Microsoft Corp. and Providence St. Joseph Health today announced a multi-year strategic alliance to accelerate the digital transformation of health care. The alliance will combine the power of Microsoft’s cloud, artificial intelligence (AI), research capabilities, and collaboration tools with the clinical expertise and care environments of Providence St. Joseph Health, one of the largest health systems in the country.

The two organizations will develop a portfolio of integrated solutions designed to improve health outcomes and reduce the total cost of care by combining technologies from Microsoft with Providence St. Joseph Health’s data and clinical expertise. The alliance will accelerate the health care industry’s adoption of the cloud and enable data-driven clinical and operational decision-making by leveraging Microsoft Azure, and industry interoperability standards like FHIR, to integrate siloed data sources in a cloud environment that enables security and compliance.

Providence St. Joseph Health will deploy next-generation solutions and emerging technologies from Microsoft and its partners at a Providence St. Joseph Health-affiliated hospital facility in Seattle, Wash., near Microsoft’s Redmond headquarters. This site will enable modern clinical and operational experiences for both patients and providers. The goal will be to scale these innovations across the entire Providence St. Joseph Health system, in a transformation that will bring innovative and necessary solutions to more communities.

“Providence St. Joseph Health has been on a journey to transform health care and achieve a vision of health for a better world. We’re excited to accelerate that journey by collaborating with Microsoft. Together, we’ll support doctors, nurses and all caregivers by equipping them with innovative tools and technology that make it easier to do the vitally important work of improving lives,” said Rod Hochman, M.D., president and CEO of Providence St. Joseph Health.

“Our alliance with Providence St. Joseph Health brings together the expertise of one of the largest and most comprehensive health systems in the country with the power of Azure, Microsoft 365 and Dynamics 365,” said Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft. “Our ambition is to accelerate Providence St. Joseph Health’s digital transformation and to build new innovations together that are designed to improve health care delivery and outcomes.”

As part of the strategic alliance, Providence St. Joseph Health will use Microsoft Azure as its preferred cloud platform and standardize productivity and collaboration tools for its 119,000 caregivers on Microsoft 365, and will continue to improve and support patient engagement using technologies including Dynamics 365. Providence St. Joseph Health doctors and nurses will use Microsoft Teams, which is part of the Microsoft 365 platform, for more secure communication and collaboration, enabling them to bring together chat, video meetings and conferencing, and line-of-business applications into a single hub.