The Healthcare IT Blog

The HealthVault Solution Conference that we did last year has evolved into a broader event that includes more of the solutions that Microsoft has to offer in Health.

The Connected Health Conference will be held on June 10-12 in Bellevue, WA and we’re going to feature a lot of content both around Amalga UIS and HealthVault and an exceptional lineup of speakers including David Kibbe, Governor Michael Leavitt, Uwe Reinhardt, Mark Smith and Peter Neupert. Lastly we’re going to have a few surprises in store both for HealthVault and Amalga UIS, so make sure you rush and register, we have limited space available and we expect a lot of people!

Recently we worked with Gartner Group on a webcast outlining the issues that healthcare provider organizations face when it comes to data integration and how solutions such as Amalga UIS 2009 can help address these issues and provide organizations with more tools and better ability to view, analyze and act upon information that they already own, but rendered inaccessible by the silos in which it’s locked.

The twenty minute long webcast features: GG’s Dr. Tom Handler and Vi Shaffer, two of our customers Brad Kappalman and Dr. Mark Smith (Medstar WHC) and Kim Pemble (WHIE), Jon Handler and Peter Neupert.

The webcast is available at this address. Enjoy!

Ok, I have been to a few HIMSS with Microsoft now, but I must say that this one, by all means exceeded my expectations.

We had two days of in-depth training with our field before the show and that was great. All the content was spot on (at least from my perspective :-), we had a great representation from across the company and an awesome session with two of our current customers.

The show was the busiest for Microsoft in all the 8 years I have been at HIMSS. I was there most of the time and I literally did not have the time to shut up for more than 2 minutes. I talked to our current customers about the new release for the product, prospect customer about the value of Amalga UIS and how that can be used to help address their problems and potential partners about what opportunities exist for them on Amalga UIS. All the demos rocked and the booth design was absolutely great.

The great thing was the response we got from the people there. Many heard about the product before or were referred by a friend or person they knew. It is amazing to see the difference one year makes in awareness. I must thank of course our customer for being great advocates and showing new and innovative uses for the product.

This is all happening before and while we announce two major pieces of news:

• New York Presbyterian Hospital is the first Amalga UIS customer to connect Amalga UIS and HealthVault to provide their customers with online access and control over their health records with the mynyp portal. This leverages a feature of Amalga UIS that allows direct connection to HealthVault.
• A new version of Amalga UIS is released to the market. This is the second major release of the product after the acquisition from Medstar in 2006. The product is also renamed from Amalga to Amalga Unified Intelligence System or Amalga UIS. This is to distinguish from our Amalga HIS product. The name Amalga stays and it’s meant to address the entire family of enterprise products: Amalga UIS and Amalga HIS

As part of the announcement we also announced three modules for Amalga UIS:

• Amalga UIS Medical Imaging Module
• Amalga UIS Research Foundation Module
• Amalga UIS Quality Measures Module

Each module has its unique value proposition, but each one of them leverages the ability for Amalga UIS to aggregate data in real time from multiple systems and present that in an amalgamated (pun intended :-) fashion. I will go into more detail for the modules in a future post.

We also released a new, improved version of the web site with more information and details about the product, in particular:

• Industry reports from KLAS and IDC
• New whitepapers on the business goals of Amalga UIS and closed loop medication management
• New videos

Other health groups at Microsoft have also been very busy and we released a new version of the Connected Health Framework – Architecture and Design Blueprint. Kudos to Teddy, Ilia and all the people that have contributed to this new version!

I look forward to share more of the exciting things we’re working on with you. Stay tuned!

We just issued a press release outlining some of the cool things that you’ll see at HIMSS 2009 from Microsoft.

