Microsoft Medical Building and Providence & # 39; Hospital of the Future & # 39;

Microsoft is working with Providence St. Joseph Health, a US hospital chain, to build a new high-tech hospital.

Providence St. Joseph's CEO, Rod Hochman, said the chain would accommodate an existing facility in the Seattle area, near Microsoft's headquarters.

The two companies have been discussing for months their vision of a "hospital of the future," Hochman said, including several face-to-face interviews with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.

The move is part of Microsoft's latest healthcare business after previous efforts, including a set of hospital software packages called Amalga, have not been very successful. At the same time, Apple, Amazon and Alphabet are also studying the $ 3.5 trillion industry, but with different areas of intervention ranging from clinical trials to medical devices.

The strategic priorities of the new effort are to improve the electronic health record so that doctors, nurses and other health professionals can more easily find and share information. Companies also plan to use technologies such as natural language processing and machine learning to help clinicians diagnose and treat patients.

Another priority is to improve health care and reduce costs by working closely with Seattle's largest employers. Amazon, another Seattle company, also wants to focus on the employers' experience through its partnership with J.P. Morgan and Berkshire Hathaway. This effort has recently been dubbed "Haven".

The project is still in its infancy, with many indeterminate details, and Hochman refused to share details regarding the exact size of the bed count or the scale of the operation. But he insisted that both companies are investing significant "human capital and dollars" in their efforts.

"We decided to go big with this partnership," he said. "It's not just about buying software from them."

Hochman said that he had decided to team up with Microsoft because Microsoft had positioned itself as a partner and not as a potential competitor.

"Between Apple, Google and Amazon, they all have their strengths," he said. "And that does not mean that there will be no projects with all three, but I would make the difference with Microsoft that they are not trying to heal themselves." do not try to be in the health sector, but let's try to make it better. "

Providence, which has hospitals in Washington and six other states, has been striving for years to position itself as a digital health care system. In recent years, it has attracted leaders from nearby technology companies, including Microsoft and Amazon. Its IT director, Aaron Martin, previously worked on Amazon's Kindle service, and his IT manager, B.J. Moore, worked at Microsoft for more than two decades.

Providence and other health systems are increasingly under pressure to monitor patients once they are discharged, as well as to improve the treatment of patients and health providers.

"We can not be a box that supports patients with emergency rooms," Hochman said. "We need to evolve into information centers, with sophisticated outpatient and outpatient care, and it will be interesting to see how many health systems are going through this transition."

Microsoft has done other tests in the field of health, but has not been very successful so far. In 2006, she acquired the Azyxxi medical intelligence software, originally developed by the Washington Hospital, and in 2007 she acquired additional tools from a private hospital system in Thailand. But these tools, sold under the generic name of Amalga, have never really taken off. Microsoft eventually shut down some projects and merged others into a joint venture with GE, which she split up.

Follow @CNBCtech on Twitter for the latest technology industry news.