Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare reference architectures overview

In healthcare, data is critical to creating patient insights, accelerating response efforts, and improving quality assurance and operational efficiencies. Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare is a composition of services and capabilities tailored to meet the unique requirements of healthcare customers in the cloud. The following reference architectures provide input into how healthcare organizations can adopt Microsoft services and solutions. This guide helps enterprise architects, IT managers, and implementation subject matter experts collaborate and communicate effectively on Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare solution building strategies.

There are multiple stages of organizational process and success in adoption and implementation. These stages include those starting their journey to the cloud, to fast-growing business results driven by combining Microsoft and partner solutions across many business processes.

Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare offers a range of cloud-based solutions designed specifically for healthcare organizations. This guide introduces the following reference architectures:

• Care Management
• Patient Outreach
• Patient Service Center

Security

Authentication

Users can authenticate to the Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare solutions via Microsoft Entra ID like any other Power Apps application. Microsoft Entra ID performs the authentication methods that are enabled in the tenant and enforces any conditional access policies, such as Microsoft Entra multifactor authentication for users accessing the application. To access the healthcare solutions, users need to be assigned with appropriate security roles.

When healthcare solutions are integrated with Microsoft Teams, you manage access to Teams at the user level by assigning or removing a Teams license in the Microsoft 365 admin center.

Authorization

Healthcare solutions use the role-based security model within Dataverse to carefully authorize user access to essential data elements. Built-in security roles are available, or, you can configure your own custom roles, which allows the flexibility to align access with the role-based security model.

To establish your security segmentation effectively, you need to configure your business unit hierarchy. Afterwards, you can create your security segmentation by applying these security roles to your business units. As part of your Identity and Access Management, you assign these security roles to the end user, teams, or business units.

For more information about working with Microsoft Entra groups, see Security concepts in Microsoft Dataverse.

After proper license assignment and environment access granted to each user, you need to assign extra built-in security roles to users, owner teams or Microsoft Entra group teams to be able to access or operate within the Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare solutions.

Collaboration

Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare can integrate seamlessly with Microsoft 365 products, such as Outlook, Microsoft 365 Mailboxes, Microsoft Teams, and Microsoft SharePoint.

You can extend those integrations further, such as integrating Microsoft Teams with Electronic Health Records (EHR). The EHR connector makes it easy for clinicians to launch a virtual patient appointment or consultation with another provider in Teams. Additionally, you can enable Virtual Appointments app in Microsoft Teams or make the overall patient collaboration secure by configuring secure messaging.

Analytics

Multiple Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare solutions provides ready-to-use extensible Power BI dashboards.

There's also a Patient population dashboard (preview) which provides a summary of the key metrics of your patient population and helps you identify groups of patients for outreach. Suppose you have the requirement to create an overall view of customers using the data in the Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare data model. In that case, you can extend the analytics by creating custom Dynamics 365 dashboards and Power BI embedded dashboards.

Data layer

Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare data models for Dataverse, are based on the Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) standards framework. The built-in data models enable healthcare services organizations to quickly deploy solutions using a common collection of entities. Each data model is a standalone option for partners and Microsoft Dataverse customers.

The Provider and Payor data models are included in Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare solutions. For more information about deploying the data models, see Deploy Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare solutions powered by Dynamics 365.

The Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare entities is categorized into the following modules:

• Administration
• Clinical
• Diagnostics
• Financial
• Foundational
• Medication
• Workflow

For detailed entity-relationship diagrams, see the Patient Details Entity-relationship diagram

Data models are deployed in Dataverse environment database. For extensibility, you can add new fields to existing tables in the data models or relate them to new custom entities. For more information, see Overview of Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare Entities.

Integration and interoperability

Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare offers various capabilities to help solve integration and interoperability challenges. However, Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare isn't an EHR system or a replacement for EHR systems; rather, it augments the existing EHR and EMR systems to provide better and more effective patient care.

The system of records for customers and analytical data can reside in various systems. The following table represents the tools and data stores you can integrate with Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare:

For more information on how to implement any of those components, you can find here.

See also

• Security in Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare
• Compliance in Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare
• Set up and configuration Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare
• Get started with Microsoft 365 for healthcare organizations

Next steps

• Care Management
• Patient Outreach
• Patient Service Center