I'm excited to release this 17th episode of the podcast on the 17th day of the month. I am joined by someone with whom I worked closely with at Microsoft to discuss a topic where disruptive technology is playing a significant role in improving lives. It's such an important topic that I've dedicated this second episode to do a deeper dive. I call this one - "Healthcare technology, the power and promise of digital health".

My guest Andrea McGonigle, serves as Microsoft’s Managing Director for the Health & Life Sciences. She currently leads a team focused on Business and Partner Development and looks at health holistically across the business. Health is $2B business for Microsoft. Andrea was named by PharmaVoice one of the top 100 influential people in Life Sciences in 2012 and 2013. She was named to the Main Line Times Top 24 Power Women list for 2014. Previous to joining Microsoft, Andrea spent 11 years at Merck & Co., Inc focused enterprise collaboration, FDA compliance and clinical trial management. She is on the advisory board of Drexel University MBA program and the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society.

Andrea has a great personal and professional story which she often blogs about at Working Queen Bee Blog. Andrea is passionate about health and life sciences, women in tech, and all things Microsoft.

In this episode we discuss the role of partners and why they are integral to everything she does. Microsoft uses the building blocks of Azure, IoT, Skype, Analytics and Machine Learning in its work with partners to bring forward world class solutions for healthcare. Andrea looks for partners to drive solutions in four key areas:

* Clinical Analytics.

* Care Coordination.

* Patient Engagement.

* Personalized Medicine.

We peel back on "Personalized Medicine" and Andrea gives a great example on diagnosis and how having all the data from a larger cohort allows doctors to prescribe the best path forward for patients. And we discuss a use case scenario with Genomics and how gene sequencing can predict the best treatment. DNA Nexus was a partner Andrea called out that Microsoft is working with in this area. www.dnanexus.com.

Virtual Health is another hot topic - receiving any type of care through technology. MDLive was a partner we discussed and their application utilizes the Microsoft Azure platform. www.mdlive.com.

Andrea believes Microsoft is uniquely positioned in the application of