MoneyWatch Tech

Microsoft Continues Taking Aim at Healthcare Market

By Erik Sherman

Updated on: August 25, 2009 / 7:30 AM EDT / MoneyWatch

Ars Technica recently ran a post on Microsoft's attempt to patent some basic research techniques used in evolutionary biology. And if you look at the patent, they're right, though how broad the method they describe might be is open to interpretation by those more versed in biological esoteric than I. However, it shows how keenly Microsoft is eyeing the entire healthcare market. Here's some of the other evidence:

Microsoft bought assets of Rosetta Biosoftware, which has software to analyze drug trials, from Merck.
It's made some other acquisitions in the area as well.
Microsoft Research has a computational biology group.
The company has its Health Solutions Group, which includes HealthVault, a consumer service to store healthcare records, and Amalga, a healthcare research R&D tool.
There's the Microsoft Research â€" University of Trento Centre for Computational and Systems Biology (CoSBi).

Chalking this up to the philanthropic interest that Bill Gates has in healthcare is too simplistic, I think. The reasons are driven by business. Although there is a lot of technology used in healthcare, it's still a niche market in its infancy, so there's big room for growth. Healthcare informatics is also a natural customer for cloud services -- maybe one of the biggest -- and when you think about it, there's an obvious strategy for getting your foot into a customer's door. Plenty of vendors that want to sell various forms of cloud computing, so a management team needs a method for choosing among them. One criterion could logically be providers having experience in the customer's field. Microsoft can now claim insight into the practical and regulatory needs, whether in healthcare delivery or research.