Philips, Dell and Microsoft to build solutions for community hospitals and radiologists
24 February 2011
This week we had the pleasure of announcing strategic industry alliances in the United States with
Dell and
Royal Philips Electronics (Philips). Dell and Microsoft will collaborate to deliver a business intelligence solution to meet the needs of community hospitals. Philips and Microsoft will collaborate to streamline the workflow of radiologists as they seek to build and understand the complete clinical context of a patient.
Microsoft's partnership with Dell will also include a collaboration with Stellaris Health Network, a community hospital system that consists of four hospitals in Westchester, New York, US. These hospitals will be the first to have access to consolidated patient data from source systems across the hospital, enabling organizational leaders, clinicians and physicians to rapidly gain insights into the administrative, clinical and financial data needed to make on-going operational decisions.
The initial application (The Quality Indicator System or QIS) will go beyond the current reporting requirements to deliver advanced quality indicator alerts and prevent metrics from being missed. The QIS will capture data as a patient enters the hospital, determine which quality measures may apply to the patient, and then enable the hospital to track and measure compliance throughout the patient’s stay.
“Through our demonstration project with Dell and Microsoft, we look forward to leveraging the considerable investment our hospitals have made in improving clinical care and patient outcomes by sharing best practices that will further advance the care provided by community hospitals,” said Arthur Nizza, CEO, Stellaris Health Network.
“In a highly dynamic healthcare landscape, hospitals of all sizes are challenged by a lack of timely access to health data stored in their enterprise technology systems, which has a direct impact on timely decision-making and, ultimately, the quality of care,” said Peter Neupert, corporate vice president, Microsoft Health Solutions Group. “With Dell and Stellaris, our goal is to offer a set of solutions that makes it simple for small and midsize hospitals, which typically don’t have extensive IT departments, to readily access and analyse the data they need to identify gaps in care quality and take the right steps to make measurable improvements.”
As the collaboration expands to include new members, additional applications will be developed to solve other commonly identified business issues found in the community hospitals such as solutions for turnaround time delays, care coordination, managing avoidable re-admissions, and population-based healthcare management for chronic conditions.
Microsoft's partnership with Philips will connect Microsoft Amalga, a data aggregation platform, with Philips iSite PACS (picture archiving and communication system) to give radiologists the ability to view a complete set of a patient’s data stored across the health enterprise — e.g., admission, discharge and transfer (ADT) data, lab data, pathology reports and medications — alongside the patient’s images stored in the iSite PACS system. This will enable radiologists using the Philips iSite Radiology viewer to access a patient’s clinical data aggregated and displayed within Microsoft Amalga by a single click within iSite.
“Philips and Microsoft have a unique opportunity to give radiologists a new level of insight about the patient while reducing steps in their workflow,” said Scott Burkhart, vice president of marketing, Healthcare Informatics North America, for Philips Healthcare. The ability to view digital imaging and communications in medicine (DICOM) and non-DICOM data in one place will reduce the time radiologists currently spend probing separate, disconnected information systems to build a comprehensive view of patient history and allow them to focus more time on case review, analysis and diagnostics.
“To make strides in healthcare delivery, we need to break down the artificial walls around health data and enable it to flow to the right people at the right time throughout the care process,” said Nate McLemore, general manager of business development, Microsoft Health Solutions Group.The collaboration builds upon the companies’ existing commitment to work together to connect technologies that will help yield faster delivery of meaningful health information, improve healthcare productivity, and reduce development and infrastructure costs. “We’re excited to combine the strengths of our technologies to help empower clinicians to drive improvements in the efficiency and quality of care.”
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