Azure Updates: Critical environments; Database updates; SAP cloud; Nuance; FHIR

The latest Azure news and updates from Microsoft.

CTO Mark Russinovich delved into the factors affecting critical environment infrastructure availability, like controls in datacenter construction, health monitoring, event detection, and the reliability of different infrastructure elements. Microsoft continues to make critical environment improvements focused on redundancy and efficiency, constructing infrastructure with power distribution units, automatic transfer switches, air handling units, generators, and uninterruptible power supplies. He wrote:

As Microsoft continues to introduce innovations into the CE space, reliability engineering is playing a central role in ensuring the robustness of these solutions by driving both designed-in and built-in reliability through early-stage risk analysis and mitigations. For instance, the Microsoft Sphere-based IoT solution is developed to acquire data securely from the mechanical and electrical power CE system. Reliability engineering closely works with internal and external product design and manufacturing partners in applying both analytical- and PoF-based testing approaches throughout the solution concept, prototype, design, process development, and product deployment stages. One case in point is the concern about electronics’ packaging-related defects, during its manufacture or assembly, or its usage lifecycle. A simulation tool based on finite element analysis (FEA) was employed to identify thermal-mechanical stress points, even when the design is still just a drawing on paper, as these stress points can result in failures within the expected useful life.

VP of Microsoft Health and Life Sciences, Heather Jordan Cartwright, explained that on July 1 the US Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services is set to begin requiring regulated payers to have Patient Access and Provider Directory APIs. This change will mean that patients can give consent for third-party apps to access their data, and will require regulated payers to use FHIR APIs for things like claims data. According to Cartwright, the Azure API for FHIR can support these new requirements.