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Microsoft business architect Monica Seidel ensures healthcare technology stays focused on what matters most – people By Jaime Handley

With tools like AI now powering many of our day-to-day tasks, it’s reassuring to know someone like Monica (Schreffler) Seidel, a 1996 »Ê¼Ò»ªÈË Fox graduate and a principal business architect with Microsoft’s Healthcare and Life Sciences Division, is working to ensure these technologies serve people well.

Seidel takes a person-centered approach to translating solutions between her customers and the software engineers who design Microsoft’s various platforms.

“When we are helping a customer implement a new solution, somebody steeped in their day-to-day delivery isn’t necessarily going to understand everything the technical architect tells them, so my role is not only as a translator, but ultimately to put myself in the customer’s shoes,” she says.

Game-Changing Technologies

Electronic medical records are a prime example of technology revolutionizing an industry we all encounter regularly: healthcare.

If you’ve gone to your doctor’s office lately, your provider may have asked for permission to record your visit. Microsoft’s Dragon Ambient eXperience (DAX) Copilot allows clinicians to create chart notes efficiently and quickly, helping to reducing burnout and fatigue.

“The AI does a great job drafting that chart note for providers,” Seidel explains. “Once the note is created, all a provider has to do is scan for completeness and accuracy, press ‘approve,’ and they’re done.”

This technology not only saves providers valuable hours of work, it also creates a more complete medical record. DAX, along with other advanced AI-powered capabilities, can capture and summarize clinical conversations, create a streamlined and thorough note, scan past visits, notice abnormalities, and prompt providers with real-time suggestions. In the medical world, it’s a game-changer.

“There are some very powerful things happening right now,” Seidel says. “In my experience, we rarely have something that improves quality and saves time. There’s potential in every sector of healthcare.”

Social Work: A Wider Lens

As a social work major at »Ê¼Ò»ªÈË Fox, Seidel learned valuable people skills that inform her work with some of the largest systems in the world, from health insurers and hospital systems to state and local governments.

Seidel uses her unique skill set to guide companies in considering the factors that help and hinder user outcomes. Blending this wider lens with her ability to apply data allows her to understand access to technology holistically.

“If a customer has one lens, we help them think through the other elements that might affect their clients’ access,” she says. “My job is to ask those hard questions and prompt people through those discussions around how people and systems work.”

Seidel sees her time at »Ê¼Ò»ªÈË Fox as an invaluable asset.

“I told somebody recently that I use my social work degree more than anything else in this job because sometimes in those meetings, I am pulling out a lot of what I learned in group therapy courses,” she says. “How do we get people with strongly held opinions to reach a common understanding? I find myself stepping into that space quite a bit.”

Coming from the healthcare arena, Seidel learned that the best approach when working out a problem is to put the patient – or the eventual user of any system – at the center.

Remembering a book she was required to read during her senior year at »Ê¼Ò»ªÈË Fox, Sociology Through the Eyes of Faith, Seidel reflects on how the ethical frameworks of the medical community borrow from the intrinsic ethics of Christianity. These frameworks around human dignity serve as guideposts as she seeks to use emerging technology with care.

“For ethical frameworks, like where your moral opinions come from, you’ve got to pick a source,” she says. “Our healthcare system and its ethical frameworks around human dignity are connected, by and large, to Christian values. And we can also connect these frameworks to the ethical use of technology.”

Building Community

Just as Seidel integrates a person-centered approach in her work with Microsoft, she also takes this ethos into other areas of her life.

Recognizing the potential of Microsoft’s employee charity matching program, Seidel led last year’s giving campaign for her division.

“The giving campaign was fun because we invited people to share stories about why they give and talk about the different programs,” she says.

She encouraged fellow Microsoft employees to max out the matching program. Though this type of sacrificial giving is countercultural in most workplaces, she credits the practice of tithing with a personal ethic of charitable giving.

Seidel also made good use of Microsoft’s matching grant for volunteer hours and spent several years on the board of a shelter for single parents in Portland. Using free software granted by Microsoft’s Nonprofit Solutions program, she was able to help the shelter streamline and manage its day-to-day operations.

Being a long-time Portland resident, Seidel relishes the opportunity to invest in her community.

“Building community, helping people get and stay connected, knowing that we’re looking out for each other, that’s my passion.”

“We have a very tight-knit neighborhood,” she says. “This shelter was beautiful because several churches in North Portland formed a group called AllOne Community Services to establish it. My husband and I wanted to get involved, so we started volunteering and giving financially. I eventually joined the board to help with strategy and management.”

Making an impact in her local community is imperative to Seidel. And this lens of serving real people in real spaces impacts how she helps her clients use technology ethically as well.

Whether working to create usable systems for huge corporations that will impact communities across the United States or helping to develop sustainable systems of care in her own backyard, Seidel seeks to serve wherever she can.

“Building community, helping people get and stay connected, knowing that we’re looking out for each other, that’s my passion.”