Microsoft and Azyxxi: What does it mean for our industry?

Posted By: Bill Crounse, MD | Jul 26th, 2006 @ 5:38 PM

So what does the announcement of Microsoft's acquisition of Azyxxi mean to the healthcare industry? In my opinion, it is an important first step in a journey that will produce huge benefits for clinicians and patients. First and foremost, it signals an important change in strategy for our company. I'll let you read the article in the New York Times for more on that.

More importantly, I believe it takes healthcare information technology and those who build solutions for the industry in a whole new direction. If you've followed my Blog and some of the articles I have written, you've seen my rants on the clinical systems commonly in use today. You've read why I believe we must evolve to a more common user interface that is so intuitive; clinicians need little or no training to use it. Community doctors move from hospital to hospital. Nurses move around as well. We are becoming increasingly mobile and we need solutions that work no matter where we are or what device we are using. We cannot expect healthcare professionals to change the way they work depending on the particular hospital they are visiting, or for that matter, the state, region or country they are practicing in. It is difficult enough to do patient care without having to learn a dozen different ways to do the work-flow depending on what clinical information system or systems are in use. Think of the analogy of driving a car. You may need a little time to familiarize yourself with the controls for a given make and model and then adjust for regional variations by country (traffic signs or what side of the road to drive on) but once you know how to drive a car, you can generally jump in and start driving it no matter where in the world you are.

The Azyxxi solution came about, as most good things do, out of sheer frustration. One of the physician developers told me his hospital had spent hundreds of millions of dollars on clinical systems the doctors working there couldn't or wouldn't use. Using commodity software and the latest technologies from Microsoft, they built a solution that aggregates clinical information from all the disparate systems in use. With sub-second response time it securely delivers patient information in a standardized and intuitive format to enable clinical decision making, business and clinical analytics, bio-surveillance, and more. Furthermore, the solution opens up ways to take advantage of the information worker tools, and communication and collaboration technologies our company is famous for. Frankly, I sometimes think better solutions to facilitate communication and collaboration in healthcare are perhaps more important to the industry and to patient safety than tools that simply help us assimilate and document patient information.

I'll have more to say on this in future entries. You'll find a bunch more information about Azyxxi and MedStar on-line including videos, articles and case studies. Just search the keywords "Azyxxi" or "Microsoft and Azyxxi". Now, if I could just learn to spell Azyxxi without having to look at the word each time I type it Smiley

Bill Crounse, MD Healthcare Industry Director Microsoft Healthcare and Life Sciences

Tag: health

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fpugsley

This is a major departure from the traditional Microsoft business model! The healthcare partners are not going to like this. I sure hope you guys have as much support from the customers as you need to make this work. Good luck - the guys at NHS in the UK really need to talk to you about this...

bcrounse

In reply to fpugsley

#Jul 27th, 2006 @ 8:45 PM

Partners fear not! Azyxxi is a health information integration engine. It was developed for doctors by doctors. We believe in the vision and path of its developers – to improve healthcare delivery using unique and powerful information technology.

This acquisition deepens Microsoft’s commitment and investment in the healthcare industry and to improving personal and population health using information technology, while making a proven solution more widely available to its customers. It does not displace or replace healthcare IT systems developed by our partners. It just makes it easier for clinicians to get the information they need, when and where they need it. Azyxxi was created with Microsoft developments tools. The system has a proven track record and we plan to replicate that success.

Here's what one reader had to say in commenting to my original post of HealthBlog:

Saturday, July 29, 2006 3:07 PM by Mark D

There is no doubt in my mind that getting big companies, such as Microsoft and Google into healthcare will be good for healthcare professionals and patients. As a doctor I am fed up with limited solutions, difficult interfaces and diiferent systems. MS has the breadth of expertise, to make an excellent system. I hope they commit. Some small companies will falter. Some will continue to provide valued add-ins. Some will be bought and do well. The only disappointment is that they are leaving things so long.

I'd like to thank everyone for their comments.

Bill Crounse, MD Healthcare Industry Director Microsoft Healtcare and Life Sciences