Azure Updates: FHIR interop; NC A100 v4 VMs; MLPerf AI training results

Microsoft is moving towards greater interoperability using the FHIR standard, in collaboration with SAS. Azure Health Data Services is integrated with SAS. Currently, the HL7 standard still has more users, but Microsoft and SAS see adoption of FHIR growing rapidly, particularly with its use by major EHR companies like Epic and Cerner. In fact, the US Centers for Medicare and Medicare Services has mandated FHIR going forward. FHIR is intended to make querying of patient records simpler to rapidly resolve claims and support data sharing for clinical researchers.

Senior product marketing manager Diana Gao encouraged customers to optimize cloud investments with Azure Reservations. Reserved instances are especially helpful for workloads with consistent resource usage, and customers may be able to reduce these costs by as much as 72 percent compared with pay-as-you-go pricing. Customers are able to commit to one-year or three-year plans for Data Lake Storage Gen2, SQL Database, Blob Storage, and VMs. Capacity commitment works for both Windows and Linux VMs. She wrote: