Microsoft and University of Washington Medicine have signed an
agreement to collaborate on biomedical informatics technology. Under the deal,
UW Medicine will expand its use of Microsoft's Amalga UIS (Unified Intelligence System) data-aggregation platform to further
research and medical education and improve patient care.
UW Medicine is a network of medical facilities in the Seattle
area.
The collaboration between Microsoft and UW Medicine entails extracting data from text as part of natural
language processing and using Amalga to further clinical and translational
research. Translational research entails translating knowledge learned from
basic sciences and applying it to clinical and community environments.
UW Medicine will also be able to use the informatics tools in various areas of consumer and population health
management.
The agreement follows a two-year pilot program between Microsoft and
UW Medicine. During this time, UW
Medicine's ITHS (Institute of Translational Health Sciences) began
testing the Amalga application to attempt to accelerate and improve
translational
research, Microsoft reports.
"What UW Medicine has achieved to date with Amalga in translational research and quality improvement
demonstrates the power of liberating health data from separate systems and
putting it into the hands of researchers and clinicians to use in multiple
ways," Sean Nolan, chief architect for the Microsoft Health Solutions
Group, said in a statement.
By monitoring data using Amalga, UW Medicine is able to compile statistical analysis, improve the care
of diabetic patients, lower the occurrences of bed sores and track the rates of
acquired infections. The hospital system can also use the software to enlist
patients in research studies and link study data with that of other clinical
data, Microsoft reports.
Doctors can use Amalga on top of other technology platforms in a medical facility. It provides manageable,
cohesive view of data, including single patient electronic health records and connects
to statewide HIEs (health information exchanges), according to Microsoft. Amalga
allows UW Medicine and other health care companies to access electronic records
from different databases.
Other medical facilities using Microsoft Amalga include New York-Presbyterian Hospital, Johns Hopkins Health System, and St.
Joseph Health System, Microsoft reports.
Amalga, HealthVault and HealthVault Community Connect are the key components of Redmond's health care IT portfolio.
HealthVault
allows patients to manage their EHRs via the Web and share them with family
members and health care professionals, and HealthVault Community Connect
enables medical facilities to send patients instructions electronically after
they leave the hospital.
The Community version also allows consumers to send doctors data from their HealthVault accounts.
"By working together to help refine this product, both UW Medicine and Microsoft have committed to
furthering the development of methods and tools that will help us unleash the
enormous potential for electronic biomedical data to advance research and
improve health," Dr. Peter Tarczy-Hornoch, UW professor and head of the of
the Division of Biomedical and Health Informatics, said in a statement.
UW Medicine's licensing of Amalga, announced on Dec. 8, is subject to approval by an institutional review
board and HIPAA regulations.
As part of its health care IT efforts, in February 2010 Microsoft announced that it would integrate
Eclipse's Sunrise Enterprise suite into Amalga. The Sunrise Enterprise software
allows doctors to manage the clinical and revenue aspects of their practice.
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