At HiMSS09, the annual conference and exhibition for the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS), Microsoft Corp. will showcase in its booth (No. 1232) new solutions designed specifically for healthcare providers, caregivers and patients, as well as partner and customer success stories

Specifically:

• Microsoft Amalga, the Unified Intelligence System
• Microsoft HealthVault
• Microsoft Surface
• The Microsoft Connected Health Platform including Solution Accelerators such as the IHE XDS.b Reference Implementation which now also support the Async Option
• Several partner solutions showcasing cool use of Microsoft technologies

Microsoft will also be present at the Interoperability Showcase thanks to the work that Teddy is driving.

Also check http://www.mshimss2009.com/ for more detailed info.

Media Alert: Microsoft Showcases New Health Solutions to Enhance Patient Experience and Improve Operations at HiMSS09.

Like the past 8, this year I will be at 2009 HIMSS Healthcare IT Conference and Exhibition. I will be there starting tomorrow (Friday 4/3) for internal Microsoft training. As you can imagine this is a good opportunity to get all the Microsoft people in healthcare together.

MS-HUG is on Saturday with a lot of great content. In particular if you are interested in learning more about how our customers are using Amalga UIS, make sure not to miss the session “Dealing with Tough Knowledge Management Issues with Amalga” by Ted Corbett, Seattle Children’s Hospital at 9:15am.

The show floor opens on Sunday at 2pm and I will be hanging around the Microsoft pavilion most of the time. You can find us at booth 1232 (easy to remember :-)

I will be for sure in the booth on Sunday afternoon, Monday morning, Tuesday afternoon and Wednesday morning. Yeah, I know, it’s a lot :-)

Keep an eye on the press pass site to catch all the exciting news we will be sharing with you soon. I will try and post something here over the next week.

Stop by if you can and say hi! See you there!

Today we announced Virtua Health as our 12th Amalga, the Unified Intelligence System (UIS) customer.

Virtua Health is a pioneer in healthcare quality and many other areas. We are jazzed to have them part of our client base and look forward a number of ways in which we can together “Improve Health Around the World”.

Implementation at Virtua is underway and soon we should be able to start talking about some of the benefits and accomplishments.

We see Amalga UIS playing a key role in Lean and Systems Engineering initiatives at all of the hospitals and organizations where we’re running. The fundamental principle here is that by providing the appropriate tools to the frontline users, organization will be able to reduce the feedback loop cycles helping them understand where process can be improved and naturally gravitate towards a more efficient way of providing care, improving organizational performance, reducing inefficiencies and so on.

With Virtua’s experience in this are we hope to make our product and solutions even more suited to this purpose.

Read the full press releases to get the entire story.

This brings the number of announced Amalga customers to twelve:

Peter Neupert, Corporate Vice President of the Microsoft Health Solutions Group and my grand-grand-boss, recently completed a testimony before the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP).

Peter testified along with:

• Jack Cochran, Executive Director, The Permanente Federation, Oakland, CA
• Janet Corrigan, President, The National Quality Forum, Washington, DC
• Valerie Melvin, Director of Information Technology, The Government Accounting Office, Washington, DC
• Mary Grealy, President, Health Leadership Council, Washington, DC

The full testimony can be seen on the HELP committee's web site. The transcript is available on the Microsoft PressPass web site.

On the same page you can see Peter’s written submission. This document is particularly interesting as it really summarizes what the Health Solutions Group (HSG) is all about. I strongly suggest you read it and let me know if you have any feedback either directly or though the comments below.

You can read Peter’s impressions on his blog.

Lastly, a quick video from FOX News that was recorded right after the testimony. Enjoy!

There is a recent post on the WSJ Health Blog with Steve, my grand-boss (my boss’ boss, can I say that?), as the guest of honor, shedding some light on the overall Microsoft and HSG plans in Healthcare.

Have a look at the video or click on the link for the full article:

Health Blog : How Microsoft Plans to Make Money in Health Care

This is an example of how we’re using Amalga at SJHS to bridge outpatient and inpatient. In this particular case the integration is done via ASTM CCR documents sent by Allscripts to Amalga.

