Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare expanded its health data services to enable the exchange of multiple data types in the FHIR format, branding the new capability Azure Healthcare APIs. Futurum’s Ron Westfall examines why Azure Healthcare APIs meets growing demand across the healthcare and life sciences fields for unified data that generates a consummate patient record with real-time data, collected and persisted in a consistent way according to common health data standards across multiple types of health data. Moreover, the new offering enables Microsoft to preserve its time to market advantages over key rivals AWS and Google Cloud in delivering FHIR support capabilities and Healthcare API innovations.