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In this episode of the IoT Unicorn Podcast, Dr. David Rhew, Chief Medical Officer & VP of Healthcare, Worldwide Commercial Business, from Microsoft, shares his experience navigating through today’s pandemic and the digital transformation of healthcare.

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00:00 Pete: Okay, well, we're here with Dr. David Rhew from Microsoft. David, really appreciate your time. We have a lot of things to talk about today, we're gonna try to squeeze it into the allotted time period, but thanks again for joining us.

00:14 Dr. David Rhew: Thanks, Pete, it's a real pleasure to be here.

00:16 Pete: Good, good. Yeah, and full transparency, something happened in the first conversation I had with David where it didn't record properly, so we're actually going through this one again. So it should be nice and well-practiced. So live and die by Teams, I guess. But anyway, David, so we, as I mentioned, chatted a couple times now, and you're actually fairly new to Microsoft. I think before we get into a lot of really interesting topics I think listeners wanna hear about around digital transformation of healthcare and what's going on with COVID-19 and Microsoft, maybe you can give us a little run-up to how did you end up here at Microsoft, and you've been here almost exactly a year now, so you can give us a little bit of background on yourself and your journey to Microsoft.

01:07 DR: Sure. Well, first of all, I'm a physician, I'm a healthcare researcher, and also a technologist. And really the combination of those three have evolved rather organically throughout my career. It's been remarkable how those three have converged to allow us to be able to start thinking about how healthcare can be used to improve health outcomes, or I should say how technology can be used to improve health outcomes, and really excited to be a part of that program here at Microsoft as we start launching technologies, predominantly cloud-based solutions with artificial intelligence to drive that.

01:45 DR: My story, I guess, begins when I was in college. I was thinking quite a bit about different types of ways that I could help people, and I guess my initial thought was helping people would probably be best served if I went to medical school, so did a curriculum, a pre-medical curriculum. And as part of that program, I think I gained a lot of the basic skills needed to be a doctor, but one of the things that I did also was I was curious about other types of activities and other types of skills. Technology was always a fascination. This was around... In the 1980s, and video games were pretty popular then. These are the arcade video games, not the ones that we typically use...

02:28 Pete: Yeah, the good ones.

02:29 DR: The classics, the Space Invaders, the Pac-Man, Mario, and I was fascinated by that. I just felt, what an incredible way for us to be able to start thinking about how we can not only spend our time, but also how we could use technology to create new experiences. And I started doing a lot of programming, in fact, I became a computer science major as well as a cellular and molecular biologist. And then I went to med school, and in med school there's not a whole lot of opportunity to use computers apart from a word processor, so I felt in many ways that that part of my career journey was put on hold. And it was on hold for a while because what I ended up doing is after I graduated from medical school, I went down a path of exploration in healthcare, specifically looking at ways that we could reduce variation and improve access to care and improve the overall quality of care. And it was done predominantly through what we referred to as guidelines. Turns out that if you were to go to a doctor in... Probably your local doctor, and you were to go to maybe survey the same type of... Ask another doctor across the country or even the globe how they would treat the same type of condition, you'll get a lot of different responses.

03:54 DR: And in fact, when they've done analyses, they've found that variation in care is pretty dramatic, even for things that have been proven to be beneficial. And what we learned in some of the investigations that I was a part of and others have been actively looking at is that a lot of that has to do with just the fact that we don't have mechanisms to remind clinicians to provide that right information at the right time. And I started building basically programs that would provide that right information at the right time. It was very manual. In many cases we had nurses and other clinicians run around the hospital, identifying patients, giving pieces of paper to doctors, saying, "Oh, by the way, your patient fulfils low-risk criteria, you could switch him from an IV antibiotic to an oral antibiotic ...