Microsoft Announces Multiple Agreements with Hospital Trusts in the UK

MicrosoftMicrosoft announced a number of contracts in the UK to help NHS trusts to deliver greater clinical productivity and reduce costs by using Identity and Access Management (IAM) products, which have been built exclusively for the healthcare sector. County Durham and Darlington NHS Foundation Trust, NHS Sutton and Merton, Salisbury NHS Foundation Trust and North Cumbria University Hospitals NHS Trust have signed contracts for one or more of the Microsoft IAM products.

Vergence, acquired from Sentillion, will be deployed at both Salisbury and North Cumbria to streamline the process of signing on and off from different workstations. Once logged on, Vergence enables clinicians to select the patient of interest once, from any system, in order to synchronise all applications to that specific patient. This ability to automatically share context between applications will increase clinical productivity and minimises the risk of mixing data for different patients, which improves patient safety.

Mark Thomas, Director of Information Management and Technology at North Cumbria University Hospitals NHS Trust, said "Microsoft's suite of products will help provide a huge increase in productivity not least by allowing clinicians to rapidly switch between applications tuned to the specific patient, which also reduces the risk of confusion. In addition, it will enable Trusts to meet the requirements of the government and the vision for a new world health infrastructure."

County Durham and Darlington NHS Foundation Trust needed a solution to address both password and identity management as the IT Service Desk were receiving in excess of 200 telephone calls a day on password unlocking and the provisioning of new user accounts alone. The Trust recognised the benefits of combining expreSSO solution with Identity Management and will become the reference site in the UK for provision. Craig Robinson, IT Support Manager said: "We will reap the rewards of The Provisioning solution very quickly after a large number of staff from Community Health transferred into the organisation. All of these new staff require accounts creating and managing on an ongoing basis."

Peter Gill, Head of Informatics at Salisbury NHS Foundation Trust said; "As we deploy more and more clinical software it is important for us to be able to give clinicians a quick way to navigate between the systems preserving the patient's context and without expecting them to remember many logins and passwords. We plan to implement Vergence as a key part of our Informatics Strategy to support the development of our Electronic Patient Record."

In the UK Microsoft's IAM portfolio consists of three products created specifically for healthcare organisations: expreSSO, a next-generation cost efficient single sign-on solution, Vergence, which unifies the single sign-on capability of expreSSO with context management, role-based access and strong authentication into a fully integrated clinical workstation and Microsoft proVision for automated centralised creation and management of network and application accounts. Collectively over 17 NHS trusts have signed contracts for IAM products from Microsoft to help deliver better clinical efficiency and reduced costs.

"With the expected change in healthcare delivery, hospitals need to adapt in order to remain competitive and efficient," said John Gobron, UK Sales Director at Microsoft. "Identity and access management tools help to optimise the clinicians experience of IT and improve their efficiency by providing access to patient data quickly and more securely, whilst suppressing the unnecessary expense of maintaining simple IT processes such as password resets."

Related news articles:

About Microsoft in Health
Microsoft is committed to improving health around the world through software innovation. Over the past 13 years, Microsoft has steadily increased its investments in health with a focus on addressing the challenges of health providers, health and social services organizations, payers, consumers and life sciences companies worldwide. Microsoft closely collaborates with a broad ecosystem of partners and delivers its own powerful health solutions, such as Amalga, HealthVault, and a portfolio of identity and access management technologies acquired from Sentillion Inc. in 2010. Together, Microsoft and its industry partners are working to deliver health solutions for the way people aspire to work and live.

About Microsoft
Founded in 1975, Microsoft (Nasdaq "MSFT") is the worldwide leader in software, services and solutions that help people and businesses realize their full potential.

Most Popular Now

Giving Doctors an AI-Powered Head Start …

Detection of melanoma and a range of other skin diseases will be faster and more accurate with a new artificial intelligence (AI) powered tool that analyses multiple imaging types simultaneously...

Philips Foundation 2024 Annual Report: E…

Marking its tenth anniversary, Philips Foundation released its 2024 Annual Report, highlighting a year in which the Philips Foundation helped provide access to quality healthcare for 46.5 million people around...

Scientists Argue for More FDA Oversight …

An agile, transparent, and ethics-driven oversight system is needed for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to balance innovation with patient safety when it comes to artificial intelligence-driven medical...

AI Agents for Oncology

Clinical decision-making in oncology is challenging and requires the analysis of various data types - from medical imaging and genetic information to patient records and treatment guidelines. To effectively support...

Start-ups in the Spotlight at MEDICA 202…

17 - 20 November 2025, Düsseldorf, Germany. MEDICA, the leading international trade fair and platform for healthcare innovations, will once again confirm its position as the world's number one hotspot for...

AI Medical Receptionist Modernizing Doct…

A virtual medical receptionist named "Cassie," developed through research at Texas A&M University, is transforming the way patients interact with health care providers. Cassie is a digital-human assistant created by Humanate...

Using Data and AI to Create Better Healt…

Academic medical centers could transform patient care by adopting principles from learning health systems principles, according to researchers from Weill Cornell Medicine and the University of California, San Diego. In...

AI Tool Set to Transform Characterisatio…

A multinational team of researchers, co-led by the Garvan Institute of Medical Research, has developed and tested a new AI tool to better characterise the diversity of individual cells within...

AI Detects Hidden Heart Disease Using Ex…

Mass General Brigham researchers have developed a new AI tool in collaboration with the United States Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) to probe through previously collected CT scans and identify...

Highland Marketing Announced as Official…

Highland Marketing has been named, for the second year running, the official communications partner for HETT Show 2025, the UK's leading digital health conference and exhibition. Taking place 7-8 October...

Human-AI Collectives Make the Most Accur…

Diagnostic errors are among the most serious problems in everyday medical practice. AI systems - especially large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT-4, Gemini, or Claude 3 - offer new ways...

MHP-Net: A Revolutionary AI Model for Ac…

Liver cancer is the sixth most common cancer globally and a leading cause of cancer-related deaths. Accurate segmentation of liver tumors is a crucial step for the management of the...