Microsoft+Amalga+(Sean+Scott)

Microsoft Amalga Microsoft Amalga is a unified health enterprise platform designed to retrieve and display patient information from many sources, including scanned documents, electrocardiograms, X-rays, MRI scans and other medical imaging procedures, lab results, dictated reports of surgery, as well as patient demographics and contact information. It was developed by doctors and researchers at the Washington Hospital Center emergency department in 1996, and in 2006 it was acquired by the Microsoft Health Solutions Group, as part of a plan to enter the fast-growing market for health care information technology.
 * Term:**
 * Description:**

Amalga can be used to tie together many unrelated medical systems using a wide variety of data types in order to provide an immediate, updated composite portrait of the patient’s healthcare history. All of Amalga’s components are integrated using middle ware software that allows the creation of standard approaches and tools to interface with the many software and hardware systems found in hospitals.

Each module of the software package performs a different task.

A breakdown of what each module includes:

-Aid personnel in making informed decision-making based on aggregated historical data of patients.
 * Clinical:** -Reduce the amount of time personal spend locating patient information with customizable views of medical history and diagnosis.

-All patient, financial and operational data is part of a single, unified database which makes it easier to provide accurate reimbursement and billing of services. -Correlate data from multiple systems to contribute to the bottom line and identify areas for improvement
 * Financial:**

-Speed investigative aspects of clinical research by allowing users to build and modify queries on existing data on-the-fly without making requests to the IT department or 3rd party vendors. -Integrates research data with patient data to identify and track trends across patient populations.
 * Research:**

-Identify trends and issues across departments from a single data source.
 * Administrative:**

-High level of availability because the system is built on widely supported Microsoft Windows and SQL Server technology. -Designed to scale for consistently fast performance by leveraging Microsoft SQL Server 2005 scalability. -Role based access controls and audits based on Active Directory and LDAP. -Supports an unlimited number of interfaces and role-based views.
 * Information Technology:**




 * Related Terminology:**
 * Electrocardiography** (**ECG** or **EKG**) is a trans-thoracic interpretation of the electical activity of the heart over time captured and externally recorded by skin electrodes.


 * X-ray** technology lets doctors see straight through human tissue to examine broken bones, cavities and swallowed objects with extraordinary ease.


 * Magnetic Resonance Imaging** (**MRI**), or **nuclear magnetic resonance imaging** (**NMRI**), is primarily a medical imaging technique most commonly used in radiology to visualize the internal structure and function of the body.



This software suite is an Enterprise-level clinical, financial and medical research system. [|Microsoft Amalga] Hospital Information Systems MRI Electronic Healthcare Record ActiveHealth Patented CareEngine System Athena Health Cerner
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 * Related Terminology-**

http://www.microsoft.com/amalga/products/microsoftamalga/default.mspx .
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