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Microsoft links HealthVault service with Amalga software

Microsoft has integrated its HealthVault service and its Amalga patient-information software, the company announced on April 6.
Written by Mary Jo Foley, Senior Contributing Editor

Microsoft has integrated its HealthVault service and its Amalga patient-information software, the company announced on April 6.

The integration is one of the new features of the newly-unveiled 2009 update to the Amalga Unified Intelligence System (UIS) platform. Other new features of UIS 2009 include preconfigured add-on modules, Amalga Web functionality and IT tools aimed at lowering total cost of ownership, according to Microsoft.

HealthVault is Microsoft's consumer-focused health-records-management Software+Service platform, which the company unveiled officially in 2007. (The service component of HealthVault is one of a handful of Microsoft services that already is hosted on top of Azure.) Amalga UIS, (one of the products formerly under the Azyxxi brand), is one of the main elements of Microsoft's enterprise health-information-system platform.

A year ago, Microsoft was testing the feasibility and usefulness of integrating HealthVault with Amalga.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer hasn't been talking up Microsoft's investments in healthcare much this year. When itemizing Microsoft's short- and long-term bets for the Wall Street crowd, Ballmer previously called out healthcare as one of the nascent areas which had the potential to become one of the company's hot growth areas.

Speaking of healthcare, Microsoft is showing off prototypes of healthcare applications that could work on Microsoft Surface tabletops at this week's Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) 2009 conference. Among the demo apps: a patient-scheduling system and a patient check-in app.

(I still think the idea of using a Surface as a stovetop makes more short-term sense. -- April Fool's or not.)

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