SEATTLE and REDMOND, Wash. — Sept. 21, 2011 — Swedish, the largest health system in the Greater Seattle area, plans to implement Microsoft Amalga, a health intelligence platform, to improve care coordination across organizational boundaries and help manage population health as patients move among care settings. The adoption of Amalga is designed to strengthen the health system’s relationships with patients and providers across the community, help improve patient transitions and care quality, and position Swedish for growth in the era of accountable care.
“Healthcare reform requires health systems to do more with less,” said Swedish President and CEO Rod Hochman, M.D. “Amalga is a key technology enabler that will allow us to efficiently combine data stored in disparate IT systems across multiple facilities and use it to uncover opportunities to improve performance and the quality of patient care across the care continuum.”
Swedish also plans to use Amalga for population management, bringing together inpatient, outpatient and payer payment data to provide a unified view of a patient population to caregivers, allowing them to specify personalized or group care plans, track progress of cohorts over time, and report on outcomes via dashboards.
“We’re excited to collaborate with Swedish and demonstrate the power of connected data to build insight and transform healthcare,” said Peter Neupert, corporate vice president, Microsoft Health Solutions Group at Microsoft. “The ability to easily find and access health data across the enterprise is critical to enabling every participant in the health system to make timely and informed decisions and to continually improving the quality and efficiency of care.”
Amalga addresses a common and critical challenge of healthcare providers — integrating vast amounts of clinical, administrative and financial information that flows in and out of disparate information systems, and tailoring that information for use by physicians, analysts, laboratory technicians, nurses and administrators. Amalga takes advantage of health enterprises’ investments in existing health IT solutions, making it possible for the entire organization to gain quick access to data and turn that information into critical knowledge that facilitates better decision-making and improved patient outcomes.
Microsoft Amalga is used at other renowned health-care institutions in the United States including New York-Presbyterian Hospital, Johns Hopkins Health System, Norton Healthcare, Providence Health & Services, and St. Joseph Health System.
About Swedish
Swedish has grown over the last 101 years to become the largest, most comprehensive non-profit health provider in the Greater Seattle area with 8,500 employees, 3,000-physicians and 1,200-volunteers. It is comprised of four hospital campuses (First Hill, Cherry Hill, Ballard, Edmonds and Issaquah); freestanding emergency departments and ambulatory care centers in Redmond and Mill Creek; Swedish Visiting Nurse Services; and Swedish Medical Group – a network of more than 70 primary-care and specialty clinics located throughout the Greater Puget Sound area. Swedish opened a new emergency department and medical office building (MOB) on its Ballard campus in November 2010 and a new MOB and hospital in the Issaquah Highlands in July 2011. In addition to general medical and surgical care, Swedish is known as a regional referral center, providing specialized treatment in areas such as cardiovascular care, cancer care, neuroscience, orthopedics, high-risk obstetrics, pediatric specialties, organ transplantation and clinical research. For more information, visit www.swedish.org, www.swedishcares.org, www.facebook.com/swedishmedicalcenter or www.twitter.com/swedish.
About Microsoft in Health
Microsoft is committed to improving health around the world through software innovation. Over the past 14 years, Microsoft has steadily increased its investments in health, with a focus on addressing the challenges of health providers, health and social services organizations, payers, consumers, and life sciences companies worldwide. Microsoft closely collaborates with a broad ecosystem of partners and develops its own powerful health solutions, such as Amalga and HealthVault. Together, Microsoft and its industry partners are working to deliver health solutions for the way people aspire to work and live.
About Microsoft
Founded in 1975, Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT”) is the worldwide leader in software, services and solutions that help people and businesses realize their full potential.
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