Contrary to Google and Amazon, Microsoft doesn’t have to worry about keeping its plans a secret, in fact, the company intentionally seeks to benefit from transparency. When a business behemoth is founded and built on fundamental business execution capabilities, it is confident that it can out work just about any competitor. By informing the world its plans to play big in the healthcare sector it attracts the brightest minds and the ambitious to join its crusade. Microsoft recently announced yet another phenomenal recruitment success – it hired David Rhew as its Chief Medical Officer.
Microsoft has stated its desire to become a major provider of cloud software and services to the healthcare sector. And it is using a partnership approach to ramp as quickly as possible. With Providence it plans to build the “hospital of the future” and with Walgreens it is figuring out a better way to deliver health care to the masses.
Microsoft believes its cloud solutions will be in high demand particularly as emerging fields such as genomics require heavy computing and storage capabilities. The complexity associated with undertaking various data intensive businesses in the healthcare sector can be overwhelming and daunting. Just as it’s done in the past, Microsoft, starts by hiring the best talent it can find.
Before joining Microsoft, David Rhew was the Chief Medical Officer at Samsung. While there, his work centered around how mobile devices could help engage consumers in committing to better health practices. From a business perspective, Samsung’s Healthcare Vertical achieved sustained double-digit revenue growth year-over-year. Prior to Samsung, David was the Chief Medical Officer for Zynx Health, a clinical decision support vendor. David began his career as a physician with UCLA and Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. He earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of Michigan and a doctor of medicine from Northwestern University.
David joins other healthcare all stars at Microsoft including Greg Moore who was recently poached from Google Cloud’s health effort and Josh Mandel, formerly with Alphabet’s life sciences group, Verily. Jim Weinstein is another high profile team member; Jim previously worked as the CEO of Dartmouth-Hitchcock’s health system. The entire healthcare effort will be managed by Microsoft’s corporate vice president Peter Lee.
