1 October 2008

Seattle Children's Hospital Research Institute

Seattle Children’s Hospital has selected Microsoft’s unified intelligence system, Amalga, as its data platform to provide clinical staff members with enhanced views of patient information.

Specifically, Amalga will provide researchers at the US hospital with a single view of electronic data needed to identify trends and relevant patients for clinical trials, as well as enable its clinical staff to better manage hospital operations, such as anticipating a patient’s length of stay.

“Currently, our clinical and research staff requests information from a single data department, so it can often take days or weeks to get the information back to the person requesting it,” said Drex DeFord, senior vice president and CIO at Children’s. “Because Amalga will allow staff members from all departments to pull the information they need more quickly and in real time, it will allow us to make full use of the patient data stored throughout our organisation.”

Children’s staff requires a timely and complete picture of the length of, and reason for, a patient’s stay in order to address throughput issues. Amalga will serve as the foundation for a real-time hospital information command centre, providing administrators with a dashboard view of how resources are being used. As a result, staff members can make real-time, informed decisions about patient, personnel and facility needs.

Amalga will allow us to make full use of the patient data stored throughout our organisation

Drex DeFord, senior vice president and CIO at Seattle Children’s Hospital “Since multiple data systems can be integrated into Amalga, we hope to streamline data management, eventually realigning resources to support consolidated data management and reporting instead of maintaining multiple, non-integrated data sources,” DeFord said.