SJHS will use the Microsoft Amalga platform to integrate Allscripts solutions with each hospital's information systems. The implementation will allow affiliated physicians to access charts, schedules, lab results and radiology results of their patients at the hospital, while hospital physicians will have access to those patients' ambulatory medical records.

Allscripts to roll out EHR, PM solutions for affiliated St. Joseph physicians

Today we are announcing two new great additions to the growing Amalga customer base: University of Washington and Seattle’s Children Hospital!

• University of Washington will focus on clinical and translational research by basically providing researches with better access to data that was previously scattered across multiple systems and the tools to investigate and
• Seattle’s Children Hospital while keeping a more clinical focus, will also address clinical research and hospital operations

Read the full press releases to get the entire story.

This brings the number of announced Amalga customers to eleven:

While looking at my past posts on the topic, I realized I never gave out the link to the download for the HL7 Schema Generation Tools that I discussed waaaaay back.

Hopefully the most entrepreneurial readers will have found it, for the rest of us, here it is with a small description from the download page:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=94877261-1F04-40B7-8C6D-CF92F38D09A3&displaylang=en

This is the same tool that the BizTalk team uses internally to generate the schemas that ship with Microsoft BizTalk Accelerator for HL7 v2.0. The tool takes the HL7 message definition from the database that HL7 publishes on their web site and generates schemas in a format that the BizTalk HL7 parser can understand. These schemas are used by the parser in the process of translating from the flat file format of HL7 v2.x to XML.
The HL7 message definitions are stored in a Microsoft Access database and include definitions for all the approved versions (2.1, 2.2, 2.3, 2.3.1, 2.4 and 2.5). The HL7 message definition database will not ship with the Accelerator as it is part of the HL7 standard and has to be acquired separately from the HL7 standards organization.
By customizing the database and the generated schema namespace, you will be able to create your own library of message definitions for your own integration purposes or for versions of HL7 that we do not include in the Accelerator for HL7.
The Schema Generation Tool also comes with full source code. That way it can be adapted to generate the schemas from *any* repository or from tools such as the HL7 Messaging Workbench.
The objective of the Schema Generation Tool is to make it easier to manage libraries of HL7 message definitions by working at the model level instead of dealing with schema customization. Every time you need to generate a custom message or segment, you can modify the repository (or a copy of it) and generate new schemas.

Just to be clear, you need to have your own HL7 definition database. You can get the “vanilla” version from the HL7 web site. To get it, go to the HL7 Bookstore, scroll down to the section “Access Databases Versions of the HL7 Standards” and click on the “more info” button.

The most interesting aspect of the tool is that it allows you to generate schemas from your own HL7 message definition. So, if you have a national HL7 v2 standard (most countries do) and you can put that definition in an easy to maintain database, then generating the BizTalk schemas for any particular HL7 dialect becomes much easier.

Another interesting route to explore, and the reason why we’re including the source code, is to adapt the tool to generate the schemas directly from other tools or repositories such as the HL7 Messaging Workbench.

Today we announced a new customer added to the growing list of organization that are adopting Amalga to gather better insight on their care delivery, operations and performance.

El Camino Hospital today announced that it has selected Microsoft Amalga, the unified intelligence system, as its data platform to aggregate all of its information, which currently resides in disparate, transaction-based systems, and integrate it into a single system that will allow the hospital to better evaluate and improve quality of care. The investment is part of an aggressive three-year initiative aimed at helping El Camino Hospital achieve a top 5 percent ranking among U.S. hospitals across all of its service lines.

We are very proud of the customers that have adopted Amalga so far and El Camino adds another big name to the growing list and today brings the number of announced customers to nine:

• Medstar (July 2006)
• New York Presbyterian Hospital (March 2007)
• Johns Hopkins (April 2007)
• Wisconsin Health Information Exchange (August 2007)
• Novant (August 2007)
• Moffitt (September 2007)
• St. Joseph Health System (November 2007)
• DC RHIO (June 2008)
• El Camino (September 2008)

The team in the UK is doing a great job with the Microsoft Common User Interface (MSCUI). Head over to http://www.mscui.net to check for the new version that was just posted.

