Health IT Roundup—Microsoft Healthcare nabs ex-Google Cloud executive

Google Cloud executive moves over to Microsoft Healthcare

Greg Moore, M.D., has joined Microsoft as corporate vice president to lead the company’s health technology and alliances. Moore was a senior healthcare leader at Google Cloud for two years.

Prior to Google, Moore served as chief emerging technology and informatics officer at Geisinger Health.

Peter Lee, Microsoft Healthcare corporate vice president, said in a blog post that Moore will manage the company’s collaborative efforts with healthcare organizations to bring together research and product development with the goal of delivering next-generation technologies and experiences for healthcare.

“He will bring into these partnerships the new AI and machine learning solutions that are being developed across Microsoft, to enable personalized care and empower care teams. And he will help provide internal and external thought leadership that can lead to a more open, interoperable, and AI-infused foundation for healthcare delivery,” Lee said. (Blog post)

Partners HealthCare plans to roll out AI to all clinicians, researchers

Boston-based Partners HealthCare, which includes Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Massachusetts General Hospital, plans to put artificial intelligence in the toolboxes of all of its researchers and clinicians.

Led by the MGH & BWH Center for Clinical Data Science, the initiative will focus on providing researchers and clinicians with access to data, graphics processing unit compute capacity and supporting software required to develop their own AI algorithms to be implemented in the clinical environment, the health system said.

The initiative will be rolled out to the Partners system over the next 12 months.

Currently, focused and siloed pockets of domain expertise in AI reside within specific departments or labs at several large academic medical centers, but making AI an enabling technology across the field of healthcare has been a challenge, said Keith Dreyer, chief data officer at Partners HealthCare.

“The truth is, you don’t have to be a computer scientist or data scientist to participate in the creation of AI—we are just starting to see increasing availability of tools to enable on-premises development of AI models by clinicians,” Dreyer said. (Press release)

Diameter Health lands $9.6M funding round

Health IT company Diameter Health, a provider of clinical data integration solutions, has raised $9.6 million in a series A-1 funding round led by new investor Optum Ventures.

Existing investors Activate Venture Partners, Connecticut Innovations, Excelerate Health Ventures and LRV Health also participated in the round.

Founded in 2013 by former Allscripts executives, Diameter Health’s clinical data integration technology aggregates, cleanses and normalizes clinical data from electronic health records for clinical and analytics applications. The technology is used by organizations that work with multisource data streams such as health information exchanges, accountable care organizations, health systems and health plans.

The new funding will support Diameter Health’s continued growth with additional product development, cloud delivery and commercial resources, the company said.

“The volume of clinical data being exchanged has grown exponentially over the last decade, and players across the health care ecosystem are grappling with how to make this influx a useful and valuable asset,” said Eric Rosow, CEO of Diameter Health. “Our partnership with Optum Ventures will accelerate our ability to meet the industry demand for technology that makes clinical data actionable at scale.” (Press release)