is incorrect, implying that this triumph was currently achievable. That was incorrect, and we have updated this section to make clear that players cannot currently pop this triumph.
Character Boost Completion Rewards: Characters who use a Level 30 boost are not granted their class Sword or emblem if they have not already completed the Red War campaign.
Base D2 Crucible Rewards: Players who own only the base Destiny 2 game can receive rewards from Lord Shaxx’s rank-up packages that drop at Year 2 Power levels, which cannot be equipped.
Collection Counter: The Collection badge counter incorrectly only counts 10 badges instead of 11.
Check back next week for part two of our Resolved Issues Preview. For the full Destiny 2 Update 2.2.0 patch notes when they are available, players should monitor our Updates page.
Popped Corn
Welcome to yet another edition of Movie of the Week. This is where we feature you! Every week we pick a few of our favorite videos created by the community and share them here for all to see. The creators of said video get a special emblem for their effort to boot! Here are this week’s winners.
Movie of the Week: Shattered Throne Flawless Solo No Hud Run
Honorable Mention: RISE
News about Destiny is random and light this week. Winter visited in the Pacific Northwest and blanketed all its splendor with an immovable object. We don’t tend to maintain the irresistible force of a fleet of plow trucks for the one week out of the year that looks like this, so earlier in the week, we hunkered down with our laptops and waited for the whole thing to blow over. That doesn’t mean that our progress has been interrupted. We’ve been working from our homes to prepare for next season and are back in the office now as the white fluffy powder devolves into a brownish mush. Season of the Drifter will arrive on March 5 with some exciting evolutions for your Guardian lifestyle. We’ll begin that conversation soon…
Between now and then, you have a few weeks to reap all the rewards from Season of the Forge. Have you got the new Bow? I’ve got mine. I’m having a great time in Crimson Doubles. Keep an eye out this weekend and you might see me out in the wild. Enjoy the rest of Crimson Days!
Left Alive tells a human story of survival from the perspective of three different protagonists during the devastating invasion set in war-torn Novo Slava in 2127.
Watching Disney's Movies Will Soon Be Much Less Of A Hassle
Many movie goers and collectors are well familiar with the Disney Vault. The company would put out movies for home release for a limited time. Then it would stop producing copies of it, lock it away in the vault, and if you didn't buy the movie then, you'd have to wait until the next time Disney released them to watch the movie. However, with Disney Plus--the company's streaming service coming soon--the company is essentially putting an end to that.
At an investor meeting in St. Louis, Disney CEO Bob Iger revealed that the upcoming streaming service will change everything. "The service, which I mentioned earlier is going to launch later in the year, is going to combine what we call library product, movies, and television, with a lot of original product as well, movies and television," explained Iger (via Polygon). "And at some point fairly soon after launch it will house the entire Disney motion picture library, so the movies that you speak of that traditionally have been kept in a 'vault' and brought out basically every few years will be on the service. And then, of course, we're producing a number of original movies and original television shows as well that will be Disney-branded."
Disney's animated films, the bread and butter of the company, date back to 1937 with the classic Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Since then, the company has produced hundreds of live-action, animated, and hybrid films, many of which have clearly stood the test of time. However, in this streaming era, it's been hard to find a place to watch or buy these movies, unless you picked it up one of the few times Disney released them from the vault. With Disney Plus, all of these movies that have been a pain to find will all be available on the service.
In addition to all the classic movies, Disney has plenty of original content planned, including shows based on characters from the worlds of Star Wars and Marvel. Aside from the Cassian Andor Rogue One prequel series, the most notable Star Wars series is none other than The Mandalorian, which is set between Return of the Jedi and The Force Awakens, following a lone gunman (Pedro Pascal) who is on the run from the Lone Gunman. On the Marvel side of things, there are numerous TV series in the works following characters like Loki, Scarlet Witch, and Falcon.
An official release date for Disney Plus has yet to be announced, but it is expected to debut later this year.
Deals: Boost Your Switch Storage With A 400GB Micro SD Card For Just £56
As any Switch owner who prefers to buy their games digitally will know, the console’s limited storage space can be a near constant issue. That is unless you have a beast of a microSD card to save your precious games on, of course, and this limited-time deal is right up there as one of the best value-for-money offers we’ve ever seen.
Right now on Amazon UK, and only available until midnight tonight, this new deal offers a lovely 400GB microSD card for just £55.99. For the sake of comparison, the same card in its 200GB variant is currently £43.79, so it’s a pretty huge saving.
