Many technology companies see health care as a major growth area. Microsoft is aiming to expand its presence in hospitals and medical centers. It has announced an agreement to acquire, Azyxxi, and form an alliance with MedStar Health. Azyxxi, which has been designed using Microsoft development tools, brings together patient data from various sources, and makes it available when needed.
First deployed in 1996 in one of MedStar Health's hospitals, the Washington Hospital Center, Azyxxi, in addition to serving as a repository for all of a patient's routine clinical information, also provides instant access to a comprehensive view of each patient, including EKGs, scanned documents, X-rays, CT scans, MRI scans, PET scans, dynamic angiograms, and ultrasound images.
In a statement, Peter Neupert, corporate vice president of health solutions group, Microsoft, said, "Healthcare delivery is one of the top global challenges for governments, employers, caregivers, and consumers. Microsoft believes that information technology can positively impact the situation, by removing barriers and empowering physicians with instant access to critical patient data."
"Azyxxi has demonstrated strong and clear benefits to physicians and other clinicians. We're excited to work with the original architects, MedStar Health, and Washington Hospital Center, to increase R&D investment in Azyxxi, and deliver a technology environment that will help advance the quality of healthcare for patients," Neupert said.
Speaking about the alliance, Kenneth A Samet, president and chief operating officer, MedStar Health, said, "Successful innovation requires collaboration, and we are honored to work with Microsoft to advance our shared vision for using information technology to improve patient care." According to Samet, "The Azyxxi technology is a tool that enables clinicians to treat their patients quickly, efficiently, and accurately with the click of a mouse. Putting patients first is what we're all about, and Azyxxi helps us do that every day".
Search giant Google is also involved in the health care marketplace. "The first thing that we've done was a part of the launch of Google Co-op, where we improved the quality of our health search," said Google co-founder Sergey Brin.
"More broadly, we've seen that health information has a lot of similarities to the kinds of challenges we deal with in terms of just textual information. So we would like to make sure that for this important issue to many people around the world, of health, that we're actually able to contribute our technology to solve some of those problems," he said.
"This is extremely interesting as a signal of Microsoft’s intentions in health care, but we’ll have to see what comes next and how this plays out," said Dr. Blackford Middleton, an assistant professor at the Harvard Medical School and a health technology expert at Partners Healthcare. |