New in this release:

1. Publication of new and updated Design Guidance:
   1. New Micro Patient Banner guidance
   2. New Displaying Graphs and Tables guidance
   3. Updated Time Display guidance
   4. Updated Date and Time Input guidance
2. Publication of 6 new Controls for Silverlight 2 and WPF:
   1. New Silverlight and WPF PatientBanner controls
   2. New Silverlight and WPF AddressLabel controls
   3. New Silverlight and WPF ContactLabel controls
   4. New Silverlight and WPF GenderLabel controls
   5. New Silverlight and WPF IdentifierLabel controls
   6. New Silverlight and WPF NameLabel controls
3. Updates to the Patient Journey Demonstrator which showcases CUI design guidelines, controls and future UI concepts in a Silverlight 2 application.
4. Publication of the new Team Blog.

Yes, I know, it’s been a while since I posted and I know that I have probably lost a lot of readers. Fare enough! I hope to start posting more regularly and bring you more news from the Amalga family of products, the Health Solutions Group and Microsoft in Healthcare in general.

In the meantime, Ilia posted the following on the SolShare.Net healthcare forums:

Since it was published almost two years ago, Connected Health Framework Architecture and Design Blueprint has gained popularity and has been used successfully to shape eHealth strategy and guide projects at enterprise, regional and national level in many countries.  While the key principles and guidance remain valid, we recognize the need to refresh and improve the content, and make it more relevant and useful.

This is your chance to provide input and participate in the creation of version 2 of the Connected Health Framework Architecture Blueprint.  We want to hear you success stories, what works for you and your customers (and what doesn’t), what is missing, how to make it better. Please post your suggestions ASAP, so that they can be considered for v2 – which we plan to release in 2009.

If you have ideas, suggestion or comments, please head over there and let your opinion be heard!

Today we are announcing Microsoft Amalga, the new family of Health Enterprise Systems. You can read the full press release on the microsoft.com web site.

The products included in the Amalga family are:

• Microsoft Amalga. The new version of the product formerly known as Azyxxi, Amalga is part of a new software category called Unified Intelligence Systems that allows hospital enterprises to unlock the power of all their data sitting in isolated clinical, financial and administrative systems. Without replacing current systems, it offers an innovative way to capture, consolidate, store, access and quickly present data in meaningful ways for use by clinicians and executives of leading-edge institutions. Amalga is designed for hospitals and health systems that have invested in a diverse set of IT solutions.
• Microsoft Amalga Hospital Information System (HIS). The new version of the product previously named Hospital 2000, Amalga HIS is a state-of-the-art, fully integrated hospital information system designed for developing and emerging markets. Amalga HIS is built around an electronic medical record (EMR) with complete patient and bed management, laboratory, pharmacy, radiology information system and picture archiving and communication system (RIS/PACS), pathology, financial accounting, materials management, and human resource systems.
• Microsoft Amalga RIS/PACS. The new version of the product formerly known as GCS Amalga is now available as a stand-alone system as well as an integrated component of Amalga HIS. The integrated architecture means that a radiologist can use a single application to manipulate and study images and access the patient medical record. The workstation interface is optimized for radiologist workflow, including support for predefined templates, an intuitive report editor and voice recognition capabilities.

Today we are also launching a revamped HSG web site and a new Amalga web site that contains detailed information about the three products.

This was a tremendous team effort leading up to HIMSS in a couple of weeks where you will be able to see all three products live in the Microsoft booth #2247. If you wondered where I was since the last time I blogged, well now you have a clue ;-)

The products included in the family are new versions of the products that we acquired over the last couple of years:

• Azyxxi --> Microsoft Amalga
• Global Care Solutions Hospital 2000 --> Amalga HIS
• Global Care Solutions Amalga RIS/PACS --> Amalga RIS/PACS

If you're coming to HIMSS, stop by the booth and say Hi, I will be there the entire week :-)