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Microsoft steps up focus on health care IT

26.07.2006
In a move that dramatically steps up its focus on the health IT market, Microsoft Corp. announced Wednesday that it has agreed to acquire health care software that brings together all types of data from hundreds of sources to make it available to doctors electronically.

Microsoft will take Azyxxi, a system devised at Washington Hospital Center, and continue its development so it can be offered to hospitals worldwide. Under the terms of the deal, Microsoft has formed an alliance with Columbia, Md.-based MedStar Health -- which owns several hospitals in the Washington area that use Azyxxi -- under which Azyxxi's creators and 40 employees from the software development team will join Microsoft to commercially develop the system. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Craig Feied, director of the Institute for Medical Informatics at the Washington Hospital Center, said that Azyxxi functions as an "air traffic control system" to help doctors and nurses more quickly access critical data when they need to make decisions about patient care.

"In the past, medicine and hospitals didn't know very much about software and informatics, and big companies like Microsoft didn't know much about health care," said Feied, who will be joining Microsoft as part of the deal. "As of this day, that is no longer true. Going forward, we expect a blurring of those lines."

First put into place in 1996 in the emergency department of the Washington Hospital Center, Azyxxi works as a repository for all of a patient's routine clinical information, including EKGs, scanned documents, X-rays, computerized tomography scans, magnetic resonance imaging scans and ultrasound images. It takes live feeds from various systems that contain all the information and integrates the data, Feied said.

The software is now used in four MedStar hospital emergency rooms and manages more than 40TB of live data while offering quick response times. Azyxxi is built on the Microsoft .Net Framework and uses SQL Server. It can provide access to various devices, including Tablet PCs and Pocket PCs, said Microsoft. Feied said the system responds to queries in one-eighth of a second and contains more than 12,000 data elements about a typical patient. In addition, Azyxxi includes analytic software that "makes finding needles in a haystack a routine operation."