Amalga Unified Intelligence System
On October 13 (2011), Orion has signed an agreement to purchase Microsoft’s Hospital Information System (HIS) software assets, and the related PACs (Picture Archiving and Communication Systems) and RIS (Radiology Information System) products previously marketed under the Microsoft Amalga brand. The New Zealand company will sell them as Orion Health HPM (Health Process Management) suite.
What is Microsoft Amalga
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Microsoft Amalga Unified Intelligence System (formerly known as Azyxxi) is a unified health enterprise platform designed to retrieve and display patient information from many sources, including scanned documents, electrocardiograms, X-rays, MRI scans and other medical imaging procedures, lab results, dictated reports of surgery, as well as patient demographics and contact information. It was developed by doctors and researchers at the Washington Hospital Center emergency department in 1996, and in 2006 it was acquired by the Microsoft Health Solutions Group, as part of a plan to enter the fast-growing market for health care information technology. It has since been adopted at a number of leading hospitals and health systems across America including St Joseph Health System, New York Presbyterian Hospital, Georgetown University Hospital and five other hospitals in the MedStar Health group, a nonprofit network in the Baltimore-Washington, D.C. area.
Amalga currently runs on Microsoft Windows Server operating system and uses SQL Server 2008 as the data store. Microsoft Amalga falls under the category of Health informatics.
Health informatics (also called health care informatics, healthcare informatics, medical informatics, nursing informatics, clinical informatics, or biomedical informatics) is a discipline at the intersection of information science, computer science, and health care. It deals with the resources, devices, and methods required to optimize the acquisition, storage, retrieval, and use of information in health and biomedicine. Health informatics tools include not only computers but also clinical guidelines, formal medical terminologies, and information and communication systems. It is applied to the areas of nursing, clinical care, dentistry, pharmacy, public health, occupational therapy, and (bio)medical research.
Molecular bioinformatics and clinical informatics have converged into the field of translational bioinformatics.
Insight into Microsoft Amalga:
Having the right information at hand helps healthcare organizations align their resources and increase operational and financial efficiencies, while preserving clinical performance. Once the critical information is in the hands of the right people, clinicians can truly focus on what actions will drive the best results. The core purpose of Amalga is to inspire clinical decision-making insight, which will help transform care-delivery models. For example, the ability to analyze relevant information, as well as understand the clinical context of a patient’s values, could change the course of therapy.
Easy to administer, configure, and deploy, Microsoft Amalga can help free IT resources required for traditional data aggregation, integration, and reporting.
How Amalga works:
Amalga is different by design. It doesn’t require organizations to know in advance how information will be specifically applied. It’s a paradigm shift in how healthcare providers can aggregate and use information to drive strategic goals as they present themselves. Amalga becomes, in essence, the organization’s health data platform for the future. Amalga offers ultimate flexibility in the way data can be collected and provides visibility into how that data can be used and reused across the enterprise.
By using Amalga, healthcare providers can:
- • Access and act on data they already have to understand their patients’ experience.
- • Forge new paths and solve problems by using current data that was previously
- isolated in disparate IT systems.
- • Analyze the impact of new strategic initiatives or partnerships.
Amalga brings data together in a way that dramatically changes the way healthcare organizations and their staff—from the frontline to the board room and everyone in between—can use information to drive transformational change, discovery, and innovation.