With the release of Office 2016 just a couple of days ago, Microsoft’s marketing department is giving the software suite the hard sell in order to encourage people to upgrade from older versions. Just yesterday, Terry Myerson blogged about a new offer that sees a whopping 50% discount on Office 365 from older versions of the software. Microsoft also pitched the new software to governments and explained why it would make them more efficient. Now Microsoft looks to the healthcare profession as a potential market for Office 2016.
In a recent blog post Microsoft describes the healthcare industry as a place of change that needs to stay current with technological advancements in order to best help the sick. Of course, Microsoft wants to be part of that change and it says it is dedicated to meeting the challenges the industry faces.
Today, with the launch of Office 2016, Microsoft is taking another step forward in offering health professionals the tools they need to work more efficiently in the changing healthcare delivery landscape, so they can spend more time with patients.
Office 2016 introduces many new features such as new graph types in Excel or Cortana integration. However Microsoft goes on to broadly outline three ways that Office 2016 can benefit the healthcare industry: better teamwork abilities, better data protection with Windows Hello and mobility of experience and platform.
Mobility is potentially an industry changing ability that Office 2016 has to offer as currently nurses need to carry around paper charts and files. The industry would certainly be improved if a nurse could just carry a tablet of their choice and use Office 2016 on it along with documents stored on OneDrive.
While Office is already pervasive in the enterprise, upgrading all workers to a newer product is an expensive undertaking. Healthcare is a huge market within the enterprise and if Microsoft can manage to capture even a fraction of it, they’ll doing extremely well.
Further reading: Healthcare, Microsoft, Office 2016, Upgrade