Please note that some of the links on this page are affiliate links. If you click them and make a purchase we may receive a small percentage of the sale which helps support the site. Please read our FTC Disclosure for more information.
If you’re interested in checking out more storage options for your Switch, make sure to take a look through our micro SD card guide.
Snakebyte Reveals The Games:Tower Storage Solution For Nintendo Switch
Accessory maker Snakebyte has revealed the latest in its line of products for the Switch, and this one looks like it could be a nice little practical solution for your storage needs.
Called the Games:Tower, the product is designed to be a space-saver, holding your Pro Controllers, Joy-Con, games, and more. To be precise, you’ll be able to fit 10 physical Switch game boxes in the slots provided, and up to four Pro Controllers or Joy-Con grip sets.
On top of this, rather literally, the top of the tower doubles up as a place to sit your Switch dock – handy if you currently leave it on the floor or in an annoying spot around your TV. We particularly like the bottom, too, which features a neat little drawer for storing away smaller accessories.
Marc-Alexander Knipschild, Head of Marketing for Snakebyte, has shared the following in a press release today:
“The Nintendo Switch now boasts a large game collection and ever-expanding list of accessories, and we believe gamers will flock to the GAMES:TOWER providing a simple and great value for money solution to housing their collection. We believe the GAMES:TOWER for Nintendo Switch will make a strong addition to our core accessories range and allow us to grow our market share in the console sector.”
Snakebyte says that the product is shipping now, “available from all leading gaming retailers”. We managed to track down an online option from Amazon UK (£17.99), although the product hasn’t yet appeared on Snakebyte’s own site.
Would this be useful for your current setup? Do you already have an elegant storage solution? Let us know in the comments below.
Building Flatpak apps in Gnome Builder on Fedora Silverblue
If you are developing software using Fedora Silverblue, and especially if what you are developing is a Gnome application, Gnome Builder 3.30.3 feels like an obvious choice of IDE.
In this article, I will show you how you can create a simple Gnome application, and how to build it and install it as a Flatpak app on your system.
Gnome and Flatpak applications
Builder has been a part of Gnome for a long time. It is a very mature IDE to me in terms of consistency and completeness.
The Gnome Builder project website offers extensive documentation regarding Gnome application development — I highly recommend spending some time there to anyone interested.
Editor’s note: Getting Builder
Because the initial Fedora Silverblue installation doesn’t include Builder, let’s walk through the installation process first.
Starting with a freshly installed system, the first thing you’ll need to do is to enable a repository providing Builder as a Flatpak — we’ll use Flathub which is a popular 3rd-party repository with many desktop apps.
To enable Flathub on your system, download the repository file from the Fedora Quick Setup page, and double-click it which opens Gnome Software asking you to enable this repository on your system.
After you’re done with that, you can search for Builder in Gnome Software and install it.
Creating a new project
So let’s walk through the creation of a new project for our Gnome app. When you start Gnome Builder, the first display is oriented towards project management.
To create a new project, I clicked on the New… button at the top-left corner which showed me the following view.
You’ll need to fill out the project name, choose your preferred language (I chose C, but other languages will work for this example as well), and the license. Leave the version control on, and select Gnome Application as your template.
I chose gbfprtfsb as the name of my project which means Hello from Gnome 3 on Fedora SilverBlue.
The IDE creates and opens the project once you press create.
Tweaking our new project
The newly created project is opened in the Builder IDE and on my system looks like the following.
This project could be run from within the IDE right now and would give you the ever popular “Hello World!” titled gnome windowed application with a label that says, yup “Hello World!”.
Let’s get a little disruptive and mess up the title and greeting a bit. Complacency leads to mediocrity which leads to entropy overcoming chaos to enforce order, stasis, then finally it all just comes to a halt. It’s therefore our duty to shake it up at every opportunity, if only to knock out any latent entropy that may have accumulated in our systems. Towards such lofty goals, we only need to change two lines of one file, and the file isn’t even a C language file, it’s an XML file used to describe the GUI named gbfprtfsb-window.ui. All we have to do is open it and edit the title and label text, save and then build our masterpiece!
Looking at the screenshot below, I have circled the text we are going to replace. The window is a GtkApplicationWindow, and uses a GtkHeaderBar and GtkLabel to display the text we are changing. In the GtkHeaderBar we will type GBFPRTFSB for the title property. In the GtkLabel we will type Hello from Gnome 3 on Fedora SilverBlue in the label property. Now save the file to record our changes.
Building the project
Well, we have made our changes, and expressed our individualism (cough) at the same time. All that is left is to build it and see what it looks like. The build panel is located near the top of the IDE, middle right, and is represented by the icon that appears to be a brick wall being built as shown on the following picture.
Press the button, and the build process completes. You can also preview your application by clicking on the “play” button next to it.
Building a Flatpak
When we’re happy with our creation, the next step will be building it as a Flatpak. To do that, click on the title in the middle of the top bar, and then on the Export Bundle button.
Once the export has successfully completed, Gnome Builder will open a Nautilus file browser window showing the export directory, with the Flatpak bundle already selected.
To install the app on your system, simply double-click the icon which opens Gnome Software allowing you to install the app. On my system I had to enter my user password twice, which I take to be due to the fact we had no configured GPG key for the project. After it was installed, the application was shown alongside all of the other applications on my system. It can be seen running below.
I think this has successfully shown how easy it is to deploy an application as a Flatpak bundle for Gnome using Builder, and then running it on Fedora Silverblue.
Embedded Linux Conference (ELC) is the premier vendor-neutral technical conference where developers working on embedded Linux and industrial IoT products and deployments gather for education and collaboration, paving the way for innovation. Attend, and join 800+ technical experts paving the way for transformation in these key areas from across the globe for education, collaboration and deep dive learning opportunities. Learn More
Posted by: xSicKxBot - 03-08-2019, 03:03 PM - Forum: Windows
- No Replies
Progress report on digital transformation in healthcare
It’s been an incredible year so far for the health industry. We’ve seen the dream and the opportunity of digital transformation and AI start to really take shape in the marketplace.
We saw many examples of this last month at HIMSS 2019, many of our partners and other cloud providers are offering commoditized access to complex healthcare algorithms and models to improve clinical and business outcomes.
Trust
These examples show how cloud computing and AI can deliver on the promise of digital transformation. But for health organizations to realize that potential, they have to trust the technology—and their technology partner.
Microsoft has always taken the lead on providing cloud platforms and services that help health organizations protect their data and meet their rigorous security and compliance requirements. Recently, we announced the HIPAA eligibility and HITRUST certifications of Microsoft Cognitive Services and Office 365.
It’s crucial for health organizations to feel utterly confident not only in their technology partner’s ability to help them safeguard their data and infrastructure, and comply with industry standards, but also in their partner’s commitment to help them digitally transform their way—whatever their needs or objectives are. Our mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. So whether you’re a health provider, pharmaceutical company, or retailer entering healthcare, your mission is our mission. Our business model is rooted in delivering success rather than disruption for our customers.
Interoperability
Another point of vital importance as we support the movement of healthcare as an industry—and healthcare data specifically—to the cloud is ensuring that we avoid the sins of the past, specifically data silos.
To that end, we jointly announced with other leading cloud providers that we’re committed to healthcare data interoperability among cloud platforms and supporting common data standards like Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR). And I was particularly thrilled to see the excitement in the health industry in reaction to our launch last last month with Azure API for FHIR and our commitment to develop open source FHIR servers. I hope you’ll join the huge movement behind health interoperability fueled by FHIR and encourage your technologists to start actively using the open-source project to bring diverse data sets together—and to build systems that learn from those data sets.
As my colleague, Doug Seven, recently wrote, interoperability helps you bring together data from disparate sources, apply AI to it to gain insights, and then enrich care team and patient tools with those insights to help you achieve your mission. That’s a crucial step in the digital transformation of health.
Teamwork
Another crucial step is supporting health teamwork. With the changing nature of care delivery, health services increasingly require coordination across multiple care settings and health professionals. So we launched a new set of capabilities to our Teams platform that provides workflows for first-line clinical workers such as doctors and nurses that they can use to access patient information and coordinate care in real time.
The end game
Why does all of this matter? To answer that question, I always come back to the quadruple aim, which all of us in the health industry strive for: enhancing both patient and caregivers’ experiences, improving the health of populations, and lowering the costs of healthcare.
Empowering care teams and patients with data insights and tools that help them coordinate care—and that they and your health organization can trust—will help bring about the desired outcomes of the quadruple aim. Not only will this systemic change improve clinical and business outcomes, but also, at an individual level, enhance the day-to-day and digital experiences of clinical workers and patients alike—creating better experiences, better insights, and better care across the delivery system.
