February 13th, 2008
Microsoft releases hospital IT system as Amalga
Microsoft has chosen Amalga as the name for its hospital IT system and will launch the product at HIMSS in Orlando later this month.
A key selling point for Amalga will be its integration, spanning clinical, operational and financial functions.The company calls this kind of software a Unified Intelligence System, capturing, storing, and quickly presenting data from disparate systems.
The Amalga system integrates two previously-announced systems called Azyxxi and Hospital 2000, the former becoming Amalga and the latter the Amalga Hospital Information System. The name Amalga was already on its image archiving system.
While many hospital computing companies go to market and then sign key contracts, Amalga already has key customers in place and operating.
These include New York-Presbyterian Hospital, Johns Hopkins Health System, Novant Health, the H. Lee Moffitt Cancer Center & Research Institute, the St. Joseph Health System and the Wisconsin Health Information Exchange.
All those deals had been announced over the last year.
Microsoft has gone after this market slowly and methodically. Amalga, at launch, will be one of the big vendors in the space.
Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist since 1978, and has covered technology since 1982. He launched the Interactive Age Daily, the first daily coverage of the Internet to launch with a magazine, in September 1994. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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| 02/13/